Rebranding or natural falloff?

One of the side effects of our rebranding from RevaHealth.com to WhatClinic.com is that visitors who originally came to the site before the middle of August last year generally aren’t aware of the name change. Over the last few months we’ve been going back to visitors who didn’t successfully choose a clinic on their first attempt and asking them to come back and try again. As you can see from the chart above, those who were already familiar with the name change convert significantly better than those who weren’t.

There is of course a natural falloff in conversion rates, as you can see even in the difference between visitors from November and visitors from September, but I’d be inclined to attribute most of the step fall in return visitor conversion to the name change itself. It’s just another thing to keep in mind if you consider rebranding your own website.

One thing we’ve discovered again and again here in RevaHealth.com is that it’s never worth assuming that you understand what your website’s visitors want when they arrive. In the past when we added new features we looked at a couple of headline metrics to make sure we hadn’t broken everything, and hopefully improved a key metric like conversion rate or reduced another like bounce rate.

Google Analytics & Website Optimiser

Nowadays we try and go into a bit more depth about things, making more subtle improvements to parts of the site that some visitors see and others don’t, and this requires more fine grain measurement than before. A key tool that we’ve been using for years now is Google Analytics. If you’ve not been using it (or something similar) on your site up to now, I can recommend it wholeheartedly. Right now we’re using it primarily for page tracking, but we’re hoping to use it for goal tracking and even event tracking in the near future.

Google Website Optimer

Another free tool from Google we’ve just started using is their Website Optimiser. On a site like ours where we get enough traffic and enough conversions in a day or two to our key pages to give meaningful results it’s a boon. We don’t have to do any of the maths or work out confidence levels or margins or error. It does it all for us. Best of all, we can test multiple changes to a page all at once, and see which combination our visitors use the most.

Testing Two Types Of Conversion

Recently we were discussing the two main actions that people take on our site: contacting a clinic by email and looking up a clinic’s phone number. The former is far more valuable to us a company. Our customers, the clinics, can see the end result of a visitor using the site to email them. When a visitor looks up a phone number it is very unlikely that the clinic will ever know that the visitor found it on our site. The clinics can see the value of one action, and not the other. Even though we tell them how many people find their phone number on our site, it doesn’t really resonate with them.

Knowing how much more valuable an email enquiry was, we decided to test whether taking away the ability to look up a phone number would cause a significant increase in the numbers who contacted a clinic by email. The results were pretty extreme.

25% Up, 100% Down

We tested a over a two day period with only half of our traffic having the ability to find a phone number. The half who didn’t have the ability to find a phone number converted to email enquiries 25% better than before, which would seem like a good result, until you look at the numbers involved.

Over the course of the two days the 50% who couldn’t see phone numbers created an extra 109 email enquiries. In the same period the people who could look up phone numbers did so 1,418 times. To put it another way, only one in thirteen of our visitors who wanted to look up a phone number created an email enquiry instead when that option wasn’t available to them.

In the end we decided that the cost of frustrating so many of our visitors far outweighed the gains we could make from having 25% more email enquiries. Phone number look ups are here to stay because they are what a large portion of our visitors want.

We already knew that a lot of people were looking up clinics’ phone numbers on our site, but testing it in this way gave us a very clear picture that those visitors are very different to the visitors who create an email enquiry, and they need to be treated differently.

Have you discovered unusual or unexpected behaviour from your site’s visitors? Are you giving them all the actions they are looking for? Are you tracking and testing them? Let us know your experiences in the comments below.

The internet is changing the way healthcare providers deal with customers. As the internet increasingly becomes the first point of contact with new customers, healthcare providers need a process for turning website visitors into bookings.

In this first post in our series on winning healthcare customers online, we discuss online contact methods and the customer funnel.

Online Contact Methods

The essential part of your online strategy is how easily customers can contact you. There are two basic contact methods that every healthcare provider needs to emphasize online, an enquiry form and your phone number.

Some people believe this can be accomplished by simply putting your phone number and email on a website or directory, and letting interested people call you directly. While doing this is an important first step, this alone is not an effective method for winning new business online.

A phone number is an essential but only partial solution for being accessible online. Firstly interested people will be on the internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. However your clinic may only be open during normal business hours of say 09:00-18:00.  The difficulty with only being contactable during normal business hours is that your customers are also at work and the last thing they want is to have a phone conversation about private health treatments amidst their colleagues in the office. For the most part, people will not leave private matters on your voicemail, also because of privacy concerns. Even if people are looking at your website during normal business hours, they may be more comfortable writing to you via an online enquiry form. This is often the case for private procedures like cosmetic or fertility treatment.

With an online enquiry form, interested visitors can contact you directly whenever they want to. The beauty of the internet is its 24/7 always-on accessibility. Therefore to get the most from your internet presence, your clinic also needs to be always-on. Also from the clinic’s perspective, written enquiries allows you to keep a record of the customer’s initial enquiry. For these reasons, we would advise you put the emphasis on the online enquiry form over the phone number on your website. Why an online enquiry form and not simply an email address? The online enquiry form makes life easier for the customer. With an email the question arises of “what do I write?” With an online enquiry form, you tell your customer what information you need.

Congratulations, with your online enquiry form and your phone number, your contact methods are now internet friendly! However, having the right contact methods in place is the easy part.  If you are planning on to win new healthcare customers online you need to ensure that you have a customer management process in place to convert your website visitors to customers. The key to this is the customer funnel.

The Customer Funnel

The customer funnel is simple way of managing new customers. The funnel is broken into 6 key areas. Visitors are people who see your website, some of whom may be interested in purchasing your services, many other will not. The best your website can do is to convert those that are interested into written enquiries. From your email enquiries you hope to convert a sizable percentage to phone calls. The next stage is a face to face meeting and onto treatment. Once you have invested in this relationship it is important to maintain it to achieve repeat business and personal referrals.

The metaphor of the funnel is used because people drop away at each stage of a long enquiry process: For example, many of the people who send you written enquiries may have existing providers with whom they are very satisfied. On other words they are just testing the waters. Others may have requirements which other healthcare providers are better placed to treat. Still others may want to come for treatment, but not have the money to afford the treatment.

The image of the customer funnel is a visual representation of the step-by-step nature of a long enquiry process with this drop away in prospects at each stage.

Your goal at any stage of the funnel is to get the interested person to the next stage. For example when someone is visiting your website, the goal of your website is to get them to submit an online enquiry or to phone you directly.

The more efficient your customer management process is at each individual stage of the funnel the greater a percentage of the interested people will be brought to the next stage. With constant refinement and effort, a simple online presence can be converted to becoming the main source of new patients for a clinic.