Your website is ranking well in the search engines and patients are contacting you. Their inquiries might be about pricing, procedure questions, or they’re ready to book their consultation. Then when you review your costs, you notice that all of those leads that contacted you through the Internet did not convert into getting surgery. It’s unfortunately a common theme in digital marketing for professional practices. So what can you do?
There are a number of things that you can do to increase the likelihood that a lead will turn into a consultation and then surgery. Some of these include:
- Getting sales training for your support staff answering the phone and responding to emails
- Calling leads back instead of emailing them
- Contacting your leads more than once to remind them you are there and can answer any questions they have (mymedleads.com says that making a 2nd phone call increased the chance of converting a lead into a patient by 87%)
But by far, the biggest tool you have to convert a lead into a patient is time.
Time is Your Greatest Ally in Converting Leads Into Patients
According to leadresponsemanagement.org, the likelihood that your lead actually converts into becoming a patient decreases every 5 minutes that you do not contact them back.
The odds of converting a lead into a patient are highest when you can contact them within the first 5 minutes. Those odds decrease 4 times when you contact them between 6-10 minutes. The odds drop 21 times when you contact them 30 minutes after they fill out your contact form.
Contacting them a day after they become a lead? The odds you convert a day-old lead into a patient are pretty much non-existent. As you can see, the longer you wait, the less likely they will become your patient.
Response Time From Creation by 5 min: Initial Dials To Leads That Become Contacted
Image credit: leadresponsemanagement.org
And it makes sense doesn’t it? MarketingProfs have a great way of explaining this phenomenon. They call it The Taco Stand Rule. You walk up to taco stand and order a taco, but the cashier tells you, “We’ll get your taco to you in 30 minutes.” Well, who wants to wait 30 minutes for a taco? Nobody! You’re going to find another taco stand that can get you what you want faster.
It is the same with leads coming from the Internet. Why is your lead going to wait for you to contact them? If you’re waiting more than 30 minutes to get in touch with them, they’ve already visited your competitors’ websites and have contacted them for information. If your competitors contact the lead back before you do, you just lost your lead and a potential patient!
“My Staff and I Don’t Have the Time to Contact Patients Within 5 minutes”
For many practices, contacting leads within 5 minutes poses some complications. You only have so much time to get your regular tasks done in the day, how can you just drop everything to talk to a lead that might or might not become a patient?
It can seem like an impossible goal. But the expectation of your potential patients has changed, and so must the way you operate your practice. It’s just how things go – we have to adjust over time. Somehow someway, you have to find the time to get back to these leads as quickly as possible. After all, how can your practice grow without more patients? And if you’re using digital marketing as your sole source of marketing, these digital leads are going to grow your practice more than any other source.
Digital Marketing Leads are Top Priority
To sum it up, the leads you are collecting from digital form submissions should be thought of as top priority and you should be getting back to them ASAP (within 5 minutes if possible). We encourage you to figure out a system that works for you, and is scalable for your practice. We predict your practice’s growth is going to skyrocket.
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