Your competition is marketing to your patients. This is a fact I tell every practice owner I meet with. I say this not to discourage them but to motivate them to implement an easy, cost effective, automated marketing program in their practice; one that will allow them to continue seeing patients and running the business as usual without having to spend hours pulling mailing lists, managing mail merges and fussing over advertising creative. And there are many solutions available to help.
The key to any successful marketing program is consistency. And the best way to ensure consistency is to automate. Consider all the different possible appointment outcomes that could result after seeing a patient and let’s examine some examples.
The patient could:
- cancel their appointment
- show up for their appointment
- test for hearing loss and not purchase a device
- test for hearing loss and purchase a device
All four of these examples require a practice to initiate some form of follow-up communication with the patient.
The first two are straightforward – the practice needs to contact that patient and get them booked for a new appointment.
The tested and not sold patient requires something different. Here, the practice may want to reach out and further explain the benefits of treating their hearing loss and encourage them to come back in for a product trial.
Finally, the patient who did purchase a device, will most certainly need to be sent a thank you note to show appreciation for their business.
With just four appointments we are presented with four opportunities to communicate or market the practice to these patients. Managing this type of patient care communication by hand can be incredibly difficult and time consuming. However automating it is simple. Sycle Patient Care Communications allows users to build custom patient letters that are generated and sent automatically – triggered by the data a user enters in the software when completing the appointment.
And these are just a few examples of the automation Sycle allows. Others include birthday letters, warranty expiration notices, annual hearing checkup letters and more.
Building on the importance of consistency there is yet another marketing tactic clinics can implement in minutes that will benefit the practice year round – a quarterly patient newsletter program. Your current customers are your most valuable asset. Providing them with rich, informative, content on a regular basis is the best way to ensure they think of your practice when it comes to service a repair or upgrade equipment.
Newsletters, through Sycle Marketing Group, provide you a channel to deliver this educational content as well as a way to promote products and services. Getting the entire year’s program in line requires nothing more than a 20 minute phone call with a Sycle representative. Simply select your design template and your articles and Sycle will take care of the rest – customizing each newsletter to your practice’s brand.
For more information on how a simple, customized newsletter program can grow your practice while providing you more time with patients read Quarterly Newsletters: Easy, Effective Marketing by content marketing professional Matty Byloos.
Automating patient retention mail and newsletters are two simple ways to ensure you’re consistently communicating with your patients year round without sacrificing the valuable time that’s needed to treat them in your practice.
