You offer treatment with a motive to cure and satisfy your patient. Your practice is dependent on your patients. A happy patient is a key to the growth of your practice. You need to take various initiatives to increase patient engagement. The clearer your treatments, procedures, and conversations are the stronger will be your doctor-patient relationships. This helps you develop better online reputation for your practice.Below are some mistakes to avoid and creative ways for growing patient engagement and benefitting your practice’s growth.
Mistakes to avoid
For a rock-solid engagement initiative, you need to avoid following mistakes
One-for-all script: You cannot use the same script for all communications. Streamlining your communication efforts help you increase engagement and get you, loyal patients. You need to improvise and customize your script especially when dealing with same patients. Else, you are likely to bore them and face rejections. Since repetitive scripts give insecurity to patients make them feel unimportant and demotivated.
Pushing content: For successful marketing and patient engagement you cannot go with push strategy. You should always broadcast only the required information and don’t overload for engagement. Plan and be clear about your strategies instead of bombarding everything together and confusing patients.
Use newsletters, offers, and surveys to engage your target audience. Remember to check the frequency. Just like too many emails can annoy patients, similarly, very few emails can also make your patients forget about your practice.
Sales on mind: Don’t consider patients as a sales resource. This would make you lose your existing patients assuming you inconsiderate and leaving no scope of re-engagement. You need to increase your patient base but that’s possible only when are successful in retaining your existing patients.
Your patients never wish to be treated as numbers. They want to feel concerned. Any sales focused step can bring in anger and annoyance in search of immediate results. Rewards come with patience.
Engagement ways
Below are some effective and easy ways to level-up your engagement with your patients.
Feedback: To increase engagement you need to get valuable feedback from your patients. This will help you know what your patients want. If you are not pushy, patients are likely to express their opinion. You can ask for feedback when a patient visits your practice, or you can send a survey email after the patient is done with a treatment. To unsatisfied patients, you can assure improvement and reconnect with them. Feedbacks are a great way to get insights about your patients and build strong relationships.
Customer service: You and your staff should be supportive to your patients. Following an organizational culture develops a friendly environment that helps patients to share their concerns in details. Feeling respected, patients are likely to refer your practice to their friends and family. A nice behavior should be continued from first interaction to the last.
Social media presence: Have a good presence on social media platforms to engage with your existing and potential patients. Showcase your thought leader personality and share your knowledge with all. Join other groups of your niche and broaden your marketing’s wavelength and increase engagement. Use different platforms wisely keeping in mind the type and age of the audience.
Some more creative ways to increase patient engagement are:
- Ask for recommendations
- Send daily medication reminders
- Have an engaging patient portal where they can schedule appointment online and check their reports
- Recommend mHealth app that includes fun and knowledge
- Get a mobile-friendly website
- Share your videos on YouTube
- Use different forms of content such as infographics, videos, images, podcasts, etc.
- Participate in seminars and local community activities or host an open house to interact with more new patients.