5 Ways to Boost Patient Flow at Your Ketamine Clinic

Synopsis: Struggling with slow business at your ketamine therapy clinic? This blog explores five actionable strategies—from nurturing email lists to engaging with your community—to help you build trust, improve marketing, and navigate the challenges of running a successful ketamine clinic.

Key takeaway: Slow periods at your ketamine clinic often point to marketing challenges. By focusing on strategies like nurturing email lists, creating valuable content, and building trust with patients and referral networks, you can boost patient flow and position your clinic for long-term success.

How to Address Slow Business at Your Ketamine Therapy Clinic

Running your private practice is nothing like being a salaried employee in a hospital. You’ve likely spent years in the hospital system, where waiting rooms were packed and patient lines seemed endless. But when you open your own ketamine therapy clinic, you may quickly realize this isn’t always the case. Perhaps you’re experiencing dry spells, or maybe your clinic has never truly been busy—and now you’re starting to panic. Whatever the situation, it’s time to pause, review, and reflect.

Is business slow because it’s slow everywhere? Or - and here’s some tough love - is it because you could improve how you run your practice? If it’s not a universal issue and it’s just you, the likely culprits are:

1. You could do better at providing care.

2. (And this is often the more solvable issue) you could improve how you communicate and build trust with potential and current patients.

Slow times happen to all of us in the ketamine therapy industry. In this blog, we’ll explore five actionable strategies to address slow periods and position your practice for long-term success.

When business is slow, take strategic action to grow your ketamine therapy clinic, build trust with patients, improve marketing, and overcome slow business periods.

1. Nurture Your Mailing List

For some of you, the pain of a slow clinic might finally push you to start a newsletter. But hopefully, that isn’t the case. If you’re not already collecting emails, start as early as now. If you are, ask yourself: Are you regularly emailing your subscribers? More importantly, are you providing value in your emails? 

Don’t just blast subscribers with promotions; offer educational content and resources they can benefit from, even if they don’t visit your clinic. You might also consider including special offers or discounts (we’ll discuss this later in the blog).

A regular email newsletter helps keep you top-of-mind for your patients, but more importantly, it builds trust. A truly valuable newsletter stands on its own and is often forwarded to colleagues or loved ones. When this happens, it adds significant weight, plus the recipient is likely getting your email from someone they already trust, which amplifies its impact and influence.

2. Create Valuable Content

Content is a way for potential patients and referring providers to check you out, or check your vitals, if you will.

What we create should reflect a deep understanding of our patients' questions and concerns. 

It’s also an opportunity to share more about ourselves and our practice. In other words, content is a vehicle of trust. Content allows us to build our brand and stand out from the competition, but—more importantly—it’s a way to educate and reassure our potential patients. All of these factors form a strong foundation for trust.

So, when things are slow and patient volume is low, ask yourself:

• When was the last time we posted a blog on our website?

• Have we updated our FAQ section with new information? Do we even have an FAQ section?

• When was the last time we posted an update on our Google Business Profile page?

• When was the last time we posted on social media?

Consistently posting valuable content is like maintaining a healthy, normal sinus rhythm: we’re a health clinic that understands what’s important to patients, provides excellent care, and knows how to communicate. This is a formula for success and, more importantly, trust.

Inconsistent content, on the other hand, is like a sickly, irregular rhythm: an unreliable heartbeat that raises questions about our practice’s dependability. Are we there for our patients physically (are we closed? will they feel safe?) and emotionally (do they understand us?).

Use this slow time to give ourselves the gift of creating content; an opportunity to showcase our reliability and build trust.

3. Engage Locally with Your Community

Are you putting yourself out there by talking with potential referring colleagues? Not only physicians but also therapists, counselors, and life coaches? Does your local professional community even know you exist?

While we teach that you shouldn’t rely solely on referrals when you first start, once you’ve established a foundational online presence, it’s time to start building referral relationships.

Have you emailed, called, or met up for coffee with specialists who could refer patients to you? A person is willing to refer to you if they trust you with their patient. This trust mirrors the relationship a potential patient has with your clinic because it means they must believe in your ability to care for their health. You could be the best ketamine therapy specialist within a 100-mile radius, but if they don’t know you exist—or worse, don’t trust you because you never reached out—well, you get the picture.

So, what can you do?

• Meet virtually (e.g., host one-on-one Zoom sessions to connect).

• Host a webinar for multiple professionals.

• Meet in person or sponsor a booth at a local event.

We once hosted a late-morning “cocktail” party at our clinic, inviting professionals interested in learning about our services. It felt like an open house, but it was also an excellent opportunity to connect with others in the community. People enjoyed it so much that several guests even went out to brunch afterward!

Get yourself out there. Give people the opportunity to know you and your clinic.

Curious to explore networking more? We dedicated an entire blog to this topic: Maximizing Your Network: Building Referral Relationships for Your Ketamine Clinic

4. Assess If You Are Experiencing Seasonal Fluctuations

You may be doing just fine. All your marketing is on point and effective. But sometimes, your ideal target market simply isn’t available because of the season. For example, our clinic is located in Palm Springs, California, where the city essentially empties out during the summer as temperatures soar to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Additionally, many of our patients are only in town during the winter months and summer elsewhere.

Take a look around you: Are other businesses, especially cash-based ones, also taking a hit? Whether you’re dealing with a true seasonal issue that you can anticipate and strategize for next year or you’re simply seeing a temporary dip, the concern now is your low patient flow. So, what can you do?

If you aren’t already doing so, consider offering discounts or package deals. This is where nurturing your email list becomes especially important. Sure, you may attract some new patients with your discount, but you’ll also need to build a trusting relationship with those new patients from scratch. Ultimately, it’s your already established patients who can really benefit from the discount, and so can your practice.

This is why it’s important to…

5. Follow Up with Your Established Patients

Hopefully, you’re already staying connected with your patients. But if not, use this slow time to review your patient list and reconnect. Ideally, you should have a workflow where you or a staff member routinely check in with patients who have completed their initial six treatments.

Some clinics immediately schedule a booster appointment during the sixth treatment. Others wait a couple of weeks before contacting the patient to check in and see if they need to return. 

Whatever your system is, check if you actually have one! If you don’t, make one. If you do, ensure it’s being followed.

We’re going to sound like a broken record here, but this is where your monthly newsletter becomes invaluable. It’s the perfect tool to notify patients of discounts, share valuable information, and keep your clinic top-of-mind.

But more importantly, they are YOUR patients. Make sure they feel cared for; whether they’re doing well or not. At the end of the day, good patient care is the best marketing.

Explore five actionable strategies to improve patient flow and keep your ketamine clinic thriving during slow periods!

How to Build Long-Term Success for Your Ketamine Clinic

At the beginning of this blog, we mentioned that if your business is slow, it’s either because you could do a better job providing care or because you need to improve communication and build trust. We’re going to go out on a limb and assume you already provide excellent, ethical, heart-centered care for your ketamine therapy patients. That means the challenge you’re facing is likely a marketing issue.

Now that you’ve read this blog, you have a clear idea of where to start making changes and taking action. From nurturing your email list to proactively checking in with your established patients, these steps will help you stay focused and better equipped to weather the ebbs and flows of running a ketamine clinic.

Related Questions:
What should I do if my ketamine clinic is experiencing a slow period?

• First, don’t panic—slow times happen to all of us. Start by reflecting on whether you’re effectively connecting with potential and current patients. Are you nurturing your email list, creating valuable content, and engaging with your local professional community? These strategies build trust and strengthen relationships, helping you not only navigate slow periods but also position your clinic for long-term success.

Why is creating consistent, valuable content important for my clinic?

• Creating content shows your patients and community that you understand their concerns and are committed to helping them. It’s an opportunity to educate, reassure, and build trust while setting your clinic apart from the competition. Whether it’s posting blogs, updating FAQs, or maintaining your Google Business Profile, consistent content keeps you top-of-mind and demonstrates that you’re reliable; an essential trait for healthcare providers.

If you’re interested in other blogs, check out these posts too:

How to Market Your Ketamine Clinic Despite Social Media Restrictions in 2024

Struggling to market your ketamine clinic? Learn strategies to navigate social media bans, boost SEO, and turn followers into patients in this blog.

5 Ways Your Ketamine Clinic's Social Media Might Get Deleted

In this blog, learn five ways to get your ketamine clinic’s social media account shut down, and how to avoid them.

Are Ketamine Clinics Profitable? Part 1: Exploring Revenue

We get asked a lot if a ketamine clinic is profitable. We completely understand why. Leaving your stable hospital job to start a ketamine clinic is a risk and requires money. Will you be able to earn that money back and increase your income? In part one of this two-part blog series, we talk about the various factors that affect your clinic’s revenue.

Discover 5 actionable strategies to grow your ketamine therapy clinic, build trust with patients, improve marketing, and overcome slow business periods.

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