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Creating an Automated Email to Send in Response to Online Enquiries

On August 17, 2009, in Health 2.0, Stuff we've learned, by Caelen King

All online enquiries deserve a personalized email response; however your business processes should also include an automated email that is sent immediately once the online enquiry has been submitted.  A well thought out response should include the following five pieces of information:

  1. Confirmation that you have received the enquiry.  This reassures the consumer that their enquiry hasn’t fallen into a black hole and your systems are working correctly.  An automated email is standard practice on the internet and the consumer expects it. If you don’t send one then you won’t be meeting their expectations and reducing the chance that they will ever visit your practice for treatment.
  2. A time and date when they can expect a personalised response. This allows you to set the consumer’s expectations so that you can then subsequently meet them. If you don’t tell them when they can expect a response then they will create their own expectations, which will probably be unrealistic. If you say in the automated response that you will contact them within the next two days it is critical that you actually do contact them – even if it is only to apologize that there is a delay. If you do delay the response make sure you inform them of when they should expect the new response.
  3. Some further information on the clinic. Give the consumer something to read and to think about. Focus on the best aspects of your clinic such as accreditations, specialities, equipment, training, etc.
  4. Include two of three real testimonials with full names.  Credibility is absolutely critical here and if your testimonials have been published on 3rd party sites you should include that fact.
  5. Contact Information. A lot of people use email as a crude tool for organizing their life – when they want to contact you in the future they will remember that you emailed them and will search their email. Putting all of your contact information in this mail will maximise the chance that they will contact you in the future even if they don’t come for treatment immediately.

It is nice to be able to personalize the email response to include the patients name and the treatment that they are looking for. This is not critical but if your technology easily allows it then it is a good idea.

Sample Email

Dear [insert the patients name here]

Thanks for your enquiry regarding [insert treatment here] with [insert your clinic name here]

We are currently reviewing your enquiry and will contact you in the next two days.

Clinic Overview
Describe your doctors or dentists experience, qualifications and specialisations- Take this information from your staff listings and add more detail as you like.

Procedures.
Describe the procedures your clinic performs. You should let them know how long the procedure normally takes, the recovery time and the number of visits required. You can include before and after pictures if you have them.

Testimonial 1

“I was very pleased with the treatment and also I was very pleased with the way I was looked after on my visit to the clinic.”  – Alison Benson, Surrey, UK (published on RevaHealth.com)

Testimonial 2

“Despite having been to the dentist every 6 months all my life, I discovered, when I had my first appointment in Budapest, that none of the caps and facades I’d had put on locally fitted properly and my teeth had been quietly rotting away for years (the dentist gave me a mirror so I could see for myself, and I was horrified to see that the teeth underneath were black). Consequently I needed a lot of work. I’d had an estimate in a local clinic of 8 hours and 1300 Euro for just one tooth. The dentist in Budapest did the preparation work on 19 teeth in six and a half hours and the whole thing, including the most expensive crowns available (which are metal-free and therefore look like real teeth) cost around 5000 Euro. The most impressive thing was that because the dentist was so gentle and sympathetic, six and a half hours in the dentist’s chair really wasn’t that bad. It was tiring though and I felt fragile afterwards so the fact that Access Smile then drove me back to where I was staying (and ferried me back and forth to all subsequent appointments) really made a huge difference.” – Daniel Smith, London, UK (published on RevaHealth.com)

Contact information.
The patient may wish to contact you. Give them email, phone and website information for your clinic. Tell them the hours of business for your clinic and don’t forget to include the time zone – tell them hours before or after GMT.

Patient Coordinators Full Name

About the author

Caelen King

Caelen King is CEO and founder of WhatClinic.com, the medical search engine that helps people find clinics anywhere.

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Moving Potential Patients Through The Sales Funnel

On August 14, 2009, in Health 2.0, Stuff we've learned, by Caelen King

A lot of sales experts are going to tell you that the goal of any sales process should be to maximise the number of prospects you can move from one level of the sales funnel to the next. At RevaHealth.com we find that this goal can result in clinics using their limited resources inefficiently, and effort being wasted on enquiries that are never going to result in business.

At every stage of the sales funnel you are going to have prospects that are never going to convert into business. This could be for any number of reasons, including: they can’t afford the treatment, they aren’t suitable for the treatment, they are a competitor researching your clinic, they live too far away, etc. A clinic’s business process needs to maximise the number of prospects that can result in business while excluding the prospects that will never result in business.

There are three key ways in which to achieve this:

  1. Exceed or meet the prospect expectations
  2. Provide them with sufficient information to allow them to exclude themselves
  3. Ask questions so that you can exclude unsuitable prospects

Converting Website Visitors into Online Enquiries

Visitors to your website are expecting to be able to find the information they are looking for quickly and easily. They are not expecting site originality or artistic flair, they have come for information; give it to them as quickly as possible without cluttering your site. You should try and follow standard web conventions in the design and structure of your website and make it easy for the visitor to get to the following information:

  • Phone number and contact form
  • Opening hours
  • Address
  • Map
  • Prices
  • Testimonials

Your goal is to give the visitor this information while also building trust. Trust can be built in two ways through a website: transparency and personal information. Transparency can be provided with clear pricing information and candid descriptions of your core specialities. It can also be useful to mention the services you do not provide to avoid any confusion. Personal information can be provided through staff profiles and the use of pictures.

If you meet the visitor’s expectations, the next stage is to channel them into creating an email enquiry. This will typically only ever be a small percentage of your visitors, but hopefully will include a large percentage of the visitors who are actually interesting in purchasing a treatment from your clinic.

A common question we are asked is what percentage of visitors you should expect to create an enquiry. Unfortunately this is an impossible question as the single biggest variable is how ‘qualified’ the visitors to your website are. In this instance ‘qualified’ means how interested your typical visitor is in purchasing one of your treatments.

An example we commonly quote is a clinic in London that has written exceptional descriptions of the health problem they treat. These descriptions attract hundreds of visitors per day, however most of these visitors are just looking for information – they are not interested in getting treatment. This clinic converts under 2% of all visitors into online enquiries.

However, as a general guide, if you are not converting at least 5% of your visitors into online enquiries you should look to your website for potential problems.

Email Enquiries

When consumers submit an online enquiry they expect two things. First of all, they expect an automated response that informs them that you have actually received their enquiry and tells them when they can expect a response. It is a good idea to take advantage of this email to highlight the key benefits of your clinic and include contact information. In this way a consumer will always have easy access to this information even if they can’t find your website again.

Secondly, they expect a personal email that directly addresses their query. This second email should be sent no later than one business day after the initial enquiry was received. If this is not possible then an additional email should be sent explaining the delay.

The email that you send to the customer is your first real chance to start building a relationship with them. The key elements in building that relationship are to personalize the email to the consumer (it is vital that you do not sent a stock email) and to be as transparent and candid as possible.

It is easy to enter into an email dialog with the customer at this stage but remember that the goal of this stage in the sales funnel is to get the customer to the next stage. You should always try and progress the email dialog into a phone call. The purpose of this stage is to give the customer sufficient information and trust in your clinic to move them to that stage. At the same time it gives you the opportunity to weed out the time wasters.

If the customer will not engage with you on the phone then there is very little chance that they will visit your clinic. Only in a rare case is it worth expending significant effort on a potential patient that will not schedule a phone conversation. Typically this means that they are not prepared to commit to the next level of relationship.

This could be for any number of reasons – perhaps they were just comparing prices, perhaps they can’t afford it, etc. All personal emails sent to a customer should either be asking for a suitable time to call or setting a time for when you will call.

A Note On Having The Consumer Phone You Directly

A common question that we are asked is: if the goal of an email enquiry is to get the customer to talk to us on the phone, why don’t we skip the email enquiry step and just publish our phone number on our website?

First of all, it is important to put your phone number on the website in case the visitor actually wants to call you. However, it is also vital that you have a contact form and we argue that this is the desired route that you want to encourage your visitors to follow.

The reason for this is that if a consumer calls you they have a reasonable expectation that they will talk to an informed person who will be able to answer their questions. However, the person best qualified to talk to the consumer may well be busy when they call. It is better that you agree a time with the consumer when the right person can speak to them.

In some cases the consumer will get an answering machine (don’t forget your visitors will be on your website 24 hours a day, 7 days a week). A contact form is always available. It allows you time to research the consumer’s query and be properly prepared to directly address their concerns in a way that exceeds their expectations.

Phone Call

The consumer expects you to call at the specified time, or if they are calling you they expect that the relevant person will be available. They expect the person that they talk to will be able to speak specifically to their personal enquiry. They do not necessarily expect that person to have all the answers, but they do expect them to be knowledgeable, friendly, polite, understanding and non-judgmental.

Once you have succeeded in getting someone to talk to you, you have a real opportunity to start building a relationship. While you might have spent a lot of effort on your website and with the email dialog, all that did was to get the customer on the phone. So, no matter how good your website is, if you don’t manage to build a relationship with them on the phone then they are simply not going to purchase treatment from your clinic.

Face to Face

This is now getting back to your core business. You have brought the potential customer from the online world to the physical world and it is now up to your normal business processes to close the sale.

However, like all of the previous stages of your pipeline, once you have got the person to this stage everything that went before matters very little. Even if you have exceeded the customer’s expectation in all of the previous stages, you must at least meet their expectations at this stage.

Repeat and Referral Business

This is the ultimate goal that you should have for ever visitor to your website. Nothing is more profitable for your business than having a customer return for future treatment. You have already built the relationship with them and do not have to bring them through the sales pipeline again.

About the author

Caelen King

Caelen King is CEO and founder of WhatClinic.com, the medical search engine that helps people find clinics anywhere.

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How To Win Customers From Online Enquiries

On June 3, 2009, in Stuff we've learned, by Owen Cooney

At RevaHealth.com we help patients from all over the world to contact health clinics. These enquiries are then used by the clinics to generate business. In sales speak, every enquiry is a new lead.

In our experience, some clinics are very good at turning enquiries into paying patients, while others let good business slip away by making simple mistakes. This guide was originally written by Owen Cooney (ocooney@revahealth.com) specifically for health clinics, but it is relevant to any booking business that receives customer enquiries through email or form capture on the web.

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Do you feel that the enquiries you receive through the internet do not produce actual customers? Do you feel that the customer is just shopping around and that dealing with these enquiries is just an extra burden that produces no results? If the answer is yes, this guide is for you.

I will share a proven process for successfully converting online enquiries into paying customers. Innovative sales professionals who are successful in converting online enquiries into actual paying customers do this on a daily basis.

The reward for learning this process is immense. More and more customers are beginning their relationships with their service providers online, and the sales process has definitely entered the internet age.

Online is different
Online patient enquiries require a different approach than dealing with traditional enquiries. We all know how to deal with customers who turn up at our business, or call us to book something.

The difference with online enquiries is that now the initial conversation begins by email instead of face to face or via the phone.

Because the customer has contacted you online and has not talked or interacted with you, they have no real relationship with you yet. This carries a very real risk. If they break an appointment with you or stop answering your calls, this is no big deal for them because they don’t know you.

The Secret
The secret to successfully converting customers who send you online enquiries into paid bookings is to build a relationship with the enquirer. Building this relationship requires discipline.

Successful sales professionals tend to follow a similar process for building a relationship with the customer from that first enquiry through to the paid appointment.

The Process

  1. Fast response to the customers’ email enquiries giving all relevant information on the product or service requested.
  2. Follow up with a phone call within 24 hours of sending the email. In this phone call:
    1. ensure that the customer has received your email
    2. answer any immediate questions the customer has
    3. ask the customer for more information about their needs
    4. ask the customer to make some form of follow up commitment, even if it’s just another phone call

    The idea here is twofold; first, to get a better idea about how serious the customer is, and second, to help cement the budding relationship.

    This commitment helps establish trust between you and the customer. If they are not willing to make any further commitment, this may indicate that trust has not yet been established. Without trust, it is unlikely that this customer is ready to buy from you.

  3. If the customer needs more time to make a decision, arrange another phone call at a specified time and date. Call at exactly this time and date and try to move things forward again, e.g. confirm a time for a consultation, make a booking etc.
  4. If the customer is unsure, repeat step 3. Research shows that if you give up after the initial contact that you will lose more than 50% of your potential customers.
  5. Once you have some initial commitment, you still have to close the sale. As the old saying goes, “Don’t count your chickens until they are hatched”. For clinics using RevaHealth.com we suggest the following checks:
    1. A week before the patient is coming for treatment, call them to confirm that the dates are still suitable.
    2. 24 hours before the treatment, call them again to confirm that everything is fine.

Remember: It takes time and persistence for enquiries to turn into sales. For clinics, if you follow the process above, a good rule of thumb is that for every successful conversion from enquiry to booking that you get within 2 months of the enquiry, you will get a further conversion from enquiry to appointment within 2-6 months.

About the author

Owen Cooney

Owen Cooney is a senior sales executive at WhatClinic.com.

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