NOTE: The following page contains one of the forty-plus lessons in my Botox Blastoff Class; this is a gift and contains all of that lesson. For the complete course, go here (click)<--
The Psychology of Botox.
Botox is an emergency. I will explain why.
Most of the following ideas come from a book, Survival of the Prettiest, this is a well-researched book that my mentor recommended when I was first starting to offer cosmetic injections.
What I am about to say may seem like an exaggeration or an oversimplification, but I have found it to be a working-practical truth when it comes to the provision of Botox to my patients.
The idea is that we have a reasoning brain; we have an artistic right brain; we also have a lizard, instinctual, mid-brain brain that mostly subconsciously prompts mating and eating and surviving.
And with that lizard brain, when someone looks in the mirror, according to research, there is a subconscious feeling when they see a new wrinkle, “Oh, no! I’m getting older; I'm becoming undesirable. I'm going to be kicked out of the cave where the fire is and starve.”
Of course, that is not something a conscious modern woman would think about with her left brain, but there is a lizard brain that thinks it in spite of what we might try not to think, just like we might try not to think about sex, but our brain still goes there.
So with that panicked feeling, there's a need to take care of the wrinkle that day. And then there's also just the practical side of it, some people have events, and when they want to prepare for an event by getting some Botox, they may only have a small sliver of time available, and they may not remember until the last minute.
The woman I saw today owns a shoe store for children that serves a huge part of our community. She parked her store right by three different elementary schools, two private schools, and a public school. I can't remember how many thousands of children she put shoes on--but it's a LOT, which is a good business if you think about it because kids grow out of their shoes and need more even if they are not worn out. And she works six days a week, is very successful, and she runs, and she's healthy. And she just remembered that she has something important coming up (for which she wants to look her best). And today was her only day available to go for treatment. She needed Botox today. And if she couldn't get it from me, she had to get it from somewhere else because this was her tiny little sliver of time. And if I couldn't see her and she couldn't see someone else, it might be weeks before she can take a break from work again and get her Botox.
So, one of the practical applications of the psychology of Botox is that you should offer same-day appointments. Thankfully, you can squeeze a last-minute Botox treatment in between almost anything because if you work them into that day and they know they're a work in (so they are not expecting a long conversation), Botox is a five-minute visit (especially when you already know the person, and you have their Botox recipe in your chart).
Another aspect of the psychology of Botox (and beauty treatments in general) is that even in hard times, when the economy is tanking, and people are losing jobs, maybe even more so in hard times, people want their Botox because they recognize it (partly subconsciously) that staying young is part of what is necessary to survive.
To further implement this strategy, tell whoever answers your phone that they should always let someone come in that day if they want Botox. No matter what, you're just going to work them in somehow that day.
Touch Ups (do you and do you charge?)
You always let someone come back for a touch-up, but you have to tell them to return between two and four weeks because, on the first visit (first time ever to get Botox), Botox can start to wear off at four weeks and can be mostly gone at the end of two months. So, unless you specify, some will come back at two months for a “touch up” when the Botox is really mostly worn off, and they just need another whole treatment.
So, on the first visit, tell them, “Botox lasts two to three months, and eventually (after 3 or 4 treatments) it starts to last three months or longer (sometimes four or five months), but the package insert says it lasts two months. And the first time you treat them, there will be a noticeable attenuation of the results starting at about the eighth week. It will start to wear off and maybe even look like it has gone away at 2 months.”
So I tell people, “don't worry about it. Just have it done every three months. If you go more frequently than every three months, some think you may be increasing the risk of developing antibodies to the Botox, so it completely quits working.”
“So, it is okay if it looks like it is starting to wear off it two months; just wait and repeat the Botox at three months. And then, after the second or third treatment, it will start to last three months. And after a year, you may be able to stretch it to every four or five months.”
So that explanation gives them a reason to legitimately see a way to save money by not skipping treatment for the first year.
But, to improve your skills and to improve the satisfaction of your patients, you tell them that if you do a treatment and “after two weeks, if they think they need more Botox in an area you treated (for example, they can still frown with their corrugators), or if they think they see asymmetry regarding something you treated, then you will touch it up for free.”
They wait for not two days, they must give it two weeks before they ask for a touchup.
If they text me and they tell me something's crooked even a week out, I'll text back, “Since one muscle can show the effects of the Botox before another if I do something to try to straighten it out at a week, and then it kicks in and relaxes another muscle (delayed), I could make it crooked when, perhaps, if you would have just left it alone, it might have been straight. So I need to give it at least until the second week (but not more than 4) before I touch anything up.”
Then I will say, “But anything that I treat, if it's not straight if it's not to your liking, I will touch it up and add Botox to it at zero cost to you. If I decide that I need to treat something else, a new muscle group, to make you happy with the results you want, then that's an extra charge.”
“If I treat the glabella and you can still frown,” I tell them, “if you have any movement at all, I will touch it up at between two to four weeks. Or if I do your brows and one is higher than the other, or I'm straightening out the size of your eye, and I don't get it just right. I will touch it up and then add that to your recipe. And the next time, I'll do the whole recipe at once.”
When you tell them this, make it plain that they are doing you a favor by letting you know if it is not perfect. It’s a five-minute fix that you can work into your schedule. If you do not make them feel good about it, they will go somewhere else and never come back to see you if you make things a little strange.
So there are two strategies that were taught to me by my mentor, Mark Bailey from Toronto, who made many fortunes with Botox. I have used those tips for over a decade, and I have found them very helpful.
The Importance of Birthdays & How to Automatically Make Your Patients Feel Good about Theirs & Grow Your Profits
There’s an old book by Joe Gerard, who holds the Guinness book world record for the most cars sold in one year—and it stresses the importance of birthdays.
Mr. Girard sold 1,425 cars in one year (in 1978 at a Chevrolet dealership). He had someone else doing the paperwork, but he was jaw to jaw talking to people and closing the sale. In his book, he talks about how he used birthdays to engage people and bring them into his dealership.
I'm going to tell you how I implemented a system similar to Mr. Girard’s to bring people into my office. His system was done manually (he sold 13,001 cars from 1963 until 1978, a time before the personal computer). I’m going tell you how I do it using software so it all happens automatically and with no cost to me.
First, I recommend you set things up in ONTRAPORT. I know there are other systems, some easier to use, some that offer more options, but that is the system I use that offers the most options and still is easy enough to use that you will not need to hire another person to do this for you (or it can be done by someone in your office that is not a computer expert, like your receptionist).
NOTE: If you do not have ONTRAPORT already, go here to pick up a free guide to emails and a free trial of their software:
I really recommend ONTRAPORT because what I'm about to show you cannot be done in Mail Chimp (the worst because they now sensor your email and actually shut down the account of one of our doctors for just talking about PRP, and they sensor political views); what I am going to show you can also not be done in Constant Contact, or AWeber. The other software options (other than ONTRAPORT) that I have tried (SalesForce, Infusion Soft, and others) DO offer what I am about to tell you but are so complicated and time-consuming that you will almost surely need to hire someone to do the following for you.
How to Set Up Your Birthday Club
After you have installed ONTRAPORT, you are going to set up a birthday club where the person gets an email every year, automatically, without you having to ever remember, that offers them $50 off (or whatever amount you think appropriate) if they come into your office anytime within one week before or after their birthday.
Here’s how you do it.
Once you are logged into ONTRAPORT, you can follow along and set things up as per the transcript below. If you want to see a video of where I am clicking, then watch the video at the top of this page.
ONTRAPORT offers great customer support, so if you get stuck, go to their help desk and schedule a screen share with one of the tech people. That’s the easiest way to get unstuck. Their tech people have truly helped me grow my business over the past 15 years.
Transcript of Instructions to Make a Birthday Club
First, I'm going to make a new contact and pretend like I just saw them for Botox. Actually thought about doing this for someone I saw today, but then I realized I'd have to use their name. So to keep it private, I'm just going to put my name, Charles Runels, and I'll put one of my other emails, I don't think ONTRAPORT knows this email, but I'll put this one.
Now here's where it gets interesting. So if I add a facial rejuvenation step sequence, I'm going to send them a series of emails that have to do with the face.
Next, I’m going to send them a series of three emails that go out to all first-time Botox patients and offer them membership in my Botox club. I highly recommend to you the section in BotoxClass.com about starting your own Botox club. In that section, I added the three emails that I have used for that service of three.
Copy and paste those emails to set up your Botox club (we are about to get to the Birthday Club).
So here would be the second email, and I won't read them to you, but basically, the first one says, thank you for coming to see me. This one gives them a link to where to make the appointment online. It's at two weeks out. So it tells them to come to see me now; if they're not happy with what they're seeing, I have a link to my thing that pushes the O-Shot.
And then the third one comes at three months or 25 days. And it reminds them that it's time to get their Botox again. And if they haven't made an appointment, here's where you can do it.
And then there are other things that I advertise in the PS.
They get three emails offering the Botox club and giving them instructions about Botox, and then that sequence ends.
So those three emails would be one sequence to which I subscribe this person.
But then this one is just, every time I wrote an email about something to do with the face, I may not want to send that to everyone in my group so I made a facial rejuvenation step sequence, and I'll show you that in a second.
But this is the one I want to show you. This is the one that has to do with birthdays. It's a facial date sequence.
And I'll tell you the difference between these. And you can have someone do this for you, but you have to know to ask for it. So the step sequence goes like, well, let me just show you. So let me go over here. And the thing that's different about ONTRAPORT that you can't do with Constant Contact is it allows you to have more than one sequence going at the same time.
Now, you're thinking, “Aren't my people going to get tired of getting emails from me?”
So this is just a series of a few little emails that I put together. And they go out every so often for three months. And the first one goes where I talk about the math of a face, and then I refer to Leonardo's stuff, and I have a link to that little map thing that I teach in the Vampire Book, so they know that I'm not just puffing up their face, I'm thinking about it. And then they get one a few days later and a few days later, a few days later. And I didn't sit down and write these all at once. It's just every time I wrote an email about the face, I just added it to the sequence.
Here's the one about birthdays. This is what I really wanted to show you that I've never really shown before. So that would just go in that sequence no matter when I signed them up.
So if I signed up one person on September the first, they'd get the first one. And if I signed up another person on October the first they'd get the first one on October the first. And then, the second one would come in sequence by the number of days subscribed, starting from whenever they signed up. But the one that's a date sequence, which you cannot do with Constant Contact or MailChimp or many others, so it just comes once a year. That's it. Ten days before their birthday. Because I didn't show you this part, I can put my birthday in there. But this is the email. And I'll show you how I put my birthday in. So 10 days before my birthday, I could make it something else if I wanted to, but it could be like when they owed me some money or something, but I make it my birthday.
It could be an event that I'm doing, but 10 days before my birthday, the email says…
Hello,
I just wanted to say happy birthday/week/season, if you're in the neighborhood for your birthday, I'll give you 50 bucks off any treatment if you're actually in my office for the treatment during the week before or after your birthday.
Hope you have a good day.
And then I have some PSs that are ads.
And you can see I've added things that I've recently come up with. So whenever I have something new, I go change the PS's on my autoresponders. I wrote this email, the simple little email; I don't even know how many thousands of dollars this thing made for me. My phone number's changed twice since I wrote this email. It was at least one, probably two offices ago. It goes out at five o'clock in the morning, ten days before their birthday.
You could make one similar that goes out every day, three days before Christmas or two days before April's fools or something. But I just have this one.
If you try to do this with Constant Contact, MailChimp, and a lot of other software, you can't do it because you can't have more than one sequence going simultaneously, and you cannot tag it to a recurring annual date.
So if I go back to my contact, I just made it there. So all I have to do is now I've marked step sequence, which they're going to get, I've marked date sequence. I just go up here and put my birthday in.
Done.
So how long does that take?
5 minutes: enter their name, click a button.
Now I will get an email ten days before my birthday, perpetually, unless I unsubscribe. And why would I unsubscribe from something that gives me 50 bucks off 10 days before my birthday unless I just wind up not wanting me as a doctor.
For the full version of this Botox Blastoff Course, go here<--
Other Power Options
Watch what else I can do. Let's say this person expresses interest in my consultation for medical problems, then I would put them on my “Health Lessons.”
Just another click (after you write the emails).
There you go.
So now I'm getting these health lessons about every two weeks, you sess this lasts every week or two for about three months. This one goes on for six months, and this one just comes once a year.
And you're thinking, “well, aren't they going to get tired of getting emails?”
They would, if all this was just junk telling them 20% off, or please come see me, or if it was all ads. But if I'm sending them information, then they're unlikely to unsubscribe if I am their doctor and I’m sending them info that makes their life better.
If you look at my health lessons, you can see it goes on for 218 days. It's about every week or two. And when you open them up, you can see there's one about coronavirus. Well, some of these I wrote a decade ago and some of them I wrote very recently, and you can see this one is very recent, it's only fired 27 times. Some of them have fired more. Because when I write a new email, I pull it over and put it into a sequence instead of just letting it go away. So then it goes out to all my people perpetually at a prescheduled time.
So here's an email I wrote about a book that I read 20 years ago called The Coming Plague (it predicted all that went on with COVID, and had the book been on the shelf of our politicians, we would have done better.
There is always going to be another plague. So the book is about how to get ready for it and how to think intelligently without being a Chicken Little--the sky's falling and closing the whole planet. So this email was me talking about the book to my people, not on Facebook, not on Instagram—with my email to my patients—where I could speak freely about what I thought would help them.
This was me, in an email, showing a linear regression, plotting numbers of deaths per million versus population density. And the correlation coefficient was 0.7, and anyway, I won't go into it. But I did the math showing that there was some hyperbole going on in the press and wanted my people to see it.
Nobody else.
I didn't care who else looked at it, but I wanted my people to see it. And nobody banned me from any social media because no one is censoring my emails to my people. That's a personal letter from me to them--and so far in the US, personal communications are not censored. And my website is my website. And so far, at least in this country, websites are not being censored.
Unless you use MailChimp, which censors email, all the others are not doing that yet.
That is an example of a “Health Lessons” email. It would go to my medical patients. But, if I have a cosmetic patient who is interested in what I think about disease, I will subscribe them to both my “Facial Cosmetic” sequence, my Birthday Club sequence, my Botox Club sequence, and my Health Lessons.
So I've shown you how to set up automatic sequences, and you think, okay, I don't really want to take the time to do that. It's ok, it is a five-minute job for someone you hire to do.
And there are now people who work with ONTRAPORT and are consultants on how to use ONTRAPORT. I'm not one of them, but if you call the company, they will give you the name of the consultants. Still, most of the stuff I'm doing, I just figured out one thing at a time by just calling their support people and saying, “How do I do this?”
And five minutes later, I'm doing it.
It's not calculus. It's just someone telling you which button to push. But if you don't know that's an option (multiple autoresponders), maybe you might not do it.
Are You Sure that All My Patients Will Not Unsubscribe? & Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Bastard Sons
One more comment about just the frequency of emails, then I’m going to stop For some reason, I was profoundly affected by one line in the old novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles where the scene is of an out-of-wedlock mother working in a field, she’s poor and working hard, and she's upset that people know she's an unwed mother at a time when that was really, socially a big deal in most countries. You were not only a social outcast, but you had legitimate worries about whether you could feed your baby or not.
In the old south, it was called farming out your baby. If you couldn't afford to feed your baby before the social nets were made, you gave your baby to a farmer who worked your baby (did not send him to school) in exchange for feeding the child. And my grandfather was farmed out because he was born out of wedlock at a time before the social net would take care of him; and never saw one day of school and, at that time, was thought of as a “bastard.” He ran away from the farmer he work for at around twelve or thirteen and started working a labor job for the railroad.
He never talked about it. He just taught himself to read and carpentry and raised a family. But, maybe that family history is why the novel struck me.
But anyway, I’m reading the book as a teenager, and the scene with Tess in the field did strike me—mostly because of what she was thinking out there in the field.
While she was working, she thought, “Why am I really worried about what people think? Because even in the people in my town, the actual number of minutes that I occupy their minds is brief and occasional. For a whole day, they may think of me for five minutes total, if they think of me at all. So why should I worry about that?”
For some reason, that scene was freeing to me. Really, why do we worry about what people think about us when they don't think about us that much?
So how does Tess relate to what we're talking about now in regards to emails?
Think about your mom. I've thought about my mom quite a bit the past week. She and my dad celebrated their 64th wedding anniversary two days ago. So they've been on my mind and I've talked to them a few times and it's been sweet. But, even with that, regarding the woman who risked her life to bring me into the planet, I bet I haven't thought about her more than 15 minutes in any one day,
Fifteen minutes total.
Discounting my visit to them, to go to church with them since it was close their 64th anniversary, discounting the time I spent sitting in their church, for only maybe 15 minutes in a whole day have I thought about the mother who brought me into the planet.
The point I'm trying to make this: if you only think about your mom 15 minutes in a day, your patients aren't thinking about you at all.
Nada. Nothing. You are not on their mind.
So if you're not in their brain and it's time to get Botox or whatever, then there's very little loyalty. There's very little reason to come see you.
But if they're getting periodic messages from you, they get one on their birthday. They get one to remind them to come because it's time to come get their Botox. They get one at two weeks because it's been two weeks since they got their thing, and you're making sure that they know they can get a checkup and a touch-up for free.
And you’re sending them emails when you read something that you think may help them and when you go to a new training.
If you are doing all of that, then you're in their brain more. And then if your emails are telling them things that you're learning, and you're always putting a little piece of yourself in there, then they can become attached to you because you're helping them. And you're helping them with emails that you might have written a year or, in my case, sometimes 10 years ago, but you've stacked them in a way that comes periodically and in an intelligent order.
That’s what autoresponders do.
One side note, won’t they know the emails are automatic?
Yes, they do.
As a matter of fact, I don't recommend at all you ever do anything fake. For example, on my Go-To-Meeting app, there's a way to do something where you can click a button and make one of your meetings look like you're doing a live event, but you're not; it's a recording.
I actually attended one of these “pretend-to-be-live” events put on by a very prominent marketing guy that used to speak from the stage back in the eighties and late seventies and made a fortune. So, he’s got a great reputation.
So, I’m watching this, and I think, “He’s too good for this; someone must have talked him into something.”
I don't know, but I like to think he's more ethical than this, but I could tell it was recording just because I know the game and know the software. But he did stuff like have it set to automatically type into the chat box, “If you agree with what I just said, type, ‘yes.”
And then he would say stuff like, yep, yep, lots of you're doing that. And it was all a freaking recording, and it turned me off that was set up to look live. Fake, so fake that I didn't even want to listen to the rest of what he had to say, even though I'm a big fan.
One of my rules is that if I have to pretend to be stupid to get along with you, then I’m going to leave.
So, very important, I never pretend that an auto responder is not an autoresponder; although some might think it was sent individually, most people now understand enough of the internet that they know it was set up to come automatically, but they don't care. You are not trying to trick them, and you still went to the trouble to set it up.
And if it brings them useful information and if it comes at the right time and it's about something that they care about, they don't care that it was sent automatically, and they'll even respond to it and send you an email. And when they respond to it, then you really should try to answer as many of those as you can in some way.
Surprisingly, a lot of it will be stuff like you sent an email regarding something you read or research that has nothing to do with Botox, but when they get it, they'll hit you back with, oh, it's time for my Botox appointment. Or thank you, and send an email that says, “Thank you for sending this, it was helpful to me.”
And that's good. I try to answer those because it's encouraging to me that my intention was manifested in that they really were helped by a message I sent to them. And I stayed in their mind. They didn't forget about me. For a good reason: (not just because I'm waving my arms and shouting, "Come see me," not because I'm discounting everything, but because I made an honest effort to make their life better.
For the full version of this Botox Blastoff Course, go here<--