We work our buns off to build your business online and deliver high-quality patient prospects to your phones and email Inboxes. For most of our clients, that’s where our work stops and their internal work of nurturing each lead begins. Here’s a checklist to make sure you’re doing what it takes to make the most of the leads you get from the web.
1. Respond to all relevant form inquiries
Even with advanced spam detection on your forms, you’ll still get junk submissions and (how do we say this politely?) stuff from crazies and weirdos. Feel free to delete all that stuff right away. On the other end of the spectrum, you also receive well thought out, thorough inquiries from people who are serious about having a procedure right away. In between, there’s a lot of work for your front office to do to educate, serve, and convince your web leads.
All of our clients’ forms have autoresponders that acknowledge a form inquiry. But after that, a timely, helpful personal response is essential.
- Respond on the person’s preferred platform.
- Respond promptly (we’re talking minutes or hours, not days).
- Answer their question, but also try to anticipate their next question.
- Promote the value of taking the next step, even if they didn’t ask.
Oh, and p.s. – we’ve said it a million times but check your spam folder regularly for legit leads that your email program may have wrongly filtered.
2. Train your phone staff on continuing the conversation
A recent trend over the past 6 months has been for more web inquiries to pick up the phone instead of filling out forms. This may be translating into higher call volumes for your front office staff. Don’t let it translate into lower customer service levels. Especially as the economy slows, prospective patients are stretching out their decision making process and evaluating their options more closely. Your phone staff need to be especially understanding of this mindset, and not rush to label certain prospects as “tire kickers” or “time wasters.”
Following the “yes, and” approach to call management can reap big dividends. For instance, if someone calls in to find out how much eyelid surgery costs, your staff needs to do more than just rattle off a price. “That procedure can range from $X to $Y. We’d be more than happy to schedule you for a consultation to get a specific cost. Not ready for that? We run specials now and then, can I add you to our list so you’re first to know about any discounts?” There are a huge number of ways your staff can extend the conversation and move callers closer to surgery.
3. Offer to text with prospects
Some people are big into texting. And don’t make the mistake that people who want to text you aren’t serious. It’s just not true that everyone who’s serious about surgery will pick up the phone to call you.
We’ve heard many objections from clients who don’t want to text with patients and prospects. It’s not secure. It’s invasive. It’s hard to manage. We hear you. But there are texting tool available that can knock out these objections. Many EMRs offer patient texting or add-ons that have this feature. There are HIPAA-compliant call and texting platforms too…more on that below.
4. Explore more sophisticated lead and booking software
Getting leads in your email and fielding calls with no tracking is, let’s be honest, a bit antiquated these days. There are several lead management apps that can connect with your EMR to provide a better experience and more trackable data. We’ve vetted all of these and we’re happy to provide introductions to our clients who are interested in a more integrated lead/patient intake process:
- Weave – Weave is one of the most comprehensive lead and patient management systems we’ve seen. They’ll provide you with new phones and a dedicated phone service that summarizes prior caller history. They also offer texting, scheduling, patient reminders, payments and even review management all on a single platform. It’s a big overhaul, but it can revolutionize how you serve your patients and prospects.
- NextPatient – This is another comprehensive tool and one of the best options if you don’t want to mess with your current phone system. You get online scheduling, digital check-in, advanced reminders and texting, and reputation management, all integrated with the most common electronic health record systems in the cosmetic surgery space.
- Klara – Klara is big on simplifying patient intake on your website. In their ideal implementation, you remove all your existing contact forms and route users through their app, which focuses on turning phone calls into texts to speed up and simplify the intake process. We like the idea, but some practices are uneasy forcing users into a single mode of contact, and lead tracking if nearly impossible within their system.
5. Consider a website chat widget
Whether backed by a real live person or artificial intelligence (AI), chat widgets can provide answers to quick questions and core information about your business. AI-powered chat gives you the ability to automate messaging for common questions like hours, service offerings, pricing, and more. These can also be programmed to kick more complex questions over to a live representative in your office during business hours. If you feel uneasy about what an AI chatbot may tell your website users, you could also set this up to connect directly to a staff member once a question is asked.
Note that most of the lead management systems detailed above have integrated chat widgets to encourage patient booking and answer common questions.
6. Respond instantly to questions and comments on social media
Did you know that Meta has implemented automated messaging to take the work out of responding to messages on Instagram and Facebook? Using the business suite, you can set up auto responses for the following:
- Welcome message when someone messages you. It is the first thing they read from your business, so make it count! It’s good to use this as a “greeting” and or sending people to a desired location of contact, such as calling or leading them directly to your website.
- FAQ’s so you can share answers to your most commonly asked questions.
- Away messages for when you’re out of office.
You can go a step further and with the help of AI have a conversation with customers to get them to the right place. Using automated messaging not only looks good for your business, but also having a “fast response” time leaves a positive impression, since prospects can see how responsive you are to DM’s before they message you. Facebook pages with a good response time also get a badge on their profile letting everyone know of this.
7. Consider marketing automation
OK – we know we told you not to automate your responses to prospects. But hear us out! Once you’ve had some dialog with a prospect, the lead can go cold for any number of reasons. With so many other things competing for your time, it’s impossible to personally send dozens of follow-up or check-in messages.
But marketing automation easily allows you to put a prospect’s email or phone number into a funnel where they’ll receive a set of messages you’ve crafted to stay in touch and drive conversion. This gives the prospective patient a few more easy opportunities to reach back out. Sure, not everyone will – but you’ll convert more than if you had just let the lead go stale.
8. Nurture leads with email newsletters
Your existing patient base is a rich resource. They can write reviews, give referrals, and when the time is right, come back for additional procedures. Stay on their radar by dropping a regular email newsletter in their Inbox. Even if you don’t have much news and aren’t currently running any great specials, just seeing your name as they scroll through their email is a worthwhile reminder
The bottom line: communicate, communicate, communicate
Lead management is something that needs ongoing refinement as technologies change, user behavior shifts, and your internal processes adapt to new systems and requirements. We encourage clients to review their process flow at least every 6 months and ask staff to keep an eye out for ways to make communication with prospects even better.
It can be so easy, especially when you feel you are busy enough, to put lead management on the back burner. Do not make that mistake. The difference between highly successful practices and everyone else all comes down to patient experience, and leaving every lead with a positive impression of your office, even those that don’t convert, is an essential component.