The recall problem
Optometry has an unusually clean recall cycle. Most patients should come annually, the practice knows exactly when they last came, and the reason to return is not in dispute.
And yet a large share of patients drift. Not because they decided to go elsewhere, but because an annual reminder is easy to postpone and nothing in daily life forces the issue until glasses break or vision changes.
That drift is the opportunity. These are not strangers who need convincing — they are people who already chose you and simply need reminding at a moment when acting is easy.
Why paper, specifically
Email recall is cheaper per message, and most practices already send it. The problem is that it competes with everything else in an inbox and gets read, at best, in a moment when booking is inconvenient.
A postcard is read standing up, near a counter, with the whole message visible at once. It does not require opening, it does not go to a promotions tab, and it physically persists — cards sit on refrigerators and by keys for days.
The two are not mutually exclusive. The practices that do this well send both, and use the card for the patients email has already failed to reach.
Building the list
Export patients whose last exam is between twelve and eighteen months ago. That window is the sweet spot: overdue enough that a reminder is warranted, recent enough that they still think of you as their practice.
Beyond about two years the message has to change. Those patients may have been somewhere else since, and a card that assumes an ongoing relationship reads as though you have not noticed they left. Write those separately, with an offer rather than a reminder.
Strip anyone who has asked not to be contacted, and check the file for old addresses before you mail. Practice systems accumulate stale addresses faster than most owners expect.
What the card should say
Name the date. "Your last exam was in March 2025" does more work than any amount of persuasive copy, because it is specific, true, and slightly uncomfortable in a productive way.
Say what the appointment is for in plain terms. Many patients postpone because they assume an exam is a bigger undertaking than it is, or because they are not sure it is needed if nothing seems wrong.
Give one way to book. If online booking exists, a QR code straight to it removes the most common failure point, which is a patient intending to call during business hours and never doing it.
Timing and cadence
Mail continuously rather than in one annual blast. A monthly drop of everyone who crossed the twelve-month mark that month keeps the message timely and spreads the resulting appointments across the schedule instead of bunching them.
It also keeps the cost predictable and small. A practice pulling a hundred or so overdue patients a month is spending around $120 at $1.19 a card, which is a rounding error against the revenue of the appointments it produces.
If you only mail once, mail in the quieter part of your year. A card that fills a slow month is worth more than one that adds to a month you could not have serviced anyway.