3 Ways to Make the Most of Your Web Leads

You may have heard there’s a bit of economic turmoil going on. Even if your practice hasn’t seen a big drop in leads in recent months, it’s still worth paying a bit more attention to how you’re handling your leads so that you can capitalize on as many new patients as possible in 2023.

Here are 3 things to consider to make the most of your web leads.

1. Follow Ups

Many practices assume that after the initial phone call or email exchange, if a prospective patient hasn’t engaged with the practice, they weren’t all that serious to begin with. But we have news for you – these “tirekickers” can very easily stay in your lead pipeline with just a smidge of extra effort.

If your office currently does not have a follow up system, the first thing to implement is a “tickle” list to check in with each lead after a set number of days. We usually recommend following up within 3 days of the initial communication.

What does this look like? Your front office can manually keep a list of contacts and set daily reminders for follow ups. If a lead initially called you, making a follow up call is the way to go. You can script these out easily. “Hi, I’m calling from Dr. Smith’s office and wanted to follow up on our conversation the other day.” If you just had an email exchange, you can try a follow-up email, again with a set script to make it nearly effortless to stay in touch.

An even effortless-er way to run your follow ups is to set up email automation. The forms on your website can be set to create a series of auto-responders that check in with prospective patients at the intervals you select. The upside is that you do no work once these are configured. The thing to watch for is that you’ll want to make sure these messages are customized and relevant to each of your leads – spamming prospective patients is worse than not following up at all.

Here we’ll also give a plug to our own lead management system, LeadAlign. With LeadAlign installed on your site, you can use the leads dashboard to mark new leads, who’s been contacted once, and who’s received additional follow up. It’s a smart way to make the most of your lead pipeline.

2. Phone Call/Text Management

You probably don’t give a lot of thought to your business phone lines. The phone rings, someone answers it. But there’s actually a lot more you can be doing to personalize calling and greatly improve the phone customer service you provide.

We’ve worked with Weave, a next-generation business phone system that integrates patient scheduling, appointment reminders, texting and even payments all within a single, slick app that can be used among many staff members in real time. Here are just a couple scenarios where Weave can be a big help:

• A person who called a month ago about a tummy tuck is calling your office back. The app can prompt the person answering the call with all the details of the previous interaction. With these details, your staff member can personalize the call and make a very positive impression with the caller.
• A patient texts that she needs to change her consultation appointment time. The app will let your staff member know that the patient still hasn’t paid her initial consult fee, or hasn’t completed initial patient paperwork. The app also interfaces with your EMR so that you can see open times for rescheduling.

Weave is the best of these types of practice communication apps we’ve seen, but there are others to consider as well. The bottom line is that if you

3. Email Newsletters and Text Marketing

You can stay in touch with prospective patients by encouraging them to provide their email address and phone number for marketing purposes and then properly segmenting your marketing lists. According to MailChimp, segmented email campaigns have an open rate that is 14% higher than non-segmented campaigns, and click-through rates are twice as high.

Segmented email and text marketing lists for your prospective patients can deliver relevant, personalized content that is focused on getting that audience to convert. You can offer new-patient specials, provide updates on procedure pricing, or other info that people who are on the fence will find helpful.

Of course, segmenting will involve some legwork on your part, both to set up the list and keep it fresh by removing contact info for people who become patients. This ongoing maintenance is mandatory, so you don’t end up seeming out of touch by sending irrelevant info to new patients. But this effort more than pays for itself – statistics show that companies using email marketing to nurture leads see 50% more sales-ready leads at about one-third less cost.