When you are in such a sensitive industry then marketing becomes a little difficult. If you are a doctor then marketing yourself can be a little tougher as compared to other professions.
In the healthcare industry, there are certain limitations imposed by HIPAA and other healthcare regulation authorities for sending messages to patients.
Despite certain limitations, there are still a few marketing tactics you can use and one of them is marketing automation technology.
You must be wondering how marketing automation is useful for doctors? Here are six ways that doctors can use marketing automation technology to save time and grow their practice.
Sending personalized note
You should always be at top of your patient mind. Following up with a patient at regular interval let you stay on top of their mind. You can use the automation tool to send the personalized message on certain occasion like birthday, any specific day or you can also send notes on major holidays.
These emails help to keep your practice at top of mind- so that people are more likely to think of you when they do have a problem. A lot of general marketing tactics don’t work in the healthcare sector.
But implementing marketing automation and email marketing can be really effective. Implement automation in your practice and you’ll get a great result.
Appointment Reminders
No-show patients are a common issue across the world. But automation can drastically reduce the number of patients that don’t show up on the day of the appointment.
Through marketing automation tool, you can schedule emails and SMS messages based on your patients’ appointments. You can schedule a reminder that reminds patients of their appointments in advance- say a week, a day or the day of the appointment.
In this way, if patients are unable to visit due to any reason, they have an option to cancel the appointments instead of missing unexpectedly.
Collection of patient information
Collection of patient information can be a time-consuming process. For patients, they have to fill out a number of personal details before seeing a doctor then a receptionist (or any other official person) process that information.
What if patients fill out paperwork in advance before their appointments? With custom forms, you can ask patients to fill out forms online in advance before they visit the doctor, this practice save your time and as well as their time.
Send receipt after payment
Marketing automation technology let you send e-receipt automatically after patients submit payments. Using automated emails to deliver receipts can save your practice time.
In automation tool, you build the rule or set the setting to send receipts in the form of email immediately after someone makes an online payment, in this way you don’t have to make a hard copy of the receipt every time when a customer makes a payment.
Ask for feedback
Be it any industry, everybody wants satisfied customers. To be a good practitioner you need satisfied patients. Are your patients satisfied? Healthcare industry requires years of training, practice and specialized knowledge to provide excellent service and satisfactory experience to patients.
It might not necessary that patient speak up about their dissatisfaction (and generally they won’t speak) when they are in your office but by sending a simple follow-up feedback email you can get to know about the patient satisfaction level. With this system, you can easily set up feedback automation and look at the results as and when required.
Conveying updates to patients
Suppose you have added a new physician to your clinic/hospital, how will you let people know? With email marketing you can do this, you can send an update via email to your contacts.
Apart from simple and general updates, you can send customized updates (based on patient information). With the help of a patient record, you can draft your message around patient needs but make sure to update at the right time.
Wrapping up
A lot of tactics don’t work in the healthcare industry but marketing automation technology can help doctors to build and maintain patient relationships with triggered emails and follow-up actions. If you’re not taking advantage of automated marketing technologies, you’re probably missing out on a lot of business.
You can use analytics to test what works and what doesn’t. Then you can change your marketing approach according to the result.
Physicians can monitor the success of their marketing automation by tracking their campaign analytics.
