With 43 percent of millennials likely to switch practices in the next few years and 81 percent of consumers unsatisfied with their healthcare experience, the importance of deploying patient engagement and retention strategies with a marketing automation tool should be at the top of your list. It isn’t enough to provide quality care to patients anymore — they want more.
Healthcare consumers are familiar with the personalized marketing approach that is becoming more and more the standard across industries. No longer does the typical batch-and-blast email to all patients signed up for your newsletter generate the kind of engagement and conversion you need. Creating unique healthcare consumer experiences that competitors can’t easily duplicate and building relationships with those consumers is a must. Patients want a personalized experience with continuous touchpoints. However, there is a fine line between personal and too personal. Healthcare marketers must put HIPAA regulations at the forefront of your strategy and stay within your ethical boundaries.
Here are three tips to start giving your healthcare consumers a personalized path to care.
1. Utilize Your CRM Data
When dealing with customer relationship management (CRM) systems it is best to put your business thinking cap on — rather than your typical healthcare thinking cap — and start seeing potential patients as leads, patient journeys as stages in a sales pipeline or funnel, and existing patients as clients. CRM systems help you get strategic by identifying your best marketing opportunities and ways to communicate with each of those targets. They give you awareness of where patients are in their buyer journeys and allow you to identify future nurturing needs. There’s a reason our 2018 Healthcare Digital Marketing Trends Survey revealed CRM administration as one of the hottest growth areas in healthcare, with 17 percent of respondents indicating they are adding to analytics or CRM administration roles.
Additionally, from this data you can start to identify your top user personas. To learn more on user personas, watch our on-demand webinar 5 Ways To Kickstart Your Content Marketing. Tip one during the webinar covers understanding your audience and keywords.
2. Implement a Marketing Automation Platform
CRM adoption has increased steadily over the years, but there is still room for improvement in terms of integrating the web and CRM systems. According to our 2018 Healthcare Digital Marketing Trends Survey, only 12 percent of organizations are sending web-form data to CRM in real time, and a mere 7 percent are using web behavior and CRM data to drive marketing automation efforts.
While the web, CRM systems, and marketing automation platforms (MAP) provide value on their own, they’re much more powerful when integrated. Any marketing team not using these technologies together will have a difficult time keeping up with cross-channel engagement along the patient journey. For more benefits on an integrated approach, read CRM and Marketing Automation: Better When They’re Together.
Marketing automation hasn’t been adopted widely across health systems yet. According to the 2018 Healthcare Digital Marketing Trends Survey, overall respondents feel least confident in email marketing and marketing automation, illustrating the opportunity to use this strategy — for an organization that’s willing to put in the time and effort — to beat out competition.
MAPs automate manual tasks and multi-step processes such as email and social media campaigns, allowing you to send specific personalized marketing messages at a specific pace to a specific segment. These messages land right where they’re supposed to go, over time, allowing healthcare marketers to get more done in less time. List segmentation is a key activity when deciding who to send emails to and what type of content to send.
Want help identifying if your organization is ready to take on marketing automation? Check out our webinar on Email vs. Marketing Automation: 5 Signs Your Healthcare Marketing Team is Ready for Marketing Automation.
3. Measure & Change
| It is always important to track the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing automation and campaign efforts. By integrating your website, CRM, and MAP you are able to see what personalized content your potential and existing patients engaged with, what drove them to conversion, where your leads originated, and where they are in their buyer journeys. This allows you to place more focus on marketing tactics and channels that work, and produce and retain more patients for your organization. |
The best part about having an established personalized marketing strategy that incorporates tools like CRM and MAP is that it frees up healthcare marketers’ time to focus on other areas of marketing. Healthcare marketers wear many hats, providing support in multiple areas of the organization, accommodating many impulse ideas, and delivering answers to questions no one else has. If you need help establishing a marketing automation program at your organization, let us know. Having a personalized marketing strategy in place delivers a better experience to your patients and helps ensure the overall well-being of your organization in the marketplace.