What is patient relationship management? It’s a system that keeps your marketing budget from dying after the first level of response to your ad campaigns or website traffic.
What do we mean by the first level of response? When you advertise or people find your website, only a small fraction fully act upon your call to action, meaning they set an appointment with your office and show up. This is what we call the first level of response.
The issue for most practices is that there isn’t much beyond the first level that contributes to demand creation. Demand creation is a term that refers to creating the actual demand for your product. A typical CRM does not accomplish this goal, more about that soon.
There is a big misunderstanding when it comes to marketing and that is that a lead that has been generated has both a need and an interest. This is rarely the case. The first-level responders to your marketing are the ones that see their need and have an interest in treatment. These numbers typically range between 1 and 2.5% from ads and 2 to 11.4% from your website. Your website has the best conversion rate because it provides significant educational content. Ads can’t educate patients. The job of any ad is to raise awareness and generate the initial lead, so they use lead magnets and hooks to grab attention. What happens after you generate leads?
Here’s EXACTLY where most practices and marketing agencies fail when it comes to patient relationship management.
The remaining leads are dropped into one of 3 buckets:
- They do nothing with the leads that did not schedule appointments and they simply exist on a spreadsheet somewhere
- They beat them to death with sales messages from a CRM
- They write them off and don’t even save them
This is a disaster and the reason your marketing budget dies a painful death. And the reason that most Chiropractors have worked with so many marketing agencies.
Let’s look at the most overlooked part of any marketing program and why marketing fails
Marketing agencies don’t know the value of building a potential patient database of thousands of potential patients that you can market and remarket to with intelligent information about the patient’s specific condition and other valuable healthcare information. They’re about right now and don’t realize that marketing needs to work right away, and well into the future so that you get a tremendous ROI!
Having built multiple very large companies over the years, I can tell you that patient relationship management will keep your marketing dollars producing for years after your initial ad spend. But you need to create a database to make this a reality. Every lead needs to get into the system and be categorized by patient condition.
This is known as demand creation. You are actually creating the demand for your services in the mind of the potential patient. You are also compounding your marketing dollars, like compound interest.
Most agencies don’t know what demand creation is and think a CRM will “Do the Trick”.
There is no trick. You must come to grips with the fact that a lead is only a name, phone number, and email address. A typical CRM is sold to every type of business and has templates that are designed to force people to respond. In today’s World, you cannot force anyone to respond, you must intelligently entice them and prove that your treatment and practice are right for them.
Here’s something that may surprise you. It is your responsibility to uncover and cultivate the need and only then will the patient have an interest. I don’t mean that you must personally send information to prospective patients. A good patient relationship management system like ours does that for you.
The information that communicates with, and engages, the potential patient with educational material and interactivity must be written by people that understand chiropractic care as well as marketing.
Interactivity is a key component of building a solid relationship with a potential patient. The more they interact with your content, the more likely they are to become a patient. And I don’t just mean “click here to read…”.
Patient relationship management also requires a great deal of content. A good system will communicate with patients indefinitely without being obnoxious and demanding and automatically move them through different content channels as they respond…or don’t respond.
I think we’ve all been “attacked” by a CRM with constant messages of schedule now – book now – are you still there, etc? This brutal attack is not going to develop a good patient relationship and will force people to opt-out and reduce the size of your database.
Set up a demo with us and see why patient relationship management is how to earn a tremendous ROI on your marketing investments!