Using E-mail to Enhance Eye Care Marketing

To say that e-mail has revolutionized the way we communicate would be saying far too little. Professionals use e-mail every day to exchange information with colleagues, contemporaries, and customers. As an eye care professional, it’s important that you think about how e-mail impacts your eye care marketing.

Improving your eye care marketing is easy, and it makes life easier on you and your patients. I recommend using e-mail in the following ways:

As a scheduling tool. Your website should offer patients the opportunity to schedule appointments instantly, 24 hours a day. After the patient has scheduled an appointment, an auto-confirmation should be sent to his or her e-mail address.

As a forum for frequently asked questions—including answers—on your website. This saves you and your patients the hassle of rehashing concepts, questions, or ideas you’ve already discussed. Your patients will be glad to know there’s a place where their most basic questions can be answered, and where they can return with other inquiries.

To offer special discounts and deals. After all, who doesn’t like a deal? A discount for friends and family or a set of coupons offering discounts on glasses or contact lenses could increase your patient base considerably.

To educate patients. E-mail is basically an expeditious way of sharing information. As a professional who works closely with people who don’t share your level of expertise, you’re in the unique position of being able to share vital information with people who want to hear it. Maintaining healthy vision is important to your patients, and you can use e-mail to guide them along that path.

E-mail has changed the way communicate and business with one another. It allows you to accomplish so much more at a fraction of the cost. That’s a marketing advantage you can’t afford to ignore. Why not take advantage of it?

Eye Care Marketing For The Internet Age: How To Use Your Blog

So you’ve got your website set up and humming in the eye care marketing backgroud – pre-selling qualified patients by offering information and answers that they are looking for.

And your email system is steadily growing, maintaining a healthy list of actively engaged patients who can’t to see what you’ll send them next.

So now it’s time to test things out with an  eye care marketing event or a promotion.

You set up an announcement on your home page and start talking about this in your email broadcast.

Obviously, not everyone will be interested, and the last thing you want is to turn off your loyal followers with an intense marketing campaign.

So what do you do?

Take the group that wants to know more to your blog. As you know, blogs are incredibly simple to set-up.

A Wordpress blog is free and you can have someone set one up for your for the cost of a pizza.

Once you have a simple, clean looking template set up, you’re ready to start posting.

Okay. Back to your promotional campaign.

Here’s how to use your blog for a profitable event:

Somewhere in your email broadcast, let people know about the upcoming event.

This could work for trunk shows, special promotions, community events, and many other eye care marketing strategies.

And tell them that they can learn more about it by visiting your blog.

The click the click the link that takes them to the blog post.

Of course, the best part is that your blog post will encourage comments and questions that the other folks can see and be a part of

And we all know the power social proof. Of course, this is merely one use of a blog.

I plan to cover others in future approach – especially with regard to how your blog can build traffic to your main website.

Finally, eye care professionals tend to discount the power of email in their overall eye care marketing strategy.  Again,

We’ll be covering more of this as well.

Your Eye Care Marketing Niche

ou know how a lot of practice management consultants will say you need to develop a specialty within that practice?

Low vision, specialty contact lenses, and vision therapy come to mind.

It’s true.

So, why don’t you just have one big practice that does it all?

As optometrists, we pride ourselves in being the general eye guy – we can take care of most problems – or at least get people to where they need to be.

So why all the fuss about developing a side-specialty?

For the very same reason why niche-focused marketing is the most
effective way to grow your patient base.

You see, today, in early 2009, we have become a very specialized
society.

For example…

Years ago if you needed legal advice you went to a general attorney.

Today, if you needed an attorney for something, you wouldn’t think of going to a general lawyer.

You’d choose an attorney that specializes in your area of need
(i.e. divorce, personal injury, trial, intellectual property, etc.)

(We’ll talk about WHY in a second.)

And, we see this kind of specialization in every area of commerce… from ultra-specialized doctors all the way to stores just for a specific type of sunglasses.

Fact is, today, people want products and services that appear to be designed for their specific, targeted needs.

They want a SPECIALIST, NOT a generalist.

If they have cardiovascular problems, they want the cardiologist. Not a general doctor.

If they have a foot injury, they want the podiatrist. Not a general doctor.

If they have chronic sinus problems, they want a sinus specialist. Not a general doctor.

Funny thing is… people will happily pay more money for a specialist than they will a generalist.

It’s why the cardiologist gets paid a heck of a lot more money than the general M.D.

Or, why a Mercedes Benz mechanic gets paid a lot more than the Goodyear mechanic.

People want SPECIALISTS, and they happily pay more for their “perceived” expertise.

**So, what does this have to do with the low vision or vision therapy and you and your practice?

Well, the reason the practice consultant recommends these specialities and doesn’t want you to have just one big general practice that they don’t want to be perceived as one big general practice!

You want to accommodate those sliced, targeted, specific groups and their needs.

In return, you are able to attract a larger share of each of those little
groups AND charge a lot more for the service.

Which is the same exact thing you should do when marketing your practice.

You NEVER want to appear as a generalist in your marketing because it totally devalues what you do and causes people
to NOT think of you as a specialist or expert.

Hence, general eye care marketing lowers the perceived value prospective patients have of the care you provide.

Instead, what you want to do is target specific niches and conditions in different marketing pieces, so you position yourself as a
specialist in that particular area.

This makes prospective patients feel you are an expert with solving their problem and INCREASES the perceived value of your care.

Remember, people want someone who is an expert with solving their needs. NOT someone who is just a generalist.

My point is this…

Specialization in marketing is key, today, because of society’s move toward specialized solutions for their specific needs.

They want stuff just for them.

Good thing is, you don’t need multiple offices to accomplish this.

You just need specialized marketing that does it for you.

Eye Care Marketing: Effective E-Newsletters The Easy Way

You would think that once you’ve collected a the patient emails, uploaded them to your email delivery system, and refined your website, that the rest would be smooth sailing.

What’s the big deal, right? You get a ton of email newsletters in your inbox. Which ones do you read?

But a lot of people have a hard time from here.

Obviously, you have valuable insight on a subject people need and want to know about. But how do you deliver this efficiently

Here are the keys:

Keep it short and sweet.

Everyone is busy and we tend to scan ‘E-stuff’ quickly. And ‘Sweet’, in this context, also means lively – so keep it fun where appropriate.

Speak in your voice.

This a personal connection. Much more so than most imagine. If you are thinking about all those emails in your inbox, STOP. This is different. Your patients SEE you in an  entirely different manner than we see marketers and spammers. This is an email coming from the Doctor!

Give THEM something valuable.

Say you’re on a long flight. Your neighbor – a really nice, well-adjusted person you could get along with. They have problem-X and they want to know how and why it happened to THEM and what THEY can do about it. Tell them. Who knows better than you? If someone does know better than you, tell them that too.

Show them how to act.

We all need a little guidance. If you have a link to your appointment schedule or if people make appointments the old-fashioned way (they call), then remind them about. And tell them specifically what to do – as a service.

Once you have that, the next step is simply a matter of pressing send! Then watch the appointments fill in.

Not ready for this? Most doctors have a tough time with this aspect of practice.  Click to learn more about email marketing for your practice.

Eye Care Marketing and Email: The Doctor Will Text You Now

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000…513900382.html
(You may need a subscription, but here’s the link)

The article in this morning’s journal, “The Doctor Will Text You Now: Patients Visit With Their Physicians Online as More Insurers Begin Paying for Digital Diagnoses” gets off on to an embarrassing start by using a ‘red eye’ example, which you have to let slide (for now) in order to get to what I think really can be helpful.

This is what motivated me to share it with you:

“This year, 39% of doctors said they’d communicated with patients online, up from just 16% five years earlier, according to health-information firm Manhattan Research, a unit of Decision Resources Inc. So far, the most common digital doctor services are the simplest ones, like paying bills, sending lab results and scheduling appointments. But patients like Ms. Rust are also using computers to deal with issues that usually require a trip to the doctor’s office.”

And this where they miss the point:

The article goes on to focus on reimbursement as they describe the demand for online care growing leading to “more health insurers begin paying doctors for treating patients virtually, albeit at a lower fee scale than for traditional in-office appointments.”
***

Perhaps the Internist, overwhelmed with 40 patients per day, cringes at the idea of answering a flurry of patient emails ‘on the house’. Maybe you can’t blame the insurance provider for looking for ways of keeping patients out of the office.

But what about doctors who simply want to provide a valuable service, build solid loyalty, and GIVE patients a compelling reason to refer family and friends?

Many of you already make this service available in your practices. Its even part of your marketing strategy. You have a website and email contact form (so you don’t get spam). Some of you collect emails and regularly broadcast to your patients.

A lot of patients will email you from vacation. Some will have questions best answered by your staff. Occasionally, you’ll get a note from a prospective patient- usually with a good question – who almost always becomes your new patient soon.

Many of us immediately see the downside. What ‘can of worms’ am I opening with this? Does my response need to be formal? I don’t have time for this. Is this patient going to abuse this/me? Patient loyalty is complex and not predictable, and therefore you cannot rely on this alone to build trust (perhaps true). Is this even HIPPA compliant?

Of course, in reality, patients are simply overwhelmed by your willingness to acknowledge them (in any format) and most-often they WILL follow your advise — whether you reassure them, answer a question, call in an RX, or send them to the nearest ER.

And more often than not, you’ll get a very well-articulated question from a patient pointing out a problem or concern that many other patients might be thinking about. If you can then capitalize on this by delivering your response to the greater patient base, you have just leveraged serious value.

Okay. Now worry with the tiny reimbursement from the insurance masters.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000…513900382.html

Read more about how optometry marketing and email can transform the way you practice!

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