In a world of seamless web accessibility, it’s imperative for you to adopt a patient-first mentality to achieve high patient retention rates.
By focusing on your aesthetic practice’s brand, you can stand out from the competition in the ever-competitive plastic surgery industry.
If your services are spectacular and you manage to blow patients out of the water every time, then, you’re likely going to gain critical acclaim.
On the flip side, if you don’t take initiative to manage your online reputation, you’re likely going to have a bad rap and may need to perform cosmetic surgery reputation management.
Since this piece is all about keeping your head up, we’ll be looking to share insights on how you can land more great reviews and referrals as part of your reputation management for plastic surgeons strategy.
1. Automation Tools
Email marketing is a powerful asset when it comes to nurturing patients and one of many plastic surgery marketing strategies that work today.
Notably, while a single email blast can give your practice great publicity, to get the most out of email marketing, it’s best to go for a drip campaign.
This is because drip campaigns are tailored to deliver the right content to prospective patients’ right when they need it. In doing so, you can build long-lasting relationships with patients that will translate into more sales numbers.
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Schedule A ConsultationHaving shared this, it would be remiss if we didn’t mention how easy automation makes things. With a great email automation tool, you don’t have to manually, create, send, or monitor your drip campaigns. Not only does this mean less work for you to keep tabs on every conversation, but it also ensures that all prospective patients get emails to suit their position in the sales funnel.
2. Email Composition
You don’t have to overthink the first email you write up asking for a review. It’s best to be concise about what you want. For this, you can kick things off with something like, “Thank you for your business. Would you mind sparing a moment of your time and giving us your feedback?”
As you can see, brevity can get a lot of things covered.
To ensure that you’re able to know from the get-go those who are willing to participate, we recommend featuring two simple buttons – a thumbs up and a thumbs down. While these two buttons can comfortably capture patients’ position about your business, you can take things up a notch by linking their responses to secondary review sites.
The thumbs-up button can lead visitors to your site to a review site of choice e.g. a social media platform. On the other hand, the thumbs down button can lead them to a form on your website in a private survey where they can air out their frustrations.
By implementing cosmetic surgery reputation management tools as part of marketing aesthetic services, you will be able to come to terms with what patients at your practice like the most and what just doesn’t work. Having this information will put you at an advantage since you will be able to tailor the patient experience to be more pleasant.
3. Follow Up
The odds are that patients who are satisfied with your services (those who clicked the thumbs up button) will be more receptive to the idea of recommending you to others.
Knowing this, you need to feel free and contact them with a follow-up email asking for a referral. As the research shows, 35-50% of sales tend to go to the vendors who respond first. Remarkably, your odds of success improve if you’re able to follow up on web leads within 5 minutes.
Sales numbers aside, follow-ups tend to enhance the patient experience. Communicating with patients after a sale has the benefit of allowing you to know what their pain points were. If there were hitches, you can make tweaks that are geared at making the overall patient experience better.
Foresight – Cosmetic Surgery Reputation Management
By letting patients know that you’re willing to assist them long after the sale is made, you can effectively avoid negative online reviews. This approach can help you save a ton of funds that would otherwise be lost in refunds.
The key thing here is to be objective about growing your business. Sure, you may offer excellent plastic surgery services, but, the truth is nothing is flawless at conception. There’s always room for improvement and the best you can do is work towards enhancing how patients relate to your brand.
Since follow-ups happen after a sale is done, your patients will be more inclined to believe that they can trust you.
Importantly, you need to be careful about who you send the follow-up emails to. If a patient down-voted your services, then it’s best to avoid sending more automated emails to them. This is because further probing such patients could have the opposite effect of what you want.
As a rule of thumb (both literally and figuratively in this case), only request referrals from patients who enjoyed your services.
4. Keep Pushing
It’s a given that not all your follow up emails will get a response.
When this happens, it’s doesn’t always mean that your patients aren’t interested in your proposal. Maybe they’re just busy.
To ensure that your message gets out there, we recommend sending an optimal of 2-3 follow up emails. The trick here is to space out the emails. You can give prospective patients about 2-3 days to think stuff over before you can send out a successive email.
Getting Started
Cosmetic surgery reputation management is an important aspect of business today. Having highlighted how important reviews and referrals are to the sales funnel, you need to come up with a strategy to ensure patients stay happy and they enjoy your services.
Given how time-intensive the plastic surgery industry may be, you may not have time to do the marketing yourself. To assist you, we recommend embracing email automation tools and hiring an aesthetic consultant.
Since the learning curve may still be steep even with such apps, it’s safer to take on the services of an aesthetic marketing consultant to come up with a system that suits your practice.