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Staying Connected with Leads and Patients: Strategy 2

by | Apr 9, 2019 | Email

Use Technology and Personas to Your Advantage

Expanding on the first strategy of knowing your audience and communicating to targeted personas, you also need to know where and how to best connect with your target market.

According to studies, the average adult now uses 4 ½ connected devices to access the internet. As a practice looking to improve their relationship with both current and prospective patients, it is crucial that you understand this fundamental aspect of communication in the digital age.

Communicate Better Across Generations

For many medical practices, the lead management and follow up process involves calling the lead back once and leaving a voicemail if they don’t pick up. However, this methodology completely ignores the differing communication styles amongst different age groups and personas.

While Baby Boomers tend to prefer picking up the phone and making a call, Millennials typically find text messages and email more pragmatic. In fact, many in the latter group do not even check voicemail or have it set up at all.

If your follow-up and communication strategies only cater to a portion of your audience, then you can expect to also see this reflected in your conversion rates and recall effectiveness.

EXAMPLE PERSONAS

Take a look at some recent statistics that exemplify how technology and mobile devices are changing the way we communicate.

  • Fully 92% of American adults own a cellphone, including the 67% who own a smartphone. (Pew Internet)
  • Sending and receiving text messages is the most prevalent form of communication for Americans younger than 50. (Gallup)
  • Among Americans aged 65 and older, the most-used methods of communication are cellphones, landline phones and email. (Gallup)
  • 90% of all text messages are read in under 3 minutes.  (Connect Mogul)
  • Personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%. (Aberdeen Group)

Implement Communication Preferences into Your Campaigns

To improve the performance of your campaigns, you should be considering what form of communication will be most impactful for specific audiences. Since age has a strong correlation with a person’s communication preferences, this is a good place to start.

Employing automation in concert with segmentation is the best way to accomplish this. Adjusting your communications manually for each individual just isn’t feasible. With systems like MyMedLeads, however, you can set criteria-based communication sequences up once and have these campaigns do the legwork for you.

Our campaign builder allows you to add multiple communication types in one campaign series, including:

  • Emails
  • Text messages
  • Outbound call reminders

So, for instance, a campaign series for your Baby Boomer cohort might look something like this:

Whereas a campaign set up for the Millennial age range could look something like this:

Doing the Work Upfront…

Initially, customizing campaigns for each generation or persona may feel like a pain, but the fact of the matter is, this is the new reality we live in. With so many devices and communication modalities now available, you can bet that at least some of your competitors are engaging leads and patients in ways that you are not.

So, we ask you, what’s more frustrating? Having to do a bit of work up front, or continuing to see low engagement and conversion rates from your current communication efforts?