Generate More Patient Appointments from Your Website in 4 Simple Steps
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A Checklist for Creating a Website That Converts
Your website can, and SHOULD, be converting visitors into paying, loyal patients for your practice. It’s quite possible though that this is not your current situation. After hours, months or maybe even years struggling to prove your website is generating revenue, you might feel like throwing in the towel. Don’t do it! There are simple steps you can take to transform your website into a patient-converting machine and we’re going to break those down for you.
In order to create a website that converts, you need to look at your website from a different perspective.
We’ve been working with health and wellness providers for over a decade and we’ve learned a few things in that time. While marketing has changed dramatically, there are a few things that remain constant:
Even though making things easy seems like a no-brainer, many brands continue to complicate the process and create friction in the prospective patients online journey.
This can get really expensive (think paid advertising, extensive SEO backlinking strategies, etc) and it overlooks the more immediate, lower-budget options available to wellness providers like you, such as increasing the conversions of existing website visitors into patients.
If you’re like most wellness providers, your website is doing little to nothing for you right now. So, there is no better day than today to make a change. Let’s dive in!
While we’re not saying you should avoid these outbound tactics completely, there are quick, low-cost steps you can take TODAY to start driving more patient appointment or consultation requests from the website you already have in place.
This guide and checklist is designed to help you identify the top four ways to convert more of your website visitors into high quality leads. And many of these tactics can be completed THIS WEEK.
Consumers are more likely to take the next step when you make it EASY for them to take the next step. Not all of your website visitors are converting into patients.
In addition, while most websites convert well below 50% of their visitors into contacts (and less than 10% of their visitors into patients), brands tend to focus the majority of their digital marketing initiatives on driving NEW traffic to their website.
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- UNDERSTAND YOUR AUDIENCE
- CREATE STELLAR COPY
- IMPROVE ON-SITE CALLS-TO-ACTION
- DETERMINE KPIS & SETUP TRACKING
- THE OPTIMIZATION CHECKLIST
UNDERSTAND YOUR AUDIENCE
The first and most important step in creating a website that drives patient appointment requests is understanding your audience. In order to get your visitors to take action, you need to understand what motivates them to take action. This can be a mix of needs, goals, challenges, demographics and basic buying behaviors.
Pull from your experience in the health and wellness industry and the experience with your brand. Collect the knowledge of other members on your team, too, including customer service, sales, billing and providers. This step can also include digging into online conversations, reviews and support forums in your industry.
Include prospects, patients and past patients in your interviews to get a mix of perspective and insights. Ask them questions about their values, viewpoints and beliefs, challenges, pain points, needs, anxieties, decision-making process, and benefits that are most important to them.
To get a better understanding of your audience, follow this four step process:
A. START WITH WHAT YOU ALREADY KNOW.
B. INTERVIEW YOUR AUDIENCE.
C. COMPLETE YOUR KEYWORD RESEARCH
D. CREATE YOUR PATIENT PROFILES
CREATE COPY THAT CONVERTS
Once you’ve completed step one, you’ll have a better understanding of how to reach your ideal patient with your website copy. Specifically, you’ll know which patient benefits to highlight first, how to address the pain points of your visitors and what to say to alleviate anxieties and hesitations. This type of copy will help drive them to take action. Take it one step further and incorporate patient quotes from your interviews to create copy in your patients’ exact language. This will transform your content into useful and inspiring copy that establishes an emotional connection with your website visitor.
Here are 4 additional tips to keep in mind as you craft the perfect messages for your health and wellness website:
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- Useful content, increased positive emotions and increased comfort = more patient conversions from your website.
- Your content must build trust and authority.
- Engage your website visitors by appealing to the human brain.
- Give proof and context of any claims that you make.
- Tell the reader what to do next.
- A. BUILD TRUST & AUTHORITY
- B. APPEAL TO THE HUMAN BRAIN
- C. GIVE PROOF & CONTEXT
- D. TELL THE READER WHAT TO DO NEXT
INCLUDE SPECIFIC + FREQUENT CALLS-TO-ACTION
This leads beautifully into our next point. You can’t expect every visitor to know what they should do next. For this reason, it’s critical that you guide them to the steps and the solutions that are best for their needs. You must guide them to the right resources on your website with specific and targeted ‘next step’ actions, like scheduling a consultation or appointment.
First, let’s address the individual who’s browsing and collecting information to help them make their decision. These individuals may not be ready, at this point in time, to schedule an appointment. But, they may be ready to subscribe to receive more information or download an offer that provides them valuable details on a specific condition or service they’re interested in learning more about. For these ‘browsers’ be sure to include calls-to-action on your site that allow them to convert from visitors into leads.
From there, you can nurture these contacts with engaging valuable content both through your blog subscription itself and more targeted email nurturing.
Make your calls-to-action frequent, hyper-specific and targeted to the individual buyer based on where they are in their decision process.
A. THE ‘I’M HERE FOR INFO’ VISITORS:
B. THE ‘ON THE FENCE’ VISITORS:
C. THE ‘READY TO BUY’ VISITORS:
CHAT TOOL PRO TIP: Select a website chat tool that allows you to load premade questions and responses to help educate your visitor and streamline the sales process!
If you don’t have website tracking in place, remember that the fewer form fields you have the better. Only ask for what you absolutely need in this first step and collect the rest later. The more open text fields and dropdowns you have, the more you risk lowering your conversion rate and losing potential patients.
Did you know that adding just 2 more fields can decrease conversion rates by 10%? So, if you have extra fields and are generating 50 leads/month, removing two fields can result in an additional 5 leads per month. How simple is that? For some wellness providers, this could also mean tens of thousands of dollars in additional patient opportunities!
WEBSITE PRO TIP: Fix your forms
ESTABLISH KPIs + SETUP TRACKING
Last, but certainly not least, you need to establish your key performance indicators (KPIs) and performance tracking. Whether you’re managing all of your marketing in-house or outsourcing to a digital marketing agency, determine which metrics you’ll be paying attention to in order to gauge the success of your campaigns. This could be the number of appointment requests or consultations requested through the website each month.
You also need to have appropriate tracking setup to monitor these metrics. If you’re using something like Google Analytics, set up conversion goals to understand which of your sources or campaigns is driving conversions.
For more comprehensive monitoring and closed-loop reporting, consider a platform like HubSpot.
This list includes just a handful of examples we have found to be important to health and wellness brands. What you ultimately track should be dependent upon your brand’s goals. For example, if your goal is increasing your patient appointment requests through an optimized website, focus first on Total Monthly Appointment Requests and move from there to supporting metrics like Visitor-to-Appointment Request Conversion Rate and Total Website Visits.
Some of these metrics may require more than digital tracking (i.e. patient acquisition cost). Ensure the appropriate individuals on your team are looped into the conversation, understand your brand’s goals and their roles in either helping to accomplish those, or managing and reporting on specific metrics.
Whether you’re getting 100 visits or 100,000 visits to your website each month, there is always an opportunity to drive higher-impact results and additional revenue. Most wellness providers we work with have limited resources to invest in marketing and sales – so use what you have to optimize your website the best way possible with these 4 steps.
When you optimize your website in the right way, it’s similar to hiring a salesperson to work for your brand around the clock, every day of the week, for the fraction of the cost. Start taking these steps today and start reaping the rewards for your brand. It’s just that simple.
Finally, you’ve created a website that converts. Interested in seeing how much revenue you’re missing out on with your website? Let us complete a Website Diagnostic for you. Schedule a discovery call with our team today.
Here is a comprehensive checklist of the items we just covered. We recommend you download and print this so you can reference it regularly:
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- I’ve collected and compiled what we already know (sales, customer service, etc)
- I’ve interviewed my audience (prospects, customers and past customers)
- I’ve completed my keyword research
- I’ve created my Brand Companions® profile and/or my Evaluation Document
- My content builds trust and authority
- I’ve engaged visitors by appealing to the human brain
- I’ve given proof and context
- I’ve provided the reader with the next step
- I’ve updated content to address the ‘I’m here for info’ visitor
- I’ve updated content to address the ‘I’m on the fence’ visitor
- I’ve updated content to address the ‘I’m ready to buy’ visitor
- I UNDERSTAND MY AUDIENCE
- I’VE CREATED STELLAR COPY
- I HAVE FREQUENT & TARGETED CALLS-TO-ACTION
- I’VE ESTABLISHED KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
- I’VE STEPPED UP ONGOING TRACKING
