You know how crucial SMS marketing and email marketing campaigns are to attracting new patients to your healthcare practice. But what about your previous patients? Retaining your current patients and getting patients who have booked in with you previously to come back can be a struggle. SMS marketing and email marketing can certainly help, but the ideal way to go about it differs from how to attract new patients.
This article explains why patient reactivation is so important, and details ways you can achieve this goal. For personalised advice, contact our team at practiceedge today.
Why Is Patient Reactivation So Important?
Retaining your current patients is key to helping your healthcare practice thrive. While attracting new patients is crucial in many ways, it isn’t the be-all and end-all. After all, once you attract those new patients, you need to be able to retain them. If they go elsewhere, your mission should be to bring them back.
This is because keeping the right customers (or patients, in this case) actually costs five to 25 times less than trying to acquire new patients. With the costs of seemingly everything on the rise lately, saving costs is more important now than ever.
4 Ways To Engage Previous Patients
Some types of messages you may send to entice previous patients back to your practice may include:
1.Automated Surveys
Asking your patients how they found the quality of the service provided by you and/or your staff helps your patients to realise that their opinions matter. With this knowledge, they’re likely to want to continue their relationship with you at your practice. Additionally, the results of these surveys will show you if and where your practice needs any improvement in any area.
2. Reminders To Book Appointments
As we all know, life can get busy. Even when it comes to important matters like healthcare, it can be easy for things to slip from patients’ minds in amongst all that they have going on. In some cases, these patients haven’t found a new healthcare provider elsewhere, but booking an appointment anywhere may be the furthest thing from their minds.
If you use your patient relationship management system to automatically send appointment reminders at specific intervals, you may find your books getting back on track sooner than you thought.
3. Personalised Engagement
In the same way that booking appointments can fall off patients’ radars, the importance of consistent care can as well. For example, if a patient has a condition and frequently forgets to schedule appointments to monitor it, you may like to send them not only an appointment reminder but also a reminder as to why they should make the appointment.
Educational content that speaks to patients in an easy-to-understand manner and that doesn’t come across as pushy or ‘salesy’ in any way is important here.
4. Education
SMS marketing and email marketing are often used to provide education and timely reminders. Anticipating patients’ needs and reminding them of the importance of certain health checks during particular times of the year is one way to bring patients back in.
You may want to consider monthly or quarterly campaigns based on awareness months or seasonal changes. For example, you could send educational reminders about women’s health during Women’s Health Month, information on how to prevent and check for skin cancer in spring and summer, and diabetes educational content during National Diabetes Week.
Looking To Reactivate Your Previous Patients?
If engaging with your previous patients and bringing them back to your practice is important to you, SMS marketing and email marketing are excellent places to start. However, as we mentioned earlier, people can get busy and have other things they need to focus on first and foremost.
As a healthcare provider, your aim is to help others so that’s what you spend your day doing. As digital marketing specialists for healthcare providers, our team at practiceedge understands how your industry works and has all your marketing needs covered. To start bringing your previous patients back with a strategy tailored just for you, contact us at practiceedge today.
