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As a patient, when was the last time you received an important and informative message from your healthcare provider to remind you of your health checkup? 

Truth be told, some healthcare organizations still find it hard to use technology to improve their patients’ experiences.

Healthcare marketing automation is often the best solution. It helps expand your reach, nurture leads, improve your patient acquisition, and grow your practice faster. 

However, some may still be concerned with potential data security breaches and find integrating these new systems into their existing ones challenging.

Even so, let’s be realistic: traditional healthcare marketing is no longer enough to survive this increasingly competitive and saturated industry. Growing your web presence and adapting to digital healthcare marketing are keys to your growth.

So, is it worth the investment? We’ll discuss all the benefits of marketing automation to your practice in this article. Keep reading!

What is Automation in Healthcare Marketing?

Automation in healthcare marketing uses technology-powered marketing campaigns to enable healthcare professionals to personalize their engagement with previous, current, and potential patients based on predetermined behaviors.

An automation platform lets you identify a particular group of prospective patients based on their customer journey stage. It allows you to send automated and targeted messages to guide these people to step forward to another level of their journey.

With automation tools, you can plan for different potential customer actions and create a predetermined response. For instance, what will happen if someone visits your website? Will you direct them to answer health surveys? Will you send personalized informative content? Or will you link them to your appointment booking form?

If executed properly, these actions can be cost-efficient for your healthcare marketing initiatives.

Here are some of the things you can automate:

• Patient scheduling
• Appointment reminders
• Patient feedback form
• Email marketing
• Social media marketing
• Blogging
• Search engine advertising

What Can Marketing Automation Do?

1. Simplify Your Sales Process Through Marketing Automation Tools 

From instilling brand awareness to prospective customers to set appointments, the process of converting leads into patients is often tricky. 

The use of tools for automation marketing like a patient portal and appointment schedulers shortens the time needed to make sales and complete a patient journey. 

2. Improve Customer Service and Patient Experience

Communication is vital in measuring customer service performance. With automation, you can communicate with high volumes of patients about things they need and want to know in an efficient and timely manner. 

Automated newsletters and emails are also effective ways in keeping your customers aware of the updates and developments in your organization. 

Sending automated emails of encouragement, reminders, post-diagnosis notes, and suggestions can help them take better care of their health conditions, take their prescribed medicines, and follow other physician instructions.

3. Save Money and Time 

With automated marketing, you can reach out to more patients in multiple channels at once, saving time and money. 

Read: Authoritative, Omnichannel Marketing: Reach Your Patients (Where They Are)

Scheduling content ahead of time is easy. Data collection and storage can be done automatically and digitally (goodbye paperwork!). With these functions, your team can focus on more important tasks, take better care of your patients, and improve the quality of your healthcare business.

4. Provide Consistent Messaging

With the right automated email marketing tools, you can increase your patient engagement efficiently and consistently. You can send consistent messages (blogs, e-newsletters) to your customers regularly, making your healthcare brand more remarkable to them. 

Since these are automated, content creation can be done with minimal reliance on office staff execution. 

Read: The Content Ocean Strategy: Turning 1 Article Into a Sea of Online Content

5. Increase Patient Engagement

You can increase patient engagement and retention rates by sharing the right information on digital HCP engagement platforms at the right time. Rather than sending general content messages that may or may not apply to all recipients, you can target information to specific patients under relevant health situations. 

Your patients will appreciate receiving answers to their potential questions and concerns, even when they aren’t asking. Doing so will create lasting patient relationships and make you a trusted healthcare expert to them.

If your patients are satisfied with these, the chances of referring you to their loved ones and friends are high too. They’ll also leave you good patient feedback on the web!

6. Analyze and Improve the Performance of Your Healthcare Marketing Campaign

Marketing automation tools let healthcare providers gain in-depth insights about their customers and campaign data.

Through automated processes, you can test, track, and analyze your campaigns shortly. You can get a more accurate picture of your target audience, the efficiency of every aspect of your strategies, and the growth of your conversion rates across your different services. 

This benefit allows you to determine potential actions you can take to improve your strategies. 

Additionally, you can use and analyze your customer data to gain new leads and business opportunities.

7. Competitive Edge

The healthcare industry is not yet fully automated. Some providers are still hesitant to instill automation technologies into their present marketing campaigns.

Jumpstarting on digital marketing automation reaps you better rewards than those who would rather not take the challenge.

Maximize The Benefits of Healthcare Marketing Automation Today!

In this digital age, healthcare messages must be seen and heard by the right audience at the right time. This will boost their awareness of your brand and encourage them to move forward with their patient journey with your practice. 

If you’re not using marketing automation tools in your practice yet, now is the time to take advantage of their benefits and become a sought-after institution in the healthcare industry.

Here are some strategies when using marketing automation to boost your patient acquisition and engagement:

• Automate patient and physician referrals
• Automate online listings management (location data, services, office address)
• Automate email and text messaging (including birthday and holiday e-cards of your patients)
• Automate your testimonials page
• Automate online reputation management, RFP response, and reviews
• Automate patient feedback using AI-based sentiment analysis
• Get insights into your patient needs and preferences

To make the most out of your strategies, consult an experienced healthcare marketer.

Got any questions about marketing automation in healthcare? Ask us in the comments section below!