Designing your marketing strategy around marketing automation is an excellent way to personalize your patient’s customer journey. The meaning of personalized marketing communication has evolved with advances in technology. As software available becomes more sophisticated, the features incorporated allow businesses to create advanced marketing strategies without having to outsource the work to marketing agencies. Marketing automation is a tool that has been around for a few years but is starting to become more popular.
Automation Benefits
Using a marketing platform with automation capabilities like Salesforce Marketing Cloud or HubSpot Marketing Professional is a hefty investment for a small practice. Still, the benefits received are rewards that far outweigh the risks. By automating specific behavioral marketing tasks, you or your marketing team members can reduce the time spent on smaller efforts like sending after visit emails, appointment reminders, or patient satisfaction surveys. The extra time earned can be used tending to your patient’s needs or developing engaging content. Utilizing automation can reduce your costs in terms of efficiency and reaching quality leads, so the resources spent on your marketing efforts will produce a higher ROI.
Marketing Automation allows you to create hyper-personalized marketing communications along the customer journey through email, social platforms, text, and web touchpoints. Workflows are set up by using pre-determined behaviors that trigger the next marketing communication based on actions taken by the patient or customer. Effective workflows take into account the entire customer journey and follow the patient throughout the whole cycle.
A Walk in their Shoes
Let’s walk through a potential automation workflow for a patient that found your practice through a google search ad.
Jane Doe is a first-time mother looking for a pediatrician for her baby Zoe and uses google to search. Jane comes across your paid Google search ad and clicks it, which leads her to a landing page on your private practice’s website. Jane then subscribes to your site’s weekly blog to receive helpful tips on the health of babies by entering her email. Her email address is input into your CRM which triggers a welcome email. Jane opens the email, which invites her in for a free consultation. Jane books an appointment through the email’s call to action link, which triggers the system to schedule a reminder email and text. The day before her appointment, Jane receives a reminder email and text message confirming the appointment. Then after the visit, Jane gets a patient satisfaction survey via email. Upon completing the survey Jane receives a Thank you message with a discount code at local baby boutique who has agreed to partner with you. A few weeks later Janes receives an email following up on the baby and a call to action to schedule Zoe’s next check-up. Jane schedules the appoint which triggers the cycle to begin again based on her step she’s at in her customer Journey.
This workflow considers all the actions Jane will take in her customer journey with your practice. Using the same discipline workflows for nurturing this customer should considered. Nurturing your customer’s is a fundamental principle for inbound marketing and can be done so by delivering relevant and engaging content.
Next step
Think of your main customer segment group and begin to map out a workflow based on their customer journey. Don’t forget to consider important behavioral actions that can be taken and different workflows for the paths. By doing this your customers will receive customized marketing communication pieces that are relevant to them and reaching them at the right time.
Check out my previous blog on Google search ad rankings here