7 Steps to Building an Amazing Patient-Nurturing Workflow
Just as a marketing strategy is essential for any entrepreneur, it is equally vital for healthcare providers such as doctors, dentists or orthodontists. The power of building a robust patient-nurturing workflow serves to increase engagement, improve care, save staff time and increase your client base.
With just a few simple steps, you can take advantage of powerful tools to be more efficient with your email marketing, getting the right messages to the right people at the right time.
The Seven Steps
1. Set goals
Determine your objectives for your email campaign. Is it to inform patients about new services? To provide appointment reminders to improve attendance? Is it to inform and enhance compliance with treatment recommendations? Is it to improve outreach and bring in new patients? As you identify multiple objectives dependent on the patient type, then you can move to the next step where you will narrow your focus for each group.
2. Target your audience
For each goal, there is an intended target audience. Creating a list of criteria for inclusion into the group helps determine placement. Some patients will belong to the group who receive personalized appointment reminders, while another group gets a newsletter about ongoing care and specials on cosmetic procedures. Sometimes these lists will overlap, and other times they will be separate. This is all part of getting the right information to the right people. Laying the groundwork is a critical piece predicting the future success of your workflow.
3. Map your content
Determine what content you will deliver, what you intend to accomplish with this piece and when you will provide it. Thinking about the examples above, the patient who gets appointment reminders might need them when they set the appointment, a week ahead of time and again the day before the meeting. For the patient receiving your newsletter offering a special on cosmetic procedures, perhaps you want to send the first notice three months before the winter holidays and then again monthly as a reminder before party season begins.
4. Compose emails
Be intentional with the message you send and consider that when you compose the email. For each type of patient, you will focus the content of the message and end with a specific call to action. Perhaps that call to action is for the patient to confirm, cancel or reschedule an appointment. Or, it is a link to learn more about a procedure and an invitation schedule a consultation. Decide here what the message will say, how many times to distribute it and what the desired outcome is.
5. Set workflow rules
You don't want to inundate patients with emails, so carefully setting up rules will prevent this. Workflow rules can specify who receives an email batch and when they receive it, but can also exclude patient groups or certain days or times. If your office is closed on Friday afternoons, you don't want to send an email with a call to action that prompts a patient to schedule via phone and no one is there to respond. Likewise, the patient who has weekly orthodontist visits might lose an important appointment reminder if they are also receiving the email about a cosmetic procedure that they do not qualify for at this time.
6. Go live
After the pre-work is completed, turn the workflow and start collecting data!
7. Analyze and improve
Analyze the data and make changes where needed. Are you meeting the goals? What is your click-through rate? What is your conversion rate? Do you see an improvement in adherence? Watch how the workflow performs and prepare to make changes. Change the subject line, the offer, the frequency or the call to action and analyze the impact.
It’s the 9-1-1 for Marketing 4-1-1
At HARNESS, email workflow is just one of the services we offer to improve your marketing campaigns, expand your business and increase your exposure. Contact us to learn more about creating a patient-nurturing workflow that will help your practice.
A Crash Course in Video Marketing Best Practices
Video marketing has become one of the most important tactics for businesses today. Majority of B2Cs have already started producing videos for their brands. Data shows they see impressive returns on this investment.
In some cases, conversion rates increase 80 percent after adding videos to landing pages, an EyeView Digital study found.
Results aren't guaranteed, however. You need to follow video marketing best practices and avoid common pitfalls if you want to be successful. One of the biggest mistakes brands make is by creating a video with no clear audience and, thus, no real purpose.
The first thing you need to do when you're embarking on a video marketing campaign is to make sure you understand your audience.
Look at the Numbers
Use data to hone your audience targeting. Even if you already have a buyer persona, it's a good idea to flesh out details with customer data you've collected. There are some places you can check, depending on the digital marketing channels you use, like Google Analytics, email marketing and automation tools, YouTube Analytics, and social media.
Here is some of the data you should be looking at:
1. Location
Where does your audience live? Are they spread across the United States, or do you have a concentration of customers in one region (Southwest, Northeast, West Coast) that you can hone your message to?
2. Gender
Do you have an even split of males and females? More males? More females? This will help guide your messaging and approach in the videos.
3. Age
What age group does your brand attract? If you have more Millennials, you may need to take a more casual or humorous approach to get their attention than you would with an audience of Gen Y, or Baby Boomers.
4. Device
Are your customers coming to your website on a desktop device, a smartphone, or a tablet? This might seem inconsequential at first, but it offers important insights on the environment people are in while watching your video and how long they will spend watching it.
5. First time or returning visitors
Is your audience mostly first-time visitors, who are discovering your brand for the first time? Or are you getting a majority of returning visitors? This breakdown has a huge impact on your approach to video marketing because these groups expect very different information.
Learn what they want
To get a sense of what your customers want from a video -the type, the tone -try to glean some insights from what you already know they like.
Identify the content that's generated the most audience interest in the past. Conduct a content drill down in Google Analytics to see what pages and posts have:
- The most visitors
- The lowest bounce rates
- The lowest exit rates
- The best time-on-site metrics
Look for any common threads among these articles. Is there one topic that consistently performs well? Do you see a difference in results when content has a conversational or formal tone?
Then, evaluate which types of content attract the most visitors:
- Blog articles that tell them how to do something or explain a process
- 'About us' section to learn about the team
- Product pages to look at your inventory
These are clues about what your audience prefers and the information they are most interested in.
Conduct Competitive Analysis
Identify a competitor with a target audience similar to yours, who you think is creating compelling videos. Do some sleuthing to find out what is working for them, and if they have any ideas, you can borrow as you launch your video marketing strategy.
Here are two ways to do this:
1. Look at social metrics on the website
Some companies posts videos on their websites and the data on these pages can be useful. See if they have social media icons that show how many times the posts have been shared, and find the most widely-distributed video. This is a good indicator that viewers liked the content enough to pass along. Take note of the title, the type of video, the length, the tone, and the content as examples of what your audience enjoys.
2. Look at YouTube
If competitors post videos on YouTube, you can look at their Channel and see which videos are the most popular. Find the videos with the most plays, as well as Likes and comments.
Again, find any common denominators in their most-successful versus least-successful videos. Are they longer or shorter? Animated or live-action? Featuring one person or featuring multiple people?
This should paint a clearer picture of the likes and dislikes of your audience (or at least a demographic very similar to your customers).
Ask your audience
The most straightforward way to make sure you understand your audience is to ask them questions. Conduct customer interviews to learn about:
- What they like
- What they find useful
- What they want more or less of
- The information they still want from you
- The information they wish they had when making a purchase decision
Once you have gathered all of these insights, you should be armed with plenty of data to make videos tailored precisely to your target audience.
Do you want to learn more about creating videos that will help your brand stand out? Contact us to talk about a strategy that can help your business drive conversions online.