The computer and database software are an LMT’s friends.

I’ve met countless massage therapists whose office files belong more in the 20^th century than in the 21^st.  I’m not suggesting that LMTs should have paperless offices.  I am suggesting, however, that electronic data be incorporated, as well.

Paper files for each session need no changing.  But as a business coach for massage therapists, I travel the country giving my CE workshop, “How to Build a $100,000 Massage Business,” and I’ve seen and heard about far too many intake forms that fail to ask for email addresses.  How can you communicate with clients by email if you don’t know their email address?  The answer is that you can’t.  And that’s a huge oversight.  I’ve also seen far too many LMTs who treat the computer as an enemy.  (I’ll save that topic for a future blog.)

So, go through your files and if you don’t have a client’s email address, pick up the phone—another invention that made people uncomfortable in the 19^th century when it was brought into the world—and ask for it.  If you’re not asking for an email address, correct the oversight.

Once you’ve collected email addresses from clients it’s time to build a database.  That’s a slightly high tech way of saying a mailing list.  Except the mailing list I’m talking about is electronic.  The days of massage therapists mailing out paper will soon go the way of the Edsel.

Your computer has database software.  If you don’t know how to find it and/or are reluctant to learn it, find a friend, a client, a colleague or a teenager to do it for you.  If you can’t afford to actually pay them for it, trade for it.

What you’re building is a newsletter of your very own.  And that’s a subject for a future blog, as well.