Tips to Help Your Practice Effectively Communicate with Your Patients
Effective patient communication enhances the patient experience, which in turn drives your bottom line. As the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic continues to impact our communities, businesses, and families, effective communication with patients is now more important than ever. Practices with superior experiences bring in 5.7 times more revenue than competitors in that area.1
Keep patients informed from anywhere at any time with simple-to-use tools such as Email Campaigns, Two-Way Texting, Appointment Reminders, and more. Use this guide to learn 6 tips that can help you communicate critical updates quickly and effectively.
1. Use email to send critical business updates
Email marketing remains one of the most effective tools for communicating with a large audience and has the highest ROI of any other marketing channel. 91% of people use email daily and 80% of adults check their email within 15 minutes of waking up.2 If you haven’t already, develop email campaigns to send informative communications regarding your business hours and other critical information as new developments are released to the public. Email is also an effective tool to maintain patient engagement through education about certain topics that relate to your field of medicine. This is an opportunity to enforce confidence in your patients that you are a thought-leader in your line of expertise. The more you communicate, the more trust you build with your patients.
2. Send quick One-Off Messages before appointments
The COVID-19 situation changes every day, which means you may need to send urgent messages to your patients at a moment’s notice. Using a marketing and communications platform, your practice will be able to do this via text messages. Send email or text messages to your remaining patients of the day, patients with upcoming appointments, and specific patients who may be waiting to hear from the doctor. Email One-Off Messages are a great way to notify patients of additional information and/or instructions before an appointment.
3. Respond to patients in real-time with Two-Way Texting
Two-Way Texting allows you to quickly and easily send an alert and respond to patients in real-time. Texting has a 98% open rate and 73% of people prefer to receive and send texts to businesses.3 When a practice using a marketing and communications platform receives a text message, the technology will identify the most important messages that require an immediate response from the practice. If you choose to send a One-Off Message via text, your patients can reply directly to initiate a Two-Way Text conversation. This decreases response delays and shows your patients that you respect their time.
4. Maintain up-to-date business listings with accurate information
Nearly 46% of all Google searches are looking for local information.4 If your practice has been affected by COVID-19, be sure that your business listings include the following: accurate hours of operation, an updated description that references the pandemic, extra services, delays, or precautionary measures your practice might have. Accurate and up-to-date information is more important than ever during these challenging and confusing times. With an efficient marketing and communications platform, you can bulk update your business listings in just a few clicks saving your front office valuable time and resources.
5. Notify patients about upcoming appointments
On average, appointment reminders help reduce no-show appointments by 35%.5 This is a huge benefit for your bottom line, and can also be used to communicate pertinent information before an upcoming appointment. With a versatile marketing and communications platform, you can customize your email appointment reminders to include any precautionary measures your patients need to take before the appointment. Tools that offer drag-and-drop templates will make it easy to create a text module in your email reminders and type in additional information.
6. Promptly respond to instant notifications from patients
A superior patient experience requires reciprocity. How quickly you can respond to patient requests and inquiries will determine the quality of experience. Especially important during the pandemic, 82% of patients look for an immediate response.6 Your response time will influence whether a patient wants to come back to you in the future. Whether a patient is running late for an essential appointment, has to reschedule, or has questions, practices should be prepared to respond to patients immediately. A dependable marketing and communications platform can manage appointment requests, confirmations, and Two-Way Texts from patients in real-time.
Mastering patient communication requires you to engage with patients using the tools available to you through your patient management system. Integrating with Demandforce for an easy plug-and-play of the tools it can offer will boost the effectiveness of the management system. Demandforce can help streamline communication between your practice and your patients as the world continues to adjust to the COVID-19 outbreak.
Are you interested in learning more about Demandforce and getting started with these communication tools? Visit us at micromd.com/marketplace/marketing/demandforce/ or call us at 800.624.8832
1https://www.forbes.com/sites/blakemorgan/2019/09/24/50-stats-that-prove-the-value-of-customer-experience/?sh=54dcb6be4ef2
2https://www.diygenius.com/smartphone-addiction-factsheet/
3http://www.zipwhip.com/blog/heres-how-each-generation-prefers-to-text-with-your-business/
4http://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/12-local-seo-stats-every-business-owner-and-marketer-should-know-in-2019-i/549079/
5http://ispub.com/IJHCA/3/1/6793
6https://smallbiztrends.com/2018/07/real-time-response-to-customers.html#:~:text=The%20New%20Expectation%3F,businesses%20with%20which%20they%20deal
