eRelevance Patient Engagement Survey Highlights Opportunities for Practices

eRelevance Corporation, the leading provider of consumer engagement services for small- to medium-size businesses (SMBs) has released  Patient Engagement for Growth:  Aesthetic Practice Marketing Perspectives and Priorities. 

 The report—based on survey responses from nearly 150 US aesthetic practices—examines the challenges and solutions related to patient engagement, and how practices can drive cash-based consumer demand while lowering advertising costs and improving marketing lead conversions.

 “While quality patient care is always the necessary foundation of a successful aesthetic practice, long-term practice growth requires an understanding of sophisticated patient engagement,” says eRelevance Co-founder and CEO Bob Fabbio. “Nearly all survey respondents indicated that providing great patient care is very important, but this study asks the question: How are today’s aesthetic healthcare practices maintaining the highest levels of patient care while meeting business growth goals?  For aesthetic practices, sophisticated patient engagement translates into sophisticated marketing.”

 Two key takeaways from the data include:

Most aesthetic practices lack the time, expertise and tools for the sophisticated marketing necessary to meet their goals for growth. 

• 68 percent of respondents said they either don’t have enough marketing expertise or don’t have marketing expertise. Yet, only 18 percent said they outsource their marketing to experts.
• 80 percent of practice staff surveyed said lack of time and marketing expertise were their biggest challenges.

Stopping revenue losses from unconverted marketing leads is important to practices, but the staff responsible for following up on these leads feels ill-equipped to do so effectively.

• When asked if their staffs are challenged to effectively follow up on the marketing responses, 43 percent of aesthetic practice key decision makers surveyed said they don’t know. Yet, data show that practices make, on average, only .8 attempts to follow up on marketing requests—less than once per lead.
• Only 8 percent of respondents said the tools they currently use to track follow-up are very effective.

“There’s lots of good news in this report.  Aesthetic practices are leveraging social media and finding avenues of outreach to engage patients more than ever before.  The challenge is to find the solutions that will help practices meaningfully follow up on leads in order to engage and convert potential and one-time patients to life-long clients,” says Modern Aesthetics® Editorial Director Paul Winnington.