Once you’ve modernized your healthcare practice website to promote your brand and optimize your online presence, prospective patients will be able to find your information more easily online. But that might not directly translate to an increase of customers coming through your practice doors.
In order to turn searchers into customer bookings, you have to be persuasive. Online, you can accomplish this through conversion marketing. Conversion marketing tactics encourage people to take the desired action or “convert” into a customer. In this blog, we explain how healthcare providers can use conversion marketing to increase appointment bookings at their practices.
What Is a Conversion?
A conversion gets a customer to perform a desired action. This action will be specific to the business’ goals and industry. For a clothing retailer, this could involve buying a piece of apparel; for a subscription newsletter, it could be opening an email. For a healthcare provider, you are looking for prospective patients to book an appointment.
Here are three conversion tips to increase customer bookings on your practice website.
Look: 5 Reasons Your Website Visitors Might Not Be Converting Into Patients
Use Action-Oriented Language
Don’t beat around the bush when it comes to communicating with your customers. Using action-oriented language that tells a prospective patient exactly what to do is one of the best, and easiest, forms of conversion marketing.
If you want to increase the number of bookings and patients engaging with your practice, consider using these phrases on your practice website:
- Follow us on social media.
- Rate your practice experience.
- Subscribe to our newsletter.
- Schedule an appointment.
Having straightforward directions makes it clear what is being asked of the prospective patient and makes it easier for them to decide whether to take action.
Streamline Your Design with a Prominent CTA
The next step in conversion marketing is to create a call-to-action (CTA). It is important to keep in mind that streamlined pages are more likely to increase conversions or bookings than clunky designs.
Using action-oriented language, design a CTA button that will draw someone into your website. It should be prominently placed on the page, large in size, and draw the eye to it. Take a look at the example below.
Dr. Amersi’s CTA is brightly colored and placed in the center of the home page. When a visitor comes to her practice website for the first time, they quickly see the action ‘Book Online’ and can easily navigate to it.
Showcase Reviews and Testimonials
Getting a potential customer to book an appointment with a new healthcare provider can often take more convincing evidence than refined language and design. A patient’s interaction with a healthcare provider is a personal experience — show searchers what this experience might be like through positive reviews and testimonials.
By highlighting patient feedback on your website you’ll provide assurance of your services and satisfied customers, leading new patients to be more inclined to book an appointment.
Tackle Conversion Marketing at Your Practice
It’s not enough to rely on brand awareness to grow your practice. Conversion marketing techniques will drive potential customers to become users of your service, ultimately boosting your practice’s bottom line. With these three tactics, healthcare providers can use their healthcare practice website as a tool to increase appointment bookings from new patients.
Did you know Google offers local businesses an opportunity to showcase CTAs in their Google My Business listings? Learn more in the blog “Google Posts: Engage Prospects Directly in Search Results and Google Maps.”
