Turning Leads into Patients: 6 Key Strategies
We appreciate you joining us at Nextech EDGE for our discussion on key strategies for converting more of your leads into paying patients. Below you will find more information about the topics we discussed.
Improving Your Lead-to-Patient Conversions
Taking a proactive approach to lead nurturing and conversion strategies can boost your business dramatically for little to no extra cost. While many practices focus heavily on marketing and generating new leads, these efforts are in vain if only a small percentage of these prospects ever convert to actual paying patients.
At MyMedLeads, we focus on closing the gap between your marketing and sales. By managing your leads in a systematic and structured way, you can grow your patient base and increase profits without exceeding your advertising budget.
After years of analyzing lead conversion data from hundreds of doctors using our software, MyMedLeads has distilled these insights down to 6 key strategies that have the greatest impact on lead conversion.
STRATEGY #1
Response Time is the Single Most Important Factor in Conversion
The most critical component of converting leads into patients is response time. Do you know how long it takes your practice to follow up with a prospect once they have reached out to your practice? According to the data, the average medical practice takes around 9 hours to respond to form inquiries.
Research done by Harvard Business Review shows that the chances of calling to contact a lead decrease by over 10x in the 1st hour alone! On the other hand, the odds of contacting a lead if called in 5 minutes are 100x higher versus 30 minutes.
When a prospective patient contacts you about a treatment or procedure, they are at their “highest point of interest”. In other words, the problem that they want solved is at the forefront of their attention. If you respond in minutes, your practice is still “top-of-mind” and they may even still be on your website. If you wait hours, there’s a very good chance they’ve already done further research, often on your competitors’ websites…
These statistics should be promising to hear for any practice that’s struggling with their lead-to-patient conversion rates. This one simple strategy costs nothing, yet produces significant results. Of course, we understand that calling leads immediately is easier said than done when you’re running a busy practice. However, even small, incremental improvements to your lead response times can yield noticeable improvements to your patient conversion rates.
How MyMedLeads Helps with Response Time
MyMedLeads helps you decrease the time it takes to call leads back by tracking the response times of your staff members. When leads come in, our system provides a date and timestamp for each individual inquiry so that we can track the time it takes your front desk to call leads back.
The system automatically generates staff performance reports showing the average lead response time per user, giving your team a clear view of how leads are being handled and helping to provide benchmarks for future improvement.
STRATEGY #2
Understand Personas
Identifying different personas within your audience will allow you to communicate more effectively with different segments of your leads and patients. Find out which technological devices they prefer and which modes of communication they utilize the most.
For example:
- Baby Boomer – Typically prefers face to face communication or phone conversations over email. Uses a desktop computer when required.
- Gen X – Adopts quickly to new technologies. Uses a laptop daily and is comfortable communicating via email and SMS.
- Millennial – Grew up with technology and uses social media for hours each day. Frequently on smart phone or tablet. Prefers email, SMS, and live chat tools for communication.
Creating multiple personas for your practice will help you create more personalized content that really resonates with your audience. For instance, a 45-year-old man who indicates he is interested in receiving more information about liposuction probably won’t be interested in the same content that a 25-year-old woman interested in breast augmentation is. You’ve already got the data, now it’s time to act on it. Use the info you are already collecting from potential patients and use it to convert them into paying patients faster and easier.
How MyMedLeads Helps with Marketing to Different Personas
MyMedLeads Communication Builder allows you to create automated campaigns with a wide variety of communication modes, including:
- SMS & two-way text messaging
- Outbound call reminders
- Voice recorded messages
This allows you to create campaigns that are better suited for specific target audiences, increasing the likelihood of engagement with your marketing messages.
MyMedLeads uses call tracking and integration with your web forms to automatically capture lead data. Automated campaigns can be set up to target leads based on information like:
- Procedure of interest
- Demographics like age and gender
- The lead source they found you through
- The physician they’re seeing or office location
STRATEGY #3
Understand Procedure Sales Cycles
We understand that medical practices are busy and do not typically have an extensive marketing team to help with granular segmentation. A good starting place is to simply break your services down into “high-level” segments.
A good example of this is services that convert fast (nonsurgical treatments like injectables) and procedures that require more education, consults, and research (such as a tummy tuck or bariatric surgery).
Look at the purchasing/consideration timeline for these two categories of procedures. Ensure that any automated marketing workflows you set up correspond to these specific timelines. Not every workflow will look the same.
- A lead nurturing campaign for Botox may only require a couple communications over a one-week period to achieve conversion goals.
- Whereas, a campaign for a Mommy Makeover may consist of 5 emails, 3 follow up calls and one text message set up to go out over the course of 2 months.
Once you have done the groundwork for identifying your audience personas and purchasing timelines for each procedure or treatment category, it’s time to set up multiple workflows to really supercharge the results of your lead nurturing efforts.
Procedures in the “fast converting buckets”, like Botox, injectables, and low-cost skin rejuvenation devices, should have communications sent out faster, over a week’s period. Slower converting procedures, like liposuction, rhinoplasty, and facelift should have communications stretched out over a longer time period, like 30 – 60 days.
How MyMedLeads Helps Nurture Leads Based on Procedure Sales Cycles
MyMedLeads allows you to set up unlimited campaigns with varying timelines. These automated campaigns can include a series of emails, text messages, and call reminders that can be set up to deploy automatically over your predetermined time sequence.
Each email is designed to provide the lead with more relevant information on their procedure of interest while generating further curiosity in what you have to offer them. These emails should include specific and valuable information that the lead is looking for.
When an inquiry comes in, our system evaluates the appointments of a qualified lead to see if any appointments were scheduled for Procedure X (or optionally, if the lead was scheduled for ANY Appointment). By default, the individual campaigns will target leads who are interested in Procedure X, but who have not scheduled for a consultation for procedure X. But, you can set the system to disqualify the lead once he/she is scheduled for ANY scheduled appointment.
STRATEGY #4
Create a Procedure-Specific Story Broken Down into 2 to 3 Emails
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.
Consider a 45-year-old male who’s recently become concerned with the signs of facial aging and is considering laser skin resurfacing. He reaches out to your aesthetic practice with these concerns, however, due to circumstances or apprehension he never schedules a consultation. Blasting him with your special offer on Breast Augmentation or announcing your new feminine rejuvenation device is a quick way to get him to hit the unsubscribe button.
A better way to get him into your office is by creating a single series of messages tailored for men interested in laser skin resurfacing (or who simply have concerns about facial aging). These emails can include before and after photos along with testimonials from your male laser skin resurfacing clients. The content should also focus on the specific “pain points” that may make this individual consider laser skin resurfacing followed with how the treatment addresses these problems. For instance, staying youthful-looking in a highly competitive job market. The more the content is tailored to the procedure of interest (or the persona you are targeting), the higher the likelihood that something will catch their eye and remind them why they were considering your practice in the first place.
How MyMedLeads Helps You Create Procedure-Specific Story Campaigns
With the MyMedLeads Communication Center, it is easy to set up personalized email campaigns for as many services and procedures as you like. The best part is, you only have to create this series of messages once. Leads automatically get added to the campaign as they come in based on their specified interests. This is a true case of “set it and forget it” marketing, that happens to be EXTREMELY effective. Our drag-and-drop email editor allows you to create attractive emails and break your content down into easily consumable chunks of information.
Taking the time to actually create targeted content for different interests amongst your clientele creates the sense that you actually pay attention to the needs of your patients. It also gives a latent impression that your practice is specialized in this procedure and has particular expertise in their area of concern.
STRATEGY #5
Have Solid Tracking in Place
Getting high quality leads into the top layer of your sales funnel is essential for practices looking to improve their patient conversion rates. If you have no idea which ad channels are responsible for sending you the majority of your business, then it will be very difficult to replicate success.
Many practices focus all their resources on lead generation. Driving more traffic is only good if you’re driving the right traffic. If conversion is the ultimate goal, you need to be tracking what happens after a lead comes in. By understanding where your converted web leads and phone calls originated, you can identify your most effective marketing campaigns and where you should invest your future ad spend to ensure higher conversion rates.
How MyMedLeads Helps You Track Marketing Performance
MyMedLeads takes the hassle and human error out of tracking marketing performance with advanced ROI tracking technology. Our system seamlessly integrates with online marketing channels and uses unique call tracking numbers for offline ads. When a new lead comes in, you will be able to see exactly which lead source or marketing campaign the lead originally found you on. Revenue synchronization between MyMedLeads and your Nextech practice management software enables you to get highly accurate ROI reports on your marketing.
STRATEGY #6
Set Goals
In order to set any business goal, you must know where you currently stand. Benchmarking is the process of setting a baseline or standard for your practice – so that you can accurately measure your progress over time and identify areas for improvement.
When it comes to goal setting for your business, it’s critically important that you make your goals SMART. You have likely heard of SMART goals before – SMART is simply a mnemonic device to help you remember the steps necessary to achieve your goals.
The “SMART” model to setting goals is a very simple (but powerful) framework for converting your vague objectives into measurable and achievable goals. A “SMART” goal includes the following requisites:
- Specific – precise and quantifiable rather than vague
- Measurable – appropriate metrics to qualify success
- Attainable – realistic, challenging and achievable
- Relevant – aligned with existing plans and priorities
- Time Bound – specific target dates for completion
Some examples of SMART goals you can set for your practice may include…
- Increase breast procedures by 10% by the end of the 2nd quarter
- Increase lead-to-patient conversion rates by 10% each month.
- Decrease average lead response time from 60 minutes to 30 minutes by June 30th.
- Review marketing ROI reports at the end of each month. Increase the effectiveness of your practice marketing by eliminating 30% of low-performance ads by July 30th.
- Gain 5 new online patient reviews by the end of each month.
- Reduce appointment “no-shows” by 15% each month.
- Increase practice net revenue by 20% by December 31, 2019.
When you first start out with goal setting and benchmarking, it’s important to set numbers that are attainable. Once you gain some momentum, you can gradually increase these numbers with each quarter.
How MyMedLeads Helps with Setting Goals for Your Practice
MyMedLeads can help you clarify all the above goals (and more) while making it easy to track your progress. We provide our clients with the tracking and analytical tools they need to make informed decisions. MyMedLeads 2nd Generation includes trends and comparative data to benchmark your practice against the performance of other clinics, along with goal setting and tracking features.
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