Proven Patient Retention Strategies That Work
Leads, appointments, and patients are the key goals for most medical practices. Unfortunately, many providers focus on increasing patient footprint in their facilities rather than patient experience and aftercare. Your practice’s medical marketing strategies are more efficacious when applied to patient retention than being focused solely on building leads. It costs five times more to acquire a new patient than to retain existing patients.
So, what are some of the most important patient retention strategies?
Digital Marketing and Healthcare Advertising
The top proven customer retention solution is regularly staying in touch with your existing customer base. For an exclusive business model with a small number of high-value clients, the best approach is a 1-on-1 approach.
However, don’t despair if your practice is unable to implement such a time-consuming approach. Digital marketing steps in where your overloaded personnel leaves off. Email marketing and social media marketing can help your practice achieve success in the following ways:
1 Leverage personalization such as a personal address, birthday wishes,
2 Provide an avenue to reach out to patients you haven’t seen in a while
3 Remind customers of the services and any offers or seasonal tips
4 Smooth the aftercare process and follow-up visits.
Targeted healthcare digital marketing can reinforce existing patients’ awareness of what your business offers and make them more likely to come in for new procedures.
Be a Hub of Information and Education
Today’s patient is focused on value addition and that extra touch that differentiates your practice from others offering the same medical service in your area. Since digital resources have opened up their options of care providers, you need to put extra effort into ensnaring their interest and respect.
Enter content marketing. Expert, authoritative, and trustworthy information that is specific to your target patients’ needs and demographics will cement your reputation in their minds. A solid reputation will result in more repeat visits and leads.
Whether your content is in the form of a blog or video or social media posts, just remember to consistently offer value. Investing in healthcare SEO will put your content and business on the map.
Double Down on Positive Patient Experience
Patient experience is the heavyweight of patient retention strategies. It doesn’t matter how many emails, follow-ups, and high-quality content you flood your patients with if their experience in your facility is subpar.
Some of the ingredients of a positive patient experience include:
1 Convenient booking, changing and canceling of appointments either automated or online
2 Improved wait times plus clear, timely communication of visit timelines and delays
3 Transparency in pricing
4 Prompt responsiveness to inquiries or aftercare follow-ups
5 A compassionate personal touch across all staff members
6 Efficient systems across functions such as billing, referrals, and handoffs between departments
A crucial support pillar of patient experience is the proactive seeking of feedback from patients. Open the lines of communication, make your patients feel seen, and address their concerns. This is a valid way to increase retention.
The key takeaways about patient retention strategies are better communication, improved patient experience, and creating a patient resource. Some of these can be implemented in-house. However, you might need to look to professionals for telemedicine, CRM management, and healthcare search marketing solutions & trends.