For an urgent care center to be financially successful today digital patient communication is an absolute must. Integrating patient communication into your urgent care marketing strategy has many benefits, including strengthening patient-provider relationships and improving patient access to health information — and it doesn’t have to be a financial burden when done right.
But as you’re fine-tuning your communications strategy to carry you through 2024 and beyond, it’s equally important to be aware of what not to do. Because when it comes to patient communications, there are common mistakes that urgent cares tend to make again and again.
Here are six common mistakes you’ll want to avoid:
1. Over-reliance on Email Communication
There’s no denying that email is a valuable tool for communicating with your urgent care patients. But you don’t want to over-rely on email communications, especially if it’s leading you to ignore other effective and important digital channels like SMS, apps, social media, and your website.
Email is useful for sending newsletters and other materials that help strengthen your relationships with patients, but you don’t want to overlook the fact that most research shows email is a crowded space. For example, open rates for text messages sit somewhere around 98%, compared with a 20% average open rate for email communications. And SMS sees a click-through rate of about 36%, compared to email’s much lower click-through rate of 2.5%.
2. Focusing Solely on New Patient Acquisition
If your urgent care’s digital marketing strategy is hyper focused on acquiring new patients, there’s a strong chance you’re leaving out an equally important area of business: patient retention. To bolster your financial health, it’s absolutely crucial that your patient communication plans include campaigns to re-engage existing and past patients. This helps increase the lifetime value (LTV) of each patient that passes through your doors, which also often equates to a healthy stream of revenue over time.
To maintain ongoing communication and nurture long-term relationships with existing and past patients, it’s important to prioritize follow-up messaging that encourages them to return. For help with this important aspect of patient outreach, consider integrating digital communications solutions that allow you to launch pre-built text messaging campaigns that specifically target past and existing patients, without straining staff resources.
3. Neglecting Automated Patient Communication
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by all the moving pieces of a modern cross-channel communications strategy, which could include email, your website, seemingly endless social media channels, text messaging, newsletters, and beyond. But if this is the case, you’re probably under-utilizing automated communications tools that can streamline all these different channels under one umbrella.
Without draining your budget, automated tools can help you manage and send appointment reminders, follow-up messages, and even preventive health tips directly to patients in a way that feels personalized. Even better, by using these tools to automate important aspects of your communications strategy, you’ll save time and eliminate stress among your administrative staff — especially if they are currently handling this all manually. And you can streamline your messaging to make sure you’re not overwhelming patients with different messages across every channel all at once.
4. Underutilizing (or not using) Text Messaging for Patient Engagement
Text messaging is one of the most effective tools out there for communicating with patients. With far higher open rates and click rates than email communications, texting improves patient engagement and helps you communicate important information without straining your finances or staff resources. Many patients also prefer text-based communications — in one study, patients reported that they prefer text messaging over email, phone calls, and letters sent in the mail. In this same study, 78% of patients said they’d like to receive appointment reminders via text. Texting is said to improve patient satisfaction and care compliance.
Consider using text messaging this year to bolster communications across many different aspects of the patient experience — from sending appointment reminders and health tips to communicating urgent updates, or even asking patients to leave a review after their visit.
5. Ignoring Integration
It’s all too common in the worlds of urgent care marketing and administration: You add one technology solution here, another there, and before you know it, you’re juggling multiple technology vendors and feeling overwhelmed by the workload of managing it all. Not only that, but all these different platforms and services across your tech stack drive up your operational and marketing costs. And the situation isn’t great for patients either, who may be on the receiving end of a fragmented and disjointed patient outreach strategy.
Integrating your patient communications allows for a much more cohesive communications strategy that spans your social media, websites, patient portals, and other channels.
6. Making Patient Communication too Generic
Generic, impersonal messages are easy for patients to ignore and even easier to forget. And when you’re looking to develop relationships with patients and encourage them to return to your urgent care, this isn’t ideal. In contrast, personalizing your patient communications has the power to make each interaction more impactful.
One way to avoid the pitfalls of generic communication is to leverage patient data to tailor your communications. For example, you can incorporate your patient’s name into your emails and text messages and reference dates of their past or upcoming appointment. This level of personalization can help establish trust and loyalty. But you need to be sure to remain HIPAA-compliant, which means (but isn’t limited to) making sure not to use your patients personal health information and other sensitive data without permission. You also need to ensure your tech vendors — including your text messaging platform — are HIPAA compliant, which includes making sure all messages you send are encrypted.
Key Takeaways
As you revamp your urgent care marketing and communication strategies this year, be sure to avoid:
- Over-relying on email communication.
- Dedicating the vast majority of your marketing focus to patient acquisition.
- Neglecting automated systems.
- Underutilizing text messaging.
- Ignoring integrated solutions that unify your tech stack.
- Sending generic communications.
For a far more balanced, strategic, and effective approach to digital patient communication, focus on incorporating personalized and automated technology solutions that help you improve patient engagement and patient satisfaction, and increase the overall lifetime value of each patient that walks through your center’s doors.
Learn how Solv Messaging lets you send patients industry-tested campaigns to up level your re-engagement marketing instantly.
