Whether you are a new practice or a well-established clinic, RealSelf is an incredible source for targeted lead generation. With millions of users per month, the community-driven site is saturated with high-quality leads who are looking for practices like yours, and many of these individuals will become lifelong patients for you. However, if you’re not properly managing these leads, you can blow through thousands of dollars per month without REALLY taking advantage of the power of RealSelf.
As the CEO of MyMedLeads, I get asked a lot about conversion and what strategies work best. Today, we are going to discuss 6 things that you must be doing in order to maximize your return on investment with RealSelf.
- The 12 minute rule – Calling leads in the first 12 minutes increases your lead-to-contact rate, resulting in a higher lead-to-consult rate, which, naturally leads to a higher lead-to-surgery rate. The golden rule of lead management is to call leads as quickly as you can. Luckily, systems such as MyMedLeads can email, text, and notify you and your practice in various ways. We will even show you weekly what your conversion rate is. Conversely, waiting 5 hours to call someone back will drastically drop the chances of contact. Visitors on RealSelf will research other options and move on if your staff takes too long to respond.
- Calling the lead back more than once – When you manage your leads via Outlook or other email clients, it is easy to call them once. However, after a couple of weeks, when they’re no longer top-of-mind, it’s easy for your staff to forget to reach out a second or third time. Without a CRM system like MyMedLeads or Salesforce that keeps your leads organized in one place, remembering this critical step becomes much more difficult, resulting in a lower conversion rate on your RealSelf leads.
- Procedure-specific drip campaigns – In a perfect world, every lead would answer when your staff calls them and they would immediately schedule their consultation. But in reality, many patients are not ready to come in. They want information first. So, when you get their inquiry, you can either wait until they do their research on their own (possibly on a competitor’s website) or, you can feed them personalized information about the procedure they inquired about in bite size pieces. MyMedLeads can automate the process of sending a series of sequential emails over the course of several weeks, keeping you in front of potential patients in research mode, while establishing you as a knowledgeable expert. When the prospect is finally ready to schedule, they will be much more likely to think of your practice.
- Tracking – 80% of practices fail at tracking lead sources. Asking patients “How did you hear about us” doesn’t work. Without a system such as Call Rail or MyMedLeads, it is impossible to track true lead sources. Many patients visit RealSelf for research, but then click over to your site and then either call or submit a web inquiry. MyMedLeads can track both calls and form inquiries and still give credit to RealSelf’s efforts using our dynamic phone number and referring source technology.
- Understand the difference between exposers and closers– A lead source is an exposer if they expose the patient to your practice. A closer is a lead source that serves as the last interaction before they do business with you. A patient can be exposed to your practice 2 to 3 times before they contact you, and another 3 times before they commit to a procedure. Our data shows how powerful RealSelf is as an exposer, as this is frequently where patients start the buying process. In other words, without RealSelf, many patients would never have stumbled across you to begin with, and you would not be on their radar at all. It’s important that you have a way to track both exposers and closers in your funnel.
- Engagement – Lastly, we want to remind you of the importance of 2-way content on RealSelf. Answering questions on RealSelf will help you gain trust, and once the patient makes it to your practice, asking them to review you on RealSelf as well as other review sites will help other prospects inquire about your services. With our integration into your scheduling software, we can automate the process of requesting reviews from patients that have undergone a procedure or treatment with you.
Putting It Into Action…
Highly focused niche sites like RealSelf put you in front of a richly defined target audience and set you up to “make the sale”. At the end of the day though, once the lead is delivered, it’s up to you and your staff to make sure that lead gets properly managed to maximize the likelihood that they actually walk through your door.
When you’re a busy medical practice, staying on top of these critical aspects of lead management can sometimes feel overwhelming, and often get neglected. MyMedLeads helps you and your staff stay focused on growth by linking all of your sales, marketing and other service information into one integrated solution, eliminating fragmented data and providing you a clear (and automated) path to converting your leads into paying patients.
Visit MyMedLeads.com to learn more.