22 September 2026 · 5 min read · Oscar Markham
Should a physio clinic discount the first appointment?
Walk through any Irish town and half the physio and chiropractic clinics are advertising a cheap or free initial assessment. It is the default offer in the sector. It is also, for most clinics, a bad one — and the reasons are worth understanding before you copy it.
What the discount actually selects for
An offer does not just attract people. It attracts a particular kind of person. A discounted assessment attracts someone comparing clinics on price, and somebody who chose you on price will leave for the same reason.
Clinics running this offer typically report plenty of first appointments and poor course completion. That is not a coincidence — it is the offer working exactly as designed.
It also devalues the thing you are best at
The assessment is where your expertise is most visible. It is the appointment where you work out what is actually wrong, which is the part a patient cannot get anywhere else.
Pricing it at zero tells the patient it is the least valuable part of the process, and makes the treatment that follows look like the upsell.
What works better
Explain what an assessment involves and what a course of treatment looks like. Patients hesitate because they do not know what they are committing to, not because of the price of one session.
Clinics that switch from a discount to an explanation generally see fewer enquiries and more completed courses. Given that a completed course is worth six times a single appointment, that is a trade worth making.
When a discount does make sense
There is one case: a brand new clinic with no reviews and no local reputation, where the discount is buying evidence rather than patients. Used deliberately for a defined period, to generate the first twenty reviews, it can be the fastest way out of a standing start.
The mistake is leaving it running for three years after it has served that purpose.
Written by Oscar Markham, founder of Dublin Growth Digital. We run lead generation for Irish estate agents and trades, reported every Friday in enquiries and booked work.