How to Increase Medical Website Conversion Rates

Studies show that the more you engage with people who visit your website, the more likely they are to make an appointment or seek additional information about a service.

To increase the conversions of website visitors to your medical practice’s site, you need to increase the engagement with these potential patients.  Studies show that the more you engage with people who visit your website, the more likely they are to make an appointment or seek additional information about a service. If you are only relying on a static website to pull in new patients to grow your practice, you will likely lose patients to competitors. Engaging with patients will catch their attention, which is vital to prevent them from clicking the back button and checking out a competitor.  

Below are some proven patient engagement strategies that many medical practices have used to engage with their patients. The expert team at PatientGain.com can help you implement these engagement tactics for your business. We have built many apps that can be deployed to your website to engage with your visitors to help turn them into regular patients.  

1. Medical Engagement Chatbot

One of the more recent popular and proven ways to engage with patients on your website is by installing a medical engagement chatbot. While engaging with a chatbot may seem like you are communicating with some futuristic AI or even a real person, it is just a program that responds to specific questions with specific answers. A chatbot is only as good as the questions and answers programmed into it. The chatbot we use at PatientGain.com is very effective, and business owners do not need to know anything about programming to use or update its knowledge. Everything is available from your dashboard, and our team is ready to assist if you do not know how to use it. There are many ways a chatbot can help website visitors when they are on your medical practice’s site.

Our engagement chatbot is designed to help potential patients visiting your website accomplish simple tasks, or get the information they need. However, to successfully do this, you need to generate a list of tasks and questions that will help most patients. If you do not know where to start, often the best place is your front desk staff. The employees who answer phones, emails, and any other way patients communicate with your medical practice will tell you the most often questions they answer and the tasks they have to assist with. Developing a list from them will divert some of those phone calls and emails to the chatbot, freeing up their time to help patients with more complex needs. The faster they can get to patients, the more likely they will have a positive experience and not abandon the medical practice for a different healthcare choice. Our medical engagement chatbot is a great feature to have on your website. When it cannot assist with any question or topic it will take a message and forward it to a person an owner designates to follow later.  

Some of the most common things our medical engagement chatbot helps patients with include:

• Finding information about a specific service
• Hours of operation
• Directions
• Contact information
• Information on current health concerns, such as COVID-19

2. Social Media

An area that is built for high patient engagement is Social Media. All medical practices should have some social media presence to engage with current and potential patients. Your competitors are already doing it, so you do not want to miss out on this area of excellent patient engagement; for medical practices, the most common social media channels to make a profile on are Facebook, Google, Instagram, and Twitter. Each of these companies allows you to do certain things with an account. Some are the same across any channel, while other aspects are unique to each channel. Below is a breakdown of each social media channel. A medical practice should be one and what you can do with it.

A. Facebook Business Page

Unlike a Facebook Profile, a Facebook Business Page gives you access to metrics to see how much engagement your posts are getting. You also get access to Facebook’s robust advertising platform. Compared to the other social media channels, Facebook has the most variety in terms of the type of posts you can make. There is also no limit, for the most part, with the length of content you can post. However, you should avoid posting a small novella if you want to remain engaged with your patients. The most popular kind of posts to make on Facebook include:

• Text-Only Posts: These are good for quick updates or if you want to share a link to a story or another website. A well-designed website should automatically generate a thumbnail to the post.
• Picture Posts: These posts have all the bells and whistles as a text post, but you instead upload a picture. An image from your practice or an infographic often gets the most engagement. This post can be used when sharing a link to a website when you do not like the picture Facebook selected to be the preview.
• Video Posts: Similar to a picture post, but instead, you use a video. Videos, if the production value is high, can generate even more engagement than a picture post. Videos can be anything from something highlighted at your clinic or a video covering a specific medical topic.
• Event Post: If your medical practice is having an event, you can highlight it by creating an event post. It is a great way to organize the event and invite people to attend. 

B. Google Business Profile

While many medical practice owners may know about their Google Business Profile, and they should have it is a crucial part of any digital marketing plan, they may not realize that they can post updates. Updates will appear at the bottom of their business profile when their knowledge panel appears in search results. This can be a great way to engage with patients before they even visit your website. For all practical purposes, you can do the same thing on a Google Business Profile as you can on a Facebook Business Page. If posting from a service that allows you to post on multiple channels at once, you are somewhat limited, but if you go to your actual business profile page, you’ll see you have quite a few options as well as some call to action buttons to pick from. With that said, you are mostly limited to text, picture, video, and event posting. Some other types of posts can highlight products you are selling, but these would only be useful to med spas and not medical clinics.  

C. Instagram

Facebook owns Instagram, but many rules govern how you can use this social media channel compared to their parent company. First, you must include some media with every post. Many will post a picture or a series of images, known as a carousel. You can also post a video that is 1 minute in length. Longer videos can be published, but only a snippet will be shown on an Instagram profile. The rest will be uploaded to their Instagram TV section, known as IGTV. All long-form content is hosted there.

Another aspect of Instagram you should be aware of is that you can not embed links into your posts. With other social media channels, if you post a link, it becomes clickable. The text only version forces someone to copy and paste it if they want to visit a website on Instagram. You can place a link to your medical practice in your bio, so it is best to customize these posts to encourage people to see the link in a bio.  

Finally, Instagram encourages the use of hashtags. Hashtags, which are words that have a “#” symbol in front of it. For example, if you are an urgent care center promoting school physicals, after your post’s content, you could use the following hashtags: #UrgentCare #Physicals #SchoolPhysicals #SportsPhysicals. These hashtags help categorize your post and increases its overall engagement. It will, potentially, expose your post to more people who may not be following your Instagram page. 

D. Twitter

Twitter, of the social media channels mentioned so far, limits you the most in what you can say. Including spaces and punctuation, you are limited to 280 characters. Again you can post text, links, pictures, and videos. Videos on Twitter are limited to 2 minutes unless you are given access to features allowing you to post longer ones. Unless you are a significant influencer or famous, chances are you will be limited to 2 minutes. Use hashtags here and there to boost engagement, but keep in mind that these will cut into your 280 character limit. 

3. Online Quiz

Studies show that when someone visits your website, you only have seconds to pique their interest before they move on. You do not want a potential patient to click on the back button and visit a competitor. Using PatientGain.com’s quiz app, you can draw them into your website, allowing them to participate in the quiz and linger for a bit. Our research has shown that this quiz app will increase the chances of engagement with your website and your medical practice.  

We can design a compelling quiz that will ask a potential patient a series of questions. These questions are created for services your medical practice has available. The app will record their answers so you and your providers can look at this valuable data about the people participating in the quiz. You will soon see the patients who select your clinic will likely have different answers than others. You can use this information to fine-tune your medical marketing plan. Our app will also collect contact information so you can follow up with them. The app and all information collect are stored on secure HIPAA compliant servers. 

4. Two-Way Texting

Text messages are a great way to engage your current patients. Many medical practices don’t realize the power behind text messages or levy them to engage with patients. Most, if not all, of your patients will have a mobile device and have a texting plan. Unlike email providers, there are no spam folders, and when someone’s phone lets off a chime indicating a text has arrived, they instinctively will reach for their phone. As a result, text messages have an incredibly high open and engagement rate.

If you provide a way for patients to text a medical clinic through their website, you will soon find texts coming from patients trickling in throughout the day! However, you need to be HIPAA compliant if you decide to use this engagement tactic. You can not just post a phone number to a cellphone you keep at your clinic. First, texts coming to the cell phone are not encrypted or stored with encryption. Data can be accessed easily, and therefore it is not HIPAA compliant on your end. However, you can be within compliance and utilize texting if you use our two-way texting app. Instead of texts coming to a phone, when patients text your medical practice through your website it arrives on your dashboard and goes to a HIPAA compliant secure server. There you can reply to them. Be careful not to send any personal health information, PHI, to them because their phone is not secured. However, this is a great way to give more specific information about the questions they might have.

5. Medical Assessment App

When potential patients visit your website, they might not know precisely what they are looking for or are positive you are the right doctor for them. An online medical assessment can engage with them and help them decide to make an appointment at your medical clinic. When these apps are used in medical practices, conversation rates can increase by 20% or more.  

Much like the other engagement tools suggested, you want this to be HIPAA compliant as well. The quiz, answers, and contact information should only be visible to the patient and the doctor. Patients must also sign a legal “terms of use” to access the assessment. A TOS agreement is standard and only serves to protect the medical practice. A medical clinic can follow up with a patient after they finish the assessment by collecting contact information. We can design an online assessment for your potential patients to take that best fits the services you offer. Many medical practices use online assessments, but some of the most common include:  

• Med Spas
• Medical Weight Loss Clinics
• Diabetic Treatment Centers
• Cardiac Treatment Centers
• Wellness Clinics

Call the experienced team at PatientGain.com today and talk to us about patient engagement strategies. We can show you what other clients have used to be successful. We look forward to working with you to help you grow your business!

Setup Initial Meeting With PatientGain

Anatomy Of Good Medical Marketing 

Eight Steps For Achieving Great ROI Results for Doctors

The term “SEO” can have different meaning to different professionals, but we will assume that you are a doctor, physician, dentist, surgeon or an administrator of a practice.  We have seen that these professionals mean high search rankings, and simply want to acquire more patients using “SEO”.  So based on this, we will define SEO beyond the Search Engine Optimization strategies. To our audience, doctors and practice managers they mean Good Medical Marketing and its composition.

Step 1 : Website Overall Strategy – Including the Website and Facebook business page

Step 2 : Website Content Marketing

Step 3 : Local SEO & Organic Strategy

Step 4 : Social Media Marketing

Step 5 : Online Advertising Plan

Step 6 : Online Reviews Management & Marketing

Step 7 : Email Marketing & Email Automation

Step 8 : Conversion Automation 

These 8 steps are the core anatomy of a typical Healthcare practice’s medical marketing plan.