This is the operational version of provider outreach: who you contact, in what order, with what message, and how you know whether it worked. It assumes you already accept that pediatric practices are worth the effort. If you want the case for that, start with how to get more ABA referrals.
Before you send anything
Three things have to exist first. Skipping them is the most common reason outreach produces nothing.
Your four answers. Insurance accepted, ages served, current openings, and the exact intake route. Written down, specific, and current. If you cannot state your openings as a number, you are not ready to send.
A physical mailing address. Required by CAN-SPAM in every commercial email. This is not optional and the penalty is assessed per message.
Intake capacity to absorb what you ask for. If a practice refers a family and nobody calls them back for a week, you have spent a relationship to gain nothing. Outreach that succeeds is worse than outreach that fails if intake cannot catch it.
Build the target list
Work outward from your clinic, not alphabetically.
Tier 1: diagnosing clinicians within your service radius. Developmental-behavioral pediatricians, pediatric neurologists, child psychologists. Usually a short list, ten to thirty practices in a metro. Highest intent per referral.
Tier 2: primary care pediatrics within your service radius. The largest group and the widest funnel. Expect fifty to two hundred practices depending on density.
Tier 3: schools and early intervention. School psychologists, special education coordinators, EI service coordinators.
Tier 4: adjacent therapy practices. Speech, OT, pediatric PT. Reciprocal, and the easiest first conversation you will have.
Work Tier 1 first. It is small enough to do properly, and the intent is high enough that a small win is a real win.
Find the right person
Sending to info@ is how outreach dies quietly. Two better routes:
Call and ask. "Hi, I run a local ABA agency. Who should I send referral information to so it reaches the right person?" This takes ninety seconds and gets you a name. The name is worth more than the email address.
Write to the practice manager, not just the clinician. The practice manager decides what gets filed and what reaches the physician. Copy the clinician; address the coordinator.
The message sequence
Four touches over a quarter. Not more.
Touch 1, the introduction. Short. Under 120 words. Lead with what they can act on, not with who you are. Something like: there are families in their area waiting on ABA, you have openings, here is what you take and how to send someone. Attach the one-pager.
Touch 2, two weeks later, if no reply. Shorter still. Acknowledge the first note so it does not read as a fresh cold email. Restate the ask in one sentence. Make opting out trivially easy, in plain words: if now is not the right time, reply "not now" and I will stop. Then actually stop.
Touch 3, the quarterly capacity update. The highest-value message you will send, and the one most agencies never send. One line about what is open this quarter. Practices keep these. Some tape them to the wall.
Touch 4, the material change. A new BCBA, a new location, a new insurance panel, an expanded age range. Only send this when it is true.
Then the quarterly update repeats. That is the whole program.
What the one-pager looks like
One page. No design budget required. Label-first so it scans in five seconds:
- Practice name, phone, address
- Insurance accepted, listed by plan name
- Ages served, as a range
- Current openings, with a date
- How to refer: fax number, intake email, phone, and what happens after
- Turnaround commitment, if you can keep one
Make a fax-formatted version. More than half of formal referrals still move on paper, and a practice that faxes will not switch workflows for you.
What to measure
Vanity metrics will mislead you here. Open rates on physician email are noisy and reply rates are low even when outreach is working, because the response often arrives as a referral weeks later rather than as an email.
Track four things:
- Practices contacted, by tier.
- Practices that responded in any form, including a phone call to your intake line.
- First referrals from a new source. This is the number that matters.
- Referrals per source over time. A source that sent one and stopped is a relationship problem, not a marketing problem.
Give it two quarters before judging. Referral relationships in healthcare move on a slower clock than any other channel, and agencies that quit at six weeks quit right before the first intake arrives.
What not to do
Do not offer anything of value. No fee, no percentage, no gift card, no volume-linked gift. Paying for healthcare referrals is a federal crime under the Anti-Kickback Statute and is reached by state all-payer laws for private insurance too. This is the one rule with prison attached.
Do not fake a thread. No "Re:" on a first contact. State email statutes specifically penalize subject lines that misrepresent the message.
Do not send from a personal Gmail address at volume. Google's sender policies can suspend the account, and you will lose the mailbox along with the outreach. Send from your practice domain.
Do not claim outcomes you cannot support. Clinical claims in marketing to clinicians will end the conversation faster than silence would.
Do not blast. Two hundred generic emails will produce fewer referrals than forty considered ones, and will burn the list you have to work with next quarter.
The realistic version
A single-location agency working this properly is contacting perhaps sixty practices a quarter, four touches each, with a maintained sheet and an intake line that answers. That is a couple of hours a week, most of it in list maintenance rather than writing.
That list maintenance is the part software should absorb. Search your ZIP code to see the referral map around your clinic, free and without a card, and start with Tier 1.