Healthcare is a unique industry with unique challenges and unique opportunities. Healthcare providers must be able to communicate effectively with their patients, while simultaneously managing costs and compliance requirements. That’s where text messaging marketing comes in. With the right strategies, your organization can use SMS to reach specific segments of your target audience, while also staying within budget and reducing your operational footprint. In this blog post, we'll take a look at the key benefits of implementing text message marketing in your healthcare practice, as well as tips for planning, executing, tracking, and measuring these campaigns. Read on to learn more!
What Are The Benefits Of Using Text Message Marketing?
Healthcare providers often face an uphill battle to engage their patients and drive practice revenue. Mobile health (mHealth) presents new and promising ways to improve these results. Engagement is key to success with text messaging, but what makes it such a powerful and effective vehicle?
Here are a few examples of how text message marketing can help your healthcare practice: -
Better engagement with existing patients - In order to stay healthy and avoid emergencies, patients have to have a strong trust relationship with their healthcare providers. If they don’t feel comfortable reaching out to their provider, they won’t get the care they need. Text messaging allows your practice to stay in touch with patients, while having a more personal touch.
New patients
Adding new patients can be a huge challenge for many practices. There are many variables at play here, such as location, demographics, past experiences with other providers, etc. Text messaging can help your practice be more efficient and proactive when trying to recruit new patients.
Increased revenue
With the increasing popularity of health care apps, providers are now able to deliver care to their patients in new ways. Because of this, providers are now putting more focus on engagement with patients leading to improved response rates and greater revenue.
How To Use Text Message Marketing In Healthcare
You can use text message marketing with text-based messaging apps, such as TXTImpact . Other methods such as Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp are also available. Given their flexibility and range, messaging apps are an excellent choice for implementing text marketing. With these apps, you can create custom campaigns and target specific recipients based on their location, demographics, and past behavior. With mobile analytics, you can also track how your recipients respond to your messages and identify who you should focus your next campaign on.
Planning For A Successful Campaign
Healthcare providers are in a unique position to capitalize on the potential of text messaging. The nature of your business puts you in regular contact with a large number of patients. You also have access to sensitive information such as their medical records and prescription information. In order to responsibly leverage these unique advantages, you need to think carefully about how you plan your campaigns.
Here are a few tips to make your campaigns as effective as possible:
Use Location Targeting To Increase Engagement
Location targeting can help you identify the most engaged groups of patients. For example, you might be able to find out where they live, when they have an emergency, or what type of care they might need in the near future.
Use Customer Segmentation To Tailor Your Message
By identifying different segments of patients, you can better tailor your message and increase response rates. For example, you could send specific messages to pregnant women, children, or those who recently broke their ankle.
Use frequency targeting to maximize ROI
Frequency targeting lets you send reminders or promotional messages to recipients who have shown a high rate of engagement. This lets you maximize your ROFI (return on investment) and get more bang for your buck.
Tracking your results
How do you know if your campaigns are working? There are a number of ways to track the success of your campaigns, including:
Use Google Analytics or similar tracking tools to measure the impact of your campaigns. This lets you identify which recipients are engaging most with your message and which messages are driving the most action.
Use A/B testing to compare different creative variations. This lets you test different headlines, images, and timing to see which combination is most effective
Use customer service tickets to determine the impact of your campaigns. Track all customer service tickets related to text message campaigns, including complaints, questions, or requests for help.
Conclusion
Text message marketing is a smart way to engage your existing patients and attract new ones. It also allows you to manage your costs and stay compliant while expanding your customer base. Try implementing a few of these strategies and you might be surprised by the results. With the right partner, you can easily implement text message campaigns that target specific segments of your target audience. This lets you better serve your customers and improve response rates.
