New Approaches to Traditional Marketing
As practice owners and medical professionals know, effectively utilizing their patient database is a powerful tool that can drive continued success and growth for practices, and nurturing the database forms an integral part of their marketing strategies. While the concept is not new, automation capabilities for physical letters and mailers have become easier to use with more practices utilizing automation with great success.
Ask Fuel First tackles automation and integration by answering the following question: How can automated mailers and integration help bring more patients into my practice?
Automated Patient Communication
Fuel Medical has partnered with BlueWing, a mailing house that integrates with audiology software, such as Blueprint Solutions, CounselEAR and Sycle. These customer relationship management (CRM) integrations allow us to send automated physical mailers to a patient database weekly.
The process is simple. First, triggers are set up in your CRM software for patient segments, such as tested/not treated notes, warranty expiration, happy birthday, annual appointment reminders and more. The system then triggers the applicable patients every week and automatically sends the appropriate letter. Don’t worry—Fuel Medical will customize letters with relevant information for specific patients, so you don’t have to.
There are several benefits to using automated mailers, such as:
- Providing timely communication to patients through their hearing health care journey.
- Providing consistent communication with patients over time to ensure a steady flow of return patients.
- Saving time.
- Reducing planning. Once triggers are set up, no ongoing action is needed from your practice.
- Receiving powerful reporting with ROI (return on investment) data.
Look-a-Like Targeting for Prospect Mailers
Using automated mailers is the first step in database communication. The next step is developing a strategy to know who to target for your prospect mailers. For this reason, BlueWing has created a patient response model by collecting data points related to hearing aid patients and mailers. The response model includes up to 300 different factors that we use as a national standard to get more targeted with audiology prospect mailers, reach prospects who are a match for the ideal hearing aid patient and increase response rates. However, the effectiveness of the response model can differ regionally, which brings us to Look-a-Like Targeting
For clinics whose CRM system is integrated with our mailing house, we run the entire hearing aid patient database through their response model and create an ideal target demographic. In other words, it determines what their patients “look like,” and we use that information to target prospective patients. Demographic and geographic factors, such as age, income, education, occupation, propensity to donate and distance to practice, are only a few data points in the response model.
Look-a-like target models have several benefits. They provide an accurate picture of the practice’s patient database, showing which geographical locations the practice’s patients live in and which markets may be underserved. And they increase the response success rate because the right people have been targeted. Hopefully, those people will become patients and boost your practice’s income.
There is good news for practices not currently using audiology CRM software systems that integrate with the mailing house. We can still create a look-a-like model for you! We just need to pull your hearing aid patient database from your preferred system and run it through the response model to create a target list.
Integrated Match-Back Reporting
One of the challenges of marketing pieces is accurate reporting on the results of a campaign. Typically, we utilize call tracking numbers that enable us to listen to the calls and determine the ROI for each campaign. This doesn’t come without its flaws, however. For example, a recipient may visit the practice’s website before calling, in which case they won’t use the call tracking number. Even though the caller found the practice through the promotion, they won’t be included in the reporting. Match-back reporting can solve this problem.
Match-back reporting is available for practices integrating their CRM with our mailing house. This allows us to automatically match callers who schedule appointments and buy hearing aids to the practice’s database or prospect mailers. We can determine whether that caller received a letter from the practice in the past 30 days and match them back to that campaign’s analytics. This helps to eliminate flaws that are inherent in this type of marketing.
There are other benefits of using match-back reporting. It increases the accuracy of ROI reporting and clarifies the success of a campaign. It also takes place automatically and requires no time from the clinic. Overall, it’s an easy way to know whether your campaign brought in patients who made appointments or purchased hearing devices, as opposed to spending money on mailers that didn’t target the right people.
Moving Forward
Practices that want to provide an excellent patient experience and wish to utilize their database as a marketing tool to its full extent should consider automation and integration as part of their mailing strategy. Though it may take some time to set up initially, there is little effort to maintain it afterward.
Fuel Medical is always here to walk you through the process, create customized marketing materials and work with BlueWing on your behalf to ensure high-quality mailers are being sent out. We’ll also help you analyze the resulting reports and offer suggestions on how to maximize your ROI. Overall, you’ll reap the rewards and save time in the long run. If you want to learn more about automation and integration, contact your regional team today.