How to keep patients coming back

It’s a rule of thumb covered in Marketing 101: It costs more to find a new customer than to keep an existing one. Estimates of how much more it costs tend to be all over the map, depending on the industry, and we haven’t found a really reliable statistic on the healthcare field specifically. But projections put the additional cost of attracting a new customer somewhere between five and 25 times more than keeping a repeat customer. Even on the low end, that’s a lot. 

With any service business, it takes a while to build relationships, and to turn those relationships into actions. That’s especially true for mental health providers, community service agencies, and healthcare organizations because patient relationships are built on trust. Trust is the biggest asset for healthcare providers. It takes time and persuasion to convince someone to trust your organization with their mental or physical care. Once you’ve earned that trust you don’t have to do all that convincing—but you have to keep patient’s confidence. So let’s look at strategies healthcare marketers can use to retain existing patients. 

Marketing strategies for patient retention

First, we should acknowledge that many factors that keep patients happy and coming back are outside the marketing team’s control. Location and convenience. Insurance coverage. Most important, the experience delivered by the people your patients interact with, everyone from office receptionists to practitioners to billing representatives. But the marketing team can develop a long-term, ongoing patient retention effort, including:

Creating a strong brand

Every interaction—with prospective patients and longstanding ones—depends on the brand’s strategic foundation. A brand isn’t just a logo or clever tagline; it expresses your mission and vision and shapes how patients experience your organization at every touchpoint. Brand strategy includes the language your people use in communicating with patients, and the care and compassion they deliver at every step. The brand creates a standard of communication and expectation of behavior across your organization so patients know what to expect when they return for a follow-up visit or procedure down the road. 

Being consistent and clear 

We work with healthcare brands to build integrated marketing plans so that their messaging is coordinated and consistent across the applicable channels and touchpoints. This consistency builds trust, positions your organization as the preferred provider, and keeps you in people’s minds as they face different healthcare needs over time. And once folks are connected to your organization, they’ll be more open to hearing from you. 

Making digital interactions easy

Marketers don’t choose the technology platforms the organization uses, such as patient portals or scheduling apps. But you can create effective supporting content around these tools that helps people navigate them. And you can craft targeted, on-brand copy for communications like automated appointment reminders (instead of using the boilerplate content the app developer provides). 

Ongoing content marketing

Email marketing is a great way to not only remind existing patients of routine things like vaccinations and annual screenings, but also to update them on new practitioners and service lines. (While email is ideal for staying connected to current patients, make sure it’s easy for anyone in your community to sign up to hear from you on your homepage.) Providing a deep library of educational content and wellness resources positions your organization as a source of reliable expertise that patients can return to time and again.  

Healthcare marketers know that recruiting new patients takes time and resources. But patient retention requires attention, too. And the consequence of overlooking your existing patients can be problematic. In rural areas, especially where health networks or community nonprofits have little to no competition, and when switching healthcare providers is so burdensome that people just stick it out even if they don’t like their doctors, the result is not that they’ll go elsewhere, but that they’ll delay care entirely. And that’s the worst-case scenario for everyone.  

You want to make sure patients are satisfied so that they return. That they keep the same general practitioner for life, that they turn to you for information, that they think of you when an acute condition arises. Delivering great care is a non-negotiable in building these relationships. But that’s largely out of your control. Your job as a marketer, then, is to repeatedly remind them of that great care. If you’re ready to build long-term relationships with your patients, we’re happy to share the insights we’ve gained from working with a variety of healthcare providers. Let’s start a conversation!