Whether you run an urgent care clinic, dental office, or any other type of medical facility, patient retention is essential for long-term success. Studies show that it costs five times more to attract new customers than it is to keep existing ones. Patients who regularly visit your facility are also more likely to recommend your practice to others. As experts in web design and digital marketing, Barta Media Group has outlined 5 ways your website can help you improve patient retention rates.
1. Always Remember to Update Your Contact Information
Any time your contact information or office hours change, patients need to know. Sending email blasts, updating your website, social profiles, and directory listings will help inform patients and prevent potential mishaps. You never want to lose a patient due to something as simple as an outdated phone number.
You should also notify patients of any special hours for holidays, events, etc. Google My Business provides an easy way to share this information and even displays it in the search results.
2. Keep Branding Consistent
Brand identity may not be very high on your priority list, but it can have a big impact on your business. Keeping your company name, logo, taglines, and colors consistent will prevent confusion among patients and make it easier for them to remember you.
Font styles and sizes also play an important role. Everything on your website needs to be easy to read, especially if some of your patients are visually-impaired. Find a couple of fonts that you like and stick with them. Avoid fonts that are too busy, and make sure to break up large chunks of text with white-space, images, or videos.
3. Make Everything as Easy as Possible for Your Patients
Every business is going to have difficult customers, but the healthcare industry is in a league of its own. Complications from insurance, long wait times, appointment cancellations, and much more can frustrate even the nicest patient. Add in the fact that many patients don’t feel well while they’re visiting you and it’s easy to see why they may be short-tempered.
In order to keep the confusion and problems to a minimum, you need to make the entire patient experience as easy as possible. Thankfully, there are a number of ways your website can help with this.
- Providing downloadable forms
- Allowing patients to schedule appointments
- Making test results accessible online.
- Sending appointment reminders via text or email
4. Ongoing Website Maintenance & Improvements
Gone are the days when simply having a website was enough to grow your business. In order to get the most benefit from your site, you (or your webmaster) need to keep up with regular maintenance and identify areas of improvement. This will help not only the user experience of your site but its SEO as well.
Any broken links or images need to be fixed as soon as they are discovered. They not only look unprofessional but also may result in missed opportunities. Deleted content and pages from older versions of your website need to be redirected to the corresponding pages on your current site. By doing so, anybody who bookmarked pages that no longer exist will be taken to a current page with the same information.
Site speed is another important factor. Recent research indicates that 47% of users expect a website to load within two seconds, and many users will leave your site if it takes longer than three seconds. There are a variety of ways you can improve the speed of your website such as:
- Optimizing all images
- Enabling Gzip compression
- Leveraging browser caching
- Minifying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
- Reducing server response time
While many other factors contribute to site speed, these actions should make a very noticeable improvement.
5. Announce New Services and Hires
Whenever you start offering a new service or promotion, patients should be informed. Email blasts and social media posts are easy and effective ways of spreading the message. Be sure to explain the benefits of the new service, how it works, and answer any other questions patients may have.
Any significant new hires should be announced as well. Patients place a lot of trust in their doctors, so learning about new staff members, their credentials, and a little bit of personal information can improve patient loyalty. It’s also beneficial to update your About Page with team photos and short biographies about each employee.
An Affordable and Effective Solution
While a great website will not prevent all your patients from switching practices, it does provide a simple and cost-effective way to improve patient retention. People are spending more and more time on the web these days, which makes any business’s website and overall online presence key to its success. Browse through your website and see if you can identify any potential areas of improvement.
Think your website could be severing your patients better? Schedule a free consultation with us today to learn what Barta Media Group can do to help!