Holiday Marketing for Healthcare Practices
- Automate Patient Communication: Use email and SMS reminders to reduce no-shows, tailor messages to patient preferences, and free up staff to focus on in-office care.
- Offer Flexible Online Booking: Empower patients to book, reschedule, or cancel 24/7 through online portals, improving visibility and reducing scheduling chaos.
- Promote Openings & Seasonal Offers: Leverage social media and email to fill last-minute cancellations, highlight wellness specials, and maintain steady revenue during the holidays.
When you work in healthcare long enough, you get used to a baseline of patients who either cancel or reschedule appointments. It’s why the holidays are often a rough time for providers: because even the most reliable clients can be caught up in the holiday bustle.
If you’re an optometrist or a chiropractor, the holiday rush may only impact your workload so much, but if you work in a med spa or as a personal trainer, you can really start to feel the revenue loss by the time the holidays roll around.
Appointment gaps don’t just mean lost revenue, it means that your staff can’t efficiently structure their workload. They might feel entirely overwhelmed one day and disheartened the next. Here, we’ll look at how to streamline your appointment setting without spending hours making phone calls to reschedule (or, worse, increasing your cancellation penalties).
Automated Communication
Automated communication, such as texts or email reminders, is a popular way to reduce no-shows. It keeps your patients in the loop while removing a time-consuming (and often error-prone) task from your staff. Here are our healthcare marketing tips to increase client communication during the most hectic time of the year:
Honor Your Customer Channel Preferences
Communicate with the customer based on their channel preferences, as opposed to the highest open rates. While emails are often easily ignored when compared to text-message open rates, it’s important not to overstep the line.
If the customer prefers email, you can damage the relationship if you send several text messages. This tip can also encourage patients to share additional information with you, such as their regular phone number as opposed to their Google Voice phone number.
If your customers are open to both email and text reminders, consider mixing up your strategy based on the messaging. For example, you might send two general email reminders before the appointment and one urgent text message reminder on the day of.
Value-Packed Messaging
When most clients are used to automated messaging, it’s critical to pack in useful information into each email or text message — without overwhelming the customer. Time, date, location, cancellation policy, provider name, and duration can be useful to help prevent cancellations or no-shows.
Some providers might also include graphics as well to entice their patients to keep their appointments. For example, a med spa might include a photo of a fresh-faced party thrower to promote their Botox services.
Timely Reminders
While you can’t perfectly pinpoint a client’s schedule to know exactly when to send an automated reminder, you can implement a strategy that actively keeps their appointments fresh in their minds.
For example, a healthcare marketing specialist might suggest that you send an automated email or text 48 hours before the appointment, as well as a friendly reminder on the day of. This can help the client rearrange and adjust busy holiday schedules, giving them just enough time to squeeze in your service.
Inject Empathy and Build Relationships
You can adjust your automated messaging based on the season, which can create stronger connections with clients who feel entirely consumed by last-minute holiday tasks. A few words in your automated communication can go a long way to prompt clients to cancel or reschedule if they can’t make the appointment. In other words, instead of threatening customers with a cancellation fee, you might stress that you’re feeling the pressure too.
Ideally, automated communications free up your staff’s ability to build stronger real-world relationships. More face-time can not only reduce cancellations — because clients have a personal connection to the practice — it can also help your staff actively promote services without coming across as pushy.
Stronger relationships can, in turn, strengthen your automated communication, making it a symbiotic way to improve all customer experiences. For example, you can implement customer feedback from casual client conversations to improve your appointment reminder messaging.
Online Booking
Online booking is becoming more ubiquitous in healthcare, but it’s by no means universal. Smaller practices can give themselves an edge if they set up convenient portals that allow clients to schedule and cancel appointments according to the practice’s policies.
Better Visibility
Online booking provides more visibility into your scheduling system, allowing staff to see not just where the gaps or miscommunications are occurring but what they can do to fill them. For example, if you’re seeing the highest concentration of cancellations in the three days leading up to the holiday, you might consider an additional automated reminder to patients about your rescheduling policy.
Streamlined Communication
It can be difficult for some clients to cancel services, especially if they’re long-time customers who enjoy visiting the practice or facility. This can lead to unexpected no-shows and frustration with underutilized work hours.
With a convenient booking portal, where customers can book, reschedule, and cancel 24/7, you give people time and space to update the practice without forcing them to talk to a staff member or leave a voicemail. They can instantly log in when they’re ready, click a few buttons, and even provide a short explanation from wherever they are — even if they remember to do it at 2 a.m.
Consider Your Schedule
When every healthcare practice has its own rhythms, you might spend a little time figuring out where and how to adjust patterns when it makes sense. For example, during the heaviest cancellation periods, you might implement walk-in or emergency services, setting aside a concrete number of appointments for urgent care or for clients who like to book appointments on a whim. When people are putting up their own Christmas trees or climbing roofs to string up lights, you can see how a pain management specialist can expand their business when unexpected injuries pop up.
Even before you adjust your hours, you can experiment with wait lists as a way to test the waters, allowing people to sign up so you can gauge demand. (Just keep in mind that if you don’t have enough cancellations, you could end up frustrating people who sign up for a wait list and never end up making an appointment.)
Promote Availability
Once you’ve established an efficient way to fill time from inevitable cancellations or no-shows over the holidays, you can send out email or text reminders about open slots. For example, a dermatologist might use the subject line “last chance to refresh your skin for that holiday glow” as an effective promotional tool.
Or you can use social posts, including Facebook and Instagram, to appeal to current and new patients alike. Social posts can be an extremely effective tool, especially if you’re offering a pain-relief component or a relaxation element. The more hectic the holidays get, the more likely your patients are to take advantage of appointment gaps.
Stepping Up Your Healthcare Marketing Services
Even under the best of circumstances (and the most automated of systems) implementing healthcare marketing techniques is time-consuming. In addition, when every practice is different, there isn’t a one-size fits all strategy.
If marketing is a task that you can only get around to ‘once in a while’, a dedicated team can pick up the slack. Setting up automated reminders and a booking system may not be rocket science, but it can also be a struggle to implement it, deliver real value, and maintain it as digital needs and preferences change.
Surefire Local can help you keep everything up and running via:
- Google Reserve Integration: This service allows patients to book directly from your Google Business Profile without making a call. This takes the pressure off people who don’t want to spend several minutes waiting for the receptionist to pull up the calendar or leave a voicemail and wait for a return answer. Customers receive a handy confirmation that their request was processed immediately.
- SMS reminders: With text message reminders, healthcare practices enjoy up to 98% open rate, making it easier for patients to confirm or reschedule appointments on their phone. For example, you might ask all patients to reply Yes/No to whether they can make their upcoming appointment, so you can plan around their responses.
The goal of a marketing appointment setter is to give you more time to deliver care. Whether this is your receptionist asking your patients about their day or your doctors crafting a personalized treatment plan, these tasks are far more valuable than spending your time chasing down patients and chastising them for their failure to plan around the holidays.
Surefire Local can’t stop the chaos of the season, but we can give you effective tools without having to hire a full-time marketing specialist. We serve healthcare and wellness practices of every variety, including optometrists, fitness centers, and cosmetic surgeons, so that they can strengthen their revenue and provide better client care.
Want to see how to reduce your appointment gaps and maintain client relations during every season? Click here to schedule a demo today!
