Marketing | 7 micro-guides | Read time: 8 minutes
By now, you have a deeper understanding of the role marketing can play in growing your healthcare practice. You are also familiar with the various channels that are used in marketing, as well as when and how to use them. So now what? In this section, you’ll find out how to measure the success of your marketing endeavors so you can keep track of what’s working and what’s not.
‘Success,’ in general, is a pretty subjective word, with different definitions for different people, depending on the key objectives they set for themselves. If your initial goal is to welcome three new patients to your practice each month, then your marketing success can be measured by whether you meet—or exceed—this goal.
On the other hand, for a practice whose goal was to increase communication with existing patients on a more regular basis, that success could be measured in the number of sent emails that were opened and viewed or informational links that were clicked.
The definition of success can be quite broad, but here are some of the most common baseline metrics for marketing success in the healthcare space.
Patient Satisfaction—Measuring patient satisfaction not only takes the pulse of overall patient sentiment, but it can pinpoint gaps or points of friction in the patient experience. Conducting a patient-satisfaction survey via email, text or phone following an appointment or telehealth visit can help you glean insights on how you can improve the patient experience.
New Patient Acquisition—If you’re looking to grow a new practice in your area, the top objective of your marketing may be to bring in more new patients. In that case, it’s important to keep track of how many new patients you bring in over a designated period of time. You’ll also want to keep an eye on your patient acquisition cost (PAC), a metric that helps you understand the total cost of acquiring a new patient through various marketing channels and within a specific period. This can be accomplished by adding up your total marketing costs and then dividing that total by the number of new patients you acquired over a specific time period. This can help you optimize your marketing strategy by eliminating the channels that don’t seem to be bringing in new patients over time and investing more in the channels that are the most effective.
Patient Retention Rate—Acquiring new patients is only half the battle when it comes to building a strong healthcare practice. Your patient retention rate, or PRR, measures how well you’re able to retain those patients over a specified period of time. This metric is a strong indicator of the quality of your patients’ experience and their overall satisfaction, and it can help drive your decision-making when it comes to fine-tuning your marketing strategy.
Once you’ve begun to market your practice via multiple communications channels, it’s essential to track the performance of each channel so you know which strategies are the most effective.
By using data to discover the story behind how you attract new patients and retain existing ones, you can make more calculated marketing decisions that can save you time and money in the long run. Here are some of the most common metrics healthcare marketers track to optimize their performance.
One phrase we like to throw around in the marketing world is “lead source attribution.” Simply put, this means keeping track of how well communication channels bring in new leads, or in a practice’s case, new patients. Which channel is the most interest coming from? And of those people, how many actually go on to become patients? Understanding and interpreting this data can help you pare down your marketing budget, keeping the most effective communication channels and eliminating those that aren’t doing much for new patient acquisition.
How do you know whether your email or social media campaign is working? Here are some benchmarks for a successful digital healthcare marketing campaign:
Email:[1]
Open Rates—23.7%
Click-Through Rates—3.0%
Click-to-Open Rates—13.4%
Unsubscribe Rates—0.3%
Facebook PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Ads:[2]
Cost Per Click (CPC)—$1.32
Click-Through Rates—0.83%
Cost Per Landing-Page View (CPLPV)—$0.90
Depending on the unique objectives you have set for your organic social media strategy, the benchmarks for a successful campaign can vary. If your goal is to build awareness and boost engagement, any uptick in your engagement rates and number of impressions is a positive indicator. You can track these metrics by visiting the Insights sections of your active social media accounts.
However, if your main objective is to drive traffic to your practice’s website, you’ll want to pay close attention to click-through rates and site visits resulting directly from a social media post. Google Analytics can help you uncover these insights so you can see where the bulk of your traffic is coming from, and which posts are the most effective at driving visitors to your site. This information can help you develop a more effective strategy for future social media posting.
In addition, SEO metrics help you monitor your digital marketing strategies and keep track of your practice’s online presence. (We’ll get to that a bit later.)
[1] Ultimate Email Marketing Benchmarks for 2022: By Industry and Day. 2022. Campaign Monitor. https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/guides/email-marketing-benchmarks
[2] Nelson, John. Performance Benchmarks for Healthcare Facebook Ads. Jun. 12, 2021. 9Clouds. https://9clouds.com/blog/performance-benchmarks-for-healthcare-facebook-ads