Driving people to visit your website is an excellent way to start gaining new patients. Sadly, more than 90% of people who visit your website won’t give you a call or convert into new patient leads. Furthermore, unless you have a plan to turn them into repeat customers, a large number of your current patients won’t return for subsequent visits. Fortunately, there are lots of tools or strategies available that let you follow and interact with website visitors. In this fourth and last article of our practice marketing strategy series, we’ll discuss five marketing mechanisms to harness in order to convert more website visitors into patients and more patients into loyal advocates for your practice.

Brands are based on loyal consumers. They’re also the most economical method of raising sales income. That’s why figuring out your patient lifetime value is crucial to figuring out the return on investment from marketing.

Although happy patients come back for a variety of reasons, it’s not always clear why they come back. Sending promotional offers, company newsletters, and invitations to special events is a great way to stay on top of your patients’ minds and make them feel appreciated. This is yet another reason why it’s essential to maintain proper records. Make sure the data on file is up to date during a face-to-face meeting so that you can have a comprehensive patient profile for marketing purposes.

So how can you properly engage your existing patients by email? Gather information to create patient personas. Not every patient is motivated by the same Calls to Action (CTAs) and not every patient is interested in the same services. Determining the kinds of patients you see and the offers that draw them back to your office is a useful exercise. You can divide these groups up using your patient personas so that you can tailor your emails to each group’s specific motivations.

This tactic also enables you to test out new goods and services offerings to various segments to what groups resonate most.  Only for cash-based (non-insurance accepting) practices, or for supplemental sales items, you can opt to reward loyalty: By granting patients access to exclusive discounts and offers, customer loyalty programs help patients feel appreciated. It also creates an incentive for ongoing visits at your practice, which lessens friction for returning customers.

Email marketing can also be used to build-up your brand. A lot of medical practices specialize and become “known for” particular procedures in their community. Although specialization is a great advantage, most medical practices struggle to tell their current patient base that they offer more services than just what they were trained to do. One way to inform and educate current clients about your expertise in a comprehensive way is through email marketing.

The phone is one of the most important but underutilized instruments a medical practice has to influence their revenue. Yes, that is correct. An instrument that has been around since 1876, if used properly, has the ability to completely transform your practice and significantly increase patient flow.

Medical practices need to consider how to enhance the patient experience in general, especially as patient expectations are beginning to resemble the expectations people have in the retail industry. For years, the retail sector has taken advantage of people’s phone addiction to enhance their customer service, but medical practices, on the other hand, are far more likely to fail to answer inbound calls than to welcome them quickly and efficiently.

What You Must Understand About Calls Incoming to Medical Practices:

• Phone appointments make up ~90% of all medical appointments. Because phone conversations are more intimate and private, prospective patients who are doing their research online prefer them.
• ~2-3% of healthcare appointments are made on their own via the internet. A lot of patients are reluctant to enter their personal health information into an online form
• Internet leads convert 30% slower than phone leads. There is no other form of communication that will yield a quicker return on investment than calling a patient.

The result of investing the time, effort, and resources necessary to enhance your communication methods with your current patients yields a more satisfied and loyal patient base. Patient flow will eventually rise as a result of this, and combined with a retained base, this results in sustainable practice growth.

The following three strategies will help you communicate with patients more effectively:

• One excellent way to demonstrate your concern for the patient is to ask for feedback after the appointment. Up to six of your most recent online reviews are read by over 85% of prospective patients before they make a decision on which practice to go to for their care. One of the best ways to deliver great service and enhance your online reputation is to give your patient a call to find out about their overall experience and, if it makes sense, to subsequently ask them for an online review. As a healthcare professional, using a review request automated cadence tool to ask for reviews from specific patients after your call with them may be more prudent way to ask.
• Establishing outreach with patients following a missed follow-up appointment is another challenging but crucial part of robust doctor-patient communication. Best practices in outreach efforts entails making up to three phone calls to patients that have missed a follow-up appointment. If and when you do get the patient on the line, make an effort to learn more about their circumstances and potential reasons for them missing the appointment. Your doctor’s office can use this as an opportunity to gain the patient’s trust and try to reschedule the visit.
• One of the best ways to establish rapport with patients and demonstrate your appreciation for their business is to extend an invitation to an open house at your medical office. In addition to being a fantastic way for you to reconnect with patients you haven’t seen in a while, holding an open house will let you introduce new services and processes that are exclusive to your practice.

The value of having a strong online presence to generate prospective patient leads that call your practice and set up appointments irreplaceable.  Moreso it’s critical to communicate with your patients and personalize every interaction they have. Your medical practice will significantly advance patient loyalty and word of mouth spread as a result of implementing this straightforward yet powerful change.

Even though a patient’s visit to your website is an important step in the process of making an appointment scheduling decision, their website visit, and even their booking, does not guarantee that they will become an actual patient of your practice.

To mitigate the lag time for reaching a decision on moving forward with booking an appointment, email marketing is a useful tool nudging these patients forward via providing them with a preview of the services offered by your practice.

The key, of course, is to actually gather email address in the first place. While several methods can be used to obtain contact details, the most forceful and prominent one will be your website contact forms. Look for places to add CTAs that serve as conversion points requesting additional user information from visitors by conversion rate optimizing (CRO) the layout of your website.

How do you use the patient information that you gather? The following lead nurturing strategies can help convert a prospect into a client:

• Email drip campaigns: Using triggers gathered from your website to send pertinent information to people who have indicated booking intent, email drip campaigns—which are defined as an automated series of emails to a single person over time—are an effect means by which to achieve your practice’s lead nurturing goals. Additionally, these automated campaigns offer quantifiable data that can be used over time to improve your marketing message.
• SMS marketing campaigns: Texting is one of the most affordable ways to spread the word about your brand. It’s among the most valuable as well. By giving you the keys to their most valued access point—their mobile phone—a potential patient who chooses to participate in an SMS campaign has demonstrated their genuine interest in your practice. Due to the high visibility of this communication channel, there is a greater likelihood of engagement. Text messaging can also drive a potential client straight to your website for a speedy conversion.

Remember that lead nurturing isn’t just designed for using one marketing channel at a time. It is always advised to use a multi-channel strategy that makes use of two or more channels in order to maximize effectiveness.

Our society is dynamic, interconnected, and becoming more and more mobile. The fact that over 95% of Americans own a mobile phone attests to this. Furthermore, that phone is almost always within reach at any hour of the day.

Additionally, we have access to more communication channels than ever before, including social media, email, calls, texts, and more.

Which do you think is the most widely used among these communication options? You guessed it. The most popular method of communication among people is texting. Compared to other channels, text messaging is read and responded to by users far more quickly. And millennials aren’t the only ones. Every age group and industry has seen a significant increase in the use of texting, and the healthcare industry is no exception.

Let’s examine how email communication compares with text messaging:

• Open rates for SMS messages are 98%, while email opens at 20%.
• Email response rates are roughly 6%, but text response rates are 45%.
• Text messages are responded to in about 90 seconds, while emails take more than 90 minutes.

This should indicate that a key component of your multi-channel patient communication strategy should be text messaging. You should begin the process of implementing a secure SMS or 2-way messaging system right away if you haven’t already.

Take this into consideration if your medical practice is thinking about using a secure messaging app:

• HIPAA adherence: It should be “non-negotiable” for your healthcare practices to use any platform that complies with HIPAA regulations.
• Integration of EMR/EHR/PMS: Better patient engagement is just one benefit of having a 2-way messaging platform that interfaces with your practice management software. The majority of platforms let you set up automated reminders and appointment scheduling to lower no-show and cancellation rates.
• Integration with your practice’s phone system: A few platforms provide the additional feature of integrating with your phone system. This can give patients a simple and safe method to contact your practice while lowering call volume and doing away with “phone tag.”

Website Integration: By offering secure messaging as a means of communication on your website, you can increase patient conversion rates and make it simple for both current and prospective patients to get in touch with your office.

By sending out satisfaction surveys, you can stay in touch with your patients and take appropriate action to improve both your practice’s online reputation and patient base’s health. As a result of this process, you get to know your patients better and strengthen your patient relationships:

• Send surveys following each visit: Following each visit, give patients a brief, HIPAA-compliant survey asking them to tell you how their experience went. These surveys can be sent out manually or, if money is tight, via one of the many practical automated services available. Make it apparent in your survey that you respect their opinions, will pay attention to what they have to say, and will use their input to improve both their and other patients’ experiences as patients. It’s a good idea to include one or two open-ended questions along with scale-based questions in your questionnaire design for consistency and measurement. Three primary topics should be succinctly and clearly covered in the survey: interpersonal, quality, and access issues.
• Recognize problems and take action: Examine survey responses to find patterns among unhappy patients. Utilize this knowledge to enhance your services. Address urgent matters directly and without delay. Additionally, keep in mind that prompt and individual responses to patient complaints may deter unhappy patients from posting unfavorable internet reviews.

Recognize promoters and take advantage of positive social proof: In a similar vein, try to identify recurring themes among promoters in order to enhance your work and incorporate more of their recommendations. In addition, if promoters haven’t posted any kind of online review, get in touch with them directly and inquire about their willingness to share their experience in a testimonial on the website or an online review.

Retargeting is a technique for showing ads to visitors who have already engaged with your website. Every consumer has gone through it at some point; maybe you looked online for a vacuum cleaner but decided not to buy it. Then, on your Facebook newsfeed and/or other websites you visited the following week, you noticed advertisements for vacuums seemingly everywhere. That’s retargeting in a nutshell.

Retargeting is a potent tool for maintaining your company’s visibility in the eyes of prospective customers who didn’t have an immediate need or desire for your service. When, however, the user is prepared to convert (make an appointment), you want them to return to your website versus your competitors’ websites.

A piece of code called a tag or pixel is added to your website and customized for different pages in order for retargeting to function. This allows visitors to be added to your retargeting audiences via browser cookies. This cookie instructs retargeting platforms to show visitors advertisements from the website owner when the visitor exits the page.

It is important to recognize that there are significant challenges for retargeting in the healthcare industry. This is because there are HIPAA implications as these kinds of campaigns necessitate gathering the consumer’s browser cookie data. Google and Facebook err on the side of caution and prohibit the majority of healthcare retargeting on their platforms in order to avoid breaking any HIPAA laws.

What, then, can you do? Utilizing the information gathered from your pixels, you can create a lookalike audience on Google and Facebook and target them with advertisements. This audience is a good method to target potential patients because it has similar characteristics to the retargeting list you could have otherwise created based on geo-psycho-demographics. This type of targeting helps you stay out of trouble with HIPAA.

In our four-part series, we’ve provided you a strategic overview of a variety of marketing mechanisms you can implement in your practice to build a marketing foundation, establish an online presence, acquire prospective patients, and re-engage your base.  By using the actionable tips laid-out in this series to springboard your marketing action, you’ll position your healthcare practice for high-yield growth.  To dive into the details of implementing a fool-proof marketing strategy for your practice, visit us at curatohealth.com and schedule a free strategy session.