Ways to Keep in Touch with Your Current Patients
There’s a common mistake that many healthcare practices make in their marketing strategies: they put all their focus on finding new patients. As a result, they don’t keep in touch with their current patients and those patients lose interest, sometimes even leaving you for other providers. To truly have a profitable practice, you need to retain your current patients by continuously marketing to them and staying in touch with them. This way, your patients clearly understand that you care about them and their wellbeing.
How do you improve your patient engagement? While our team at McCauley Marketing Services can develop an in-depth strategy based on your specific needs, these are a few of the top ways you can keep in communication with current patients.
Email Marketing
Emails are a great way to keep your patients apprised of the latest and greatest in your practice and your industry. You can get into the habit of sending out a monthly newsletter filled with new treatments and offerings at your practice, specials and events, your newest blogs, and more. You can also send out special e-blasts when there’s a special event or announcement. It’s a fantastic way to keep your practice on your patients’ minds by educating them about new treatments, diseases, or developments in your field as well as entice them to try additional treatments and services from your practice.
Create Informative and Helpful Web Content
Your patients view you as a trusted health expert and as someone they can turn to when they have questions. You can continue to grow this trusting relationship by posting helpful and educational information on your blog and within other areas of your website. When your patients or potential patients see your site as a resource, they’ll continue to come back time and time again.
An excellent way to do this is to regularly post educational blog articles on your site. They should be informative but not overly technical so that they’re still relatable and understandable to laypeople. Be sure to tell your patients about your blog and to publicize your blogs on social media and in email newsletters when you publish them.
In addition, if you are getting the information from your trusted industry association, ensure you are rewriting it in your own words so you are not reproducing duplicate content. Above all, don’t forget to publish blogs regularly, at least a few times per month, so that you’re keeping patients engaged and keeping search engines continuously crawling your website.
Encouraging Social Media Interaction
Although social media marketing may not bring you the number of patients that other marketing techniques can, it is a very smart way to brand your practice and a terrific way to reach both current patients and future patients. However, most practices aren’t taking advantage of its full potential. Outside of getting your practice’s name in front of new people, social media is also a great way to engage with your current patients.
First, make sure you’re encouraging current patients to follow you on social media. Then, focus on interactive content that engages patients with the practice. You could hold social media contests so patients can compete for discounts, for instance, or live video sessions and encourage patients to chat throughout.
Direct Mail
While it should be used sparingly to avoid exhausting and frustrating your patients, sending out direct mail marketing from time to time can be a helpful way to call attention to big news. For example, you can use direct mail to tell patients about major events on the calendar or to announce important news like a new location or new provider.
Bringing new patients into your practice can be a time-consuming and expensive investment in your business. Once you’ve made that investment, though, it is prolonged patient engagement that will make it worth the effort. Use the tips above to improve your patient engagement or call McCauley Marketing Services to schedule a meeting about creating a detailed patient engagement strategy.