Retention Marketing - 5 ways Practice Management software can help

Most healthcare practices focus a majority of their marketing time and energy on attracting new patients. In this week's blog, guest blogger Ellie Macdonald from WriteUpp Practice Management software is making the case for focussing on retention marketing.

Using her expertise in practice management software, she is going to share with you 5 ways that an effective practice management system can help you with your retention marketing.

So without further ado, I want to hand you over to Ellie.

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Retention Marketing - making the case

Hopefully, the following statistics will persuade you that focussing on retention marketing makes sense.

Did you know it costs up to 7 times more to attract new customers into a business than it does to retain one. 

Despite this, 44% of businesses focus more on acquiring new customers while only 16% focus more on retaining them.

Add to this The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 – 70%. The probability of selling to a new customer is 5-20%

Maybe it's time to rethink who we market to: If existing patients are up to 70% more likely to come back for another treatment and loyal patients play a vital role in the acquisition of new ones thanks to their powerful word of mouth, surely retention marketing is worthy of your attention.

Retention marketing becomes a powerful tool once new patients enter your healthcare practice. 

We work hard to keep our patients active and improve their quality of life each time we resolve a problem for them. In turn, they work for us by bringing new friendly faces into our practice with clinical problems for us to solve.

When we give our patients a positive experience they might:

• Return at a later date with a similar problem
• Return with a different problem they know you can help with
• Refer family, friends, and colleagues to you (even if they never see you again)
• Introduce you to other potential valuable referrers they are connected to, like sports team managers, self-help group coordinators, or school teachers

So paying attention to your existing patients and working strategically to retain them as part of your patient community, just makes sense, but is often overlooked.

Patient retention techniques are not the same as those used to gain new patients. You’ll need to focus less on media, and more on processes within your clinic.

The great news is that there is technology to help you do it!

In this blog post, I'm going to take you through the top 5 ways your practice management software can help with your retention marketing by helping you nurture relationships with existing patients.

 

5 ways practice management software can help you with retention marketing

1. Maintain regular communication

You know what they say: out of sight, out of mind.

Don’t let this happen to your patients!

The benefit of using Practice Management software is that you can automate your communications with patients, like reminders to attend an appointment, so you don’t need to remember to do it manually each time. 

Pretty neat, huh?

There are many ways to communicate regularly, and you don't have to offer a new promotion or try and sell something each time. 

You could also let them know about new treatments, special offers, company news, or even wish them a happy birthday or patient anniversary.

If you have left it a long time and your existing patients have been ignored you can also use your Practice Management software for reconnecting with lapsed patients in a nonsleazy cheesy way and still get them to rebook. 

Separating potential patients from existing ones using tags in your management system allows you to tailor your email content to your audience's problems making the content much more relevant and relevance is pure gold when it comes to marketing in the 2020's.

Grouping people according to their condition is also a good idea: it means you can send relevant content to each group (you can use Tags for this too!)

 

2. Ask for patient reviews and feedback

Patient reviews are an incredibly powerful tool in influencing potential patients in their buying decisions.

According to a 2019 survey, 69.9% of respondents consider a positive online reputation to be very or extremely important when choosing a medical practitioner.  The same study showed that when patient's negative reviews were addressed by the practice, their satisfaction rate nearly doubled, increasing to 99%.

Therefore, managing your reviews effectively (both positive and negative) can greatly influence your online reputation.

To encourage your patients to come back for more, you’ll need a process for gathering their feedback and then acting on it.

There are a few ways you can easily collect customer feedback:

• Send out a survey
  You can set these up as assessment templates in your clinic management software and email them out to your patients after they’ve been for their appointment.  They can fill these in online, and the response will be saved automatically to their record.
  
  Encourage patients to give feedback after every encounter they have with you.
  
  After you gather the results of your survey, you should analyse the data, looking for trends in patient behaviour and other ways to enhance your patient experience. 

• Encourage happy patients to post a review online
  If you’re regularly asking for in-person feedback from patients to help with your service delivery, at the point at which they experience some transformation in their condition you should ask them if they would consider leaving you a review online. Your Practice Management software will allow you to email a request where you can provide a direct link to the page on Google, Facebook, or Yelp for example where they can leave you a review

 

Of course, the easiest way to earn positive reviews is by providing an excellent patient experience. The best strategy for dealing with negative reviews is to prevent them in the first place. 

In order to limit negative reviews, your practice needs to create a practice-wide commitment to putting the patient experience first, and using software to do this is a great option. It deals with the day-to-day admin tasks, and it frees up the time you need to really give your patient a great experience. 

Even when things go wrong (which they inevitably will), approach each situation from the patient's perspective and ask yourself what you can do to improve their experience and show that you care. 

 

3. Analyse your data

It's crucial that you track and analyse how many patients leave, and why they do.

Practice Management software will allow you to run reports to identify and track patients that have not attended an appointment during a defined period of time, say the last 12 months.

This is a missed opportunity to continue to support a patient, educate them about other services you offer, and potentially generate more income for the practice. They can be re-contacted using your practice management system to see if they need further treatment or a follow-up.

Track and report on your retention marketing efforts as well.

Here are three basic tracking methods:

• Ask existing patients why they’ve booked again with you. But don’t just ask — track it! Document it, for example in a custom field you’ve created in the patient’s record. 
• Develop a referral incentive, and track how much income a referring patient brings into the practice. If you review this quarterly, trends often appear. Maybe an existing patient has referred three new patients, adding up to £1,000 worth of work. In that case, you might want to reward them. 
• Code your marketing materials. Whether it’s a flyer, a newspaper ad or a web page, place a code on it — even just a number. If a new patient calls for an appointment, ask how they heard about the practice and ask for the code - and pop this in a custom field in their record so you can report on it

 

4. Create a customer communication task list

If you want to send personalised communications out to patients for their birthday (for example), you can set up an online task list that saves tasks against each patient.

This means that when their birthday comes around, your software will pop you a message to remind you to send them a card, text, or email.

You can set up templates for these, so you can easily ping out a message that looks completely personalised, but takes you seconds to send.

Your message could include a special offer that they can redeem for their birthday, including a discount code that they can use through your online booking system.  

Your task list can be used for anything, but using it for communication reminders is particularly effective as it means your patient is never forgotten - and they’ll notice the difference in the level of service they receive from you compared to other practices or local businesses they use.

The best software will also allow you to run reports on all your tasks, keeping you more organised.

 

5. Offer unique services and treatments

It's no easy feat to provide a superior service to your competitors, but the reward is well worth the effort.

As long as your practice solves a critical patient pain point, you'll retain patients. People ultimately buy what holds value to them - whether that’s in retail or in healthcare.

Always look for new ways you can bundle, package, and offer treatments, and advertise them on your online booking page so that patients can see what’s new at the point they are booking online.

Also, remember that a patient will be more likely to commit to your practice if you can streamline or automate a process like no one else.

But how do you do that?

You guessed it! Using a good practice management system that will help you to save time and streamline your business processes.

 

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And now it’s over to you!

 

Here’s a quick recap of the main takeaways from this blog:

1. Prioritise marketing to your existing patients. They are up to 70% more likely to come back for another treatment, and loyal patients play a vital role in marketing to potential patients with word of mouth.
2. Get feedback, and use it to improve your patient experience.
3. Take advantage of reporting and analytics in your practice management software. It will give you insights into the workings of your practice like nothing else!
4. Use technology to give your patients a better experience, and put yourself above the competition. 

  If you have any questions please use the comments section at the bottom of this page

If you’d like to know more about how WriteUpp can help you to improve your marketing efforts, and streamline the overall management of your practice, why not take advantage of our free 30 day trial?

We don’t ask for any credit card details, and there is no obligation to subscribe at the end of your trial.
Thank you for your time and we look forward to meeting you soon!

Ellie MacDonald - Content Marketer WriteUpp

You can contact Ellie and the rest of the team at WriteUpp

 Images provided by  Clay Banks on Unsplash and WriteUpp