3 Ways to Convert Prospects to Patients
Imagine standing in front of an audience of hundreds of potential patients. What would you say to them? How would you explain that you’re uniquely positioned to help them?
As every successful public speaker knows, first speak in terms of your audience’s needs. Start with what they want.
Yet this simple principle is often ignored when the situation is taken out of the auditorium and happens online.
You may have hundreds of people a week visiting your website, more than will ever walk through your office door or call your phone. What are they looking for? What happens if they can’t find the answers to their questions?
Luckily, some of them will call anyway to get answers and schedule a consult or appointment.
But most of them? They’re gone. Potential patients that you could have helped. Not because they got to your site and changed their minds, but because they made it to your site and couldn’t easily find what they wanted.
When it comes to elective healthcare, one of the top three questions asked by patients is “How much is it going to cost, and how can I pay for it?” While safety and outcomes are important, like it or not, cost is also a deciding factor for patients considering elective healthcare.
So how can you help? It’s easy. Make it easy for patients to find the answers to their “cost” questions.
1 - Make Your Financing/ Affordability Page Prominent
When categorizing navigation tabs, many practices choose to place their financing page under “Patient Tools” or “Practice Resources”. This makes sense from an organizational perspective. However, according to research shared with ALPHAEON CREDIT from numerous offices across all medical specialties, the most visited web pages on a practice’s website are (in order):
Homepage
About the Doctor(s)
Financing / Affordability
If your financing / affordability page is hidden in a drop-down, making your patients play hide-and-seek for one of your most popular pages can be a frustrating experience. The best solution is to prominently display your financing / affordability page as its own navigation tab on your home page. In addition, by addressing that cost is a concern upfront, you may find patients choose your practice over another.
““Practices that understand the value of promoting financing to their prospects often see the financing page hit more frequently. It’s interesting because even if the patient may not finance the procedure, the fact that it was in the messaging is often what helps them feel confident that they can take the first step....Fear and price are usually the two reasons people do not move forward so financing is a great way to help eliminate the cost/price issue.””
Manrique Custom Vision’s website is a perfect example of promoting financing well. They have financing as one of their top navigation tabs on their homepage. By placing this tab on their homepage, they are proactively addressing any cost concerns of potential patients.
You may be saying to yourself that your patients don’t need financing, as they typically can pay out-of-pocket. That may be true, but in saying that, you are making two distinct logical fallacies:
Survivorship Bias - Also called “Dead men tell no tales” or “You have not, because you ask not.” In short, you do not see the missed opportunities from people who chose another provider because you have not offered financing. Perhaps many otherwise perfect patients who didn’t schedule just needed a little help paying for their procedures.
False Dilemma - Also called “All-or-nothing fallacy” or “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.” By not highlighting financing, people who might otherwise be inclined don’t take advantage of it. Just because you have the means to pay out of pocket, doesn’t mean that’s always the best choice. People finance for reasons, including creative budgeting, spreading out the cost over months to improve their credit history, or just getting the procedure slightly sooner than they might otherwise.
Money Under 30 listed three times when it makes sense to pay using credit rather than cash including when deferred interest and low APR options are presented. As you know these examples are similar to patient financing promotional plans.
Plus, you never know when someone who isn’t interested in financing will tell a prospective patient that would be interested in financing. The more patients you tell, the faster the word will spread that the procedure or treatment they are considering is not out of anyone’s reach.
2 - Guide Patients Toward the Option You Want
There’s a term in psychology called “paralysis by analysis.” The term refers to the fact that when presented with choices, especially choices that aren’t especially clear, a portion of people will freeze.
The phrase may be relatively new, but the idea is ancient. In one of Aesop’s fables, a Fox boasts to a Cat that he is nimbler than the Cat. He’ll never be caught, the Fox says, because he has a hundred different ways to escape. The Cat admits that she has only one: she can climb a tree. When the Hunter comes, the Cat scurries up a tree, her only defense, while the Fox stops to deliberate about the many ways he could escape, and consequently is caught by the Hunter. Especially when you’re presenting information online, where a patient has hundreds of potential distractions, asking them to make an uninformed choice can be deadly for holding their interest.
This doesn’t mean you don’t mention other options at all, but clearly guide patients toward your preferred patient financing provider (which we hope is the one with the stronger approval rates and superior credit limits). Your engagement rate will increase as potential patients are no longer saddled with the emotional frustration of trying to make a decision based on nothing more than which colored logo they prefer.
Maybe you feel like you’re being too meddlesome in pushing a decision on a future patient? That’s understandable. No one likes to feel like they’re being forced into something. But consider this: one of the strategies Behavioral Science in the 21st Century uses for avoiding analysis paralysis, is to choose a trusted recommendation.
And who knows the best choice better than you? A patient may go through the process of medical financing once or twice in their lives. Your office might process dozens of patient payments a week. You are the trusted expert here, and patients appreciate hearing your recommendation.
3 - Call Patients to a (Simple) Action
Now it’s time to ask them to take the next step: do you want them to set up an appointment with you, or do you want them to walk in with financing in hand?
Obviously, it’s easier if everyone already has financing. It saves you time and means you’re already speaking with potential patients who can afford the procedure. In fact, that’s the path taken by many plastic surgery and dental offices.
On the other hand, it might make more sense for your practice to talk through the financing question at their first consultation. This is the route taken by many of our ophthalmology and dermatology offices. They recognize that there is value in guiding the patient through their financing in person, and applying for them in the office.
““It’s all about creating the relationship and providing a great experience for our patients.” “We walk them through the process of applying to show them how affordable the procedures we offer can be without any intimidating guesswork on their part.””
Neither is right or wrong; it’s all a matter of what you want for your patients and team.
Regardless, it’s time to ask for something. It’s time to turn interest into action. Either “Apply Now” if you want them to apply before coming in or “Call Us for Your Free Consult” if you want to guide them through your preferred patient financing vendor.
By asking them to take action, you’re testing them to see if they are interested in moving forward, but also laying out a specific next step.
On a website, a call-to-action button maybe your best attention-grabber. Wordstream recommends using buttons that are “large and legible”, feature “action packed“ text like “Apply” or “Call”, and are colorful enough that they stand-out from the rest of the website.
In Summary
Moving people from invisible website visitors to patients is a challenge, but one that can be made easier by laying out a specific path. Navigating from the homepage, to the doctor’s bio, to your financing options, to a call to action, makes the most sense.
Take a moment to look at your website and pretend to view it for the first time. Can you easily find those steps? Can you move through the process? Is there a clear “Call to Action” at the end?
If not, it might be time to reevaluate. Luckily, it might not even require a full site redesign. Simplifying your top menu and adding a contact form at the bottom of key pages might be enough to see a bump in website engagement.
The next time you redesign your site, keep these principles in mind, and you’ll be doing a better job of taking the “potential” off of “potential patients.”
