4 techniques to attract more patients to your clinic

When a clinic wants to increase its income and profits, it usually focuses and concentrates its efforts mainly on attracting more new patients to the office directly, aiming only at channeling and promoting the arrival of new people by itself.

But it is important to note that this is not the only way to earn more money or attract more patients to a clinic.

There are many ways in which doctors can improve their financial results and in our experience, we can tell you that these are the most effective alternatives:

1. The strategic education of current patients.

Education of current or active patients should not be limited to just advising on health care or any particular area.

It can go further and serve as an effective means of communication that allows physicians to increase engagement on the part of current patients; at the same time, it can serve as a means of improving the patient-specialist relationship.

Having strong relationships with patients can allow you to ensure patient loyalty to your clinic or practice and can help you build much more trust and credibility that promotes referrals from your current patients.

A patient who completely trusts the professional abilities of doctors and, at the same time, has a solid relationship with them, will be much more likely to recommend them, and this will allow them to attract more new patients indirectly without the need for commercial efforts (such as advertising) that naturally have costs.

In addition, patient education does not have to be limited to just what a doctor can teach or explain to patients at the time of their visit, which is what many doctors do.

Doctors can also strategically rely on means of communication such as email or social networks to extend their educational activities and not only be limited to the moment when a patient attends a consultation.

Thus, having the opportunity to strengthen relationships and show much more commitment to their patients and, thus, create the optimal conditions to be able to promote a greater number of recommendations thanks to current patients.

2. Create modern referral generation plans

Many doctors choose to wait for the recommendations to arrive on their own or simply limit themselves to asking their patients to recommend them to their family or friends.

That worked well in the past, but currently, in this modern environment that is so competitive, the issue has become much more complicated and many more actions are required to promote and increase the recommendations or referred patients.

To achieve this, the creation of incentive plans can be considered where current patients benefit if they promote the recommendations and facilitate the attraction of new patients.

For example: Basic services such as free consultations or check-ups can be granted to current patients who recommend the clinic or office to new patients.

These incentives can even apply to certain family members (spouses or children) to make them even more attractive to current patients.

In this way, through incentives, a clinic or office will undoubtedly be creating a greater number of new patients who will arrive through recommendations thanks to the incentive plan executed exclusively among current patients.

3. Improve patient retention and follow-ups.

Many doctors fail to see that by retaining patients and implementing effective follow-ups, they can also grow more easily in income.

Many do not take full advantage of it because they are not aware of it or because they simply tend to focus solely on trying to directly generate and attract new patients by targeting only outside their clinics or offices.

The lack of effective monitoring by many clinics or offices is very serious and ridiculous, especially since it is a factor that can be controlled and managed 100%, but sometimes it is not given due importance or priority.

Sometimes the follow-up is well planned in theory, but in practice, there are small factors that cause that when reaching a certain stage, the follow-up stops being carried out or is not done properly.

Sometimes the problem is so simple and it is because the person in charge of the follow-ups is too busy with the day-to-day in the clinic or taking care of other patients.

This means that they do not have enough time to be able to continue effectively monitoring all patients. But in reality, the problem is not that they do not have enough time, the problem lies in the lack of organization and in the fact that there are no defined mechanisms that ensure the continuity of the follow-ups when they get difficult.

You have to give more importance to follow-ups, you have to think about better organizing the topic, implementing a free CRM is the most successful in these cases.

4. Have an optimized website

Many doctors believe that a website is useless or of little use. Some consider that few patients actually reach the clinic thanks to their website and therefore de-prioritize it.

And they are right, their websites do not generate many new patients, but that is not because the websites are not good generators of new patients, it is because their sites are poorly developed, they are not updated and they are not fully optimized.

A website by itself can become a constant generator of new patients, but for this to be possible, the website must be highly optimized, that is, it must be built in such a way that it complies with the main guidelines that allow improving its web positioning.

A site with good web positioning can be easily found by potential patients who live in your area.

In simpler words, it is the one that when people in your locality search for doctors or clinics online, has the necessary qualifications that cause people to find it easily.

If this is a topic that interests you (and it should) you should check how your website is structured.

Tell us about your experience! Sure we can help you even more!