Five SMS marketing tips to keep your calendar full

Organizations of all types use business texting to connect with patients, employees, volunteers, subscribers and other contacts through short messaging service (SMS) messages and multimedia messaging service (MMS).

This article will focus on the benefits of SMS marketing.

According to a recent report,¹ 80% of people read and respond to texts within 30 minutes, and 54% of organizations find texting is the fastest way to connect with contacts. If you want to acquire more patients while doing less, SMS marketing is an option worth exploring.

Is SMS marketing HIPAA compliant?

Yes — or at least, it can be. To text in compliance with HIPAA and other associated regulations, you need to use a HIPAA-compliant texting service, which has additional layers of security and encryption to shield patients’ protected health information (PHI) as it rests in your account, and as it travels to and from mobile carriers. Compliant services should also be willing to sign a business associate agreement with you.

Beyond those security measures, there are a few things you need to do to text compliantly. Each of these is worth the little bit of effort it takes in order to experience the outsized gains SMS marketing can create.

Register for a 10-digit long code (10DLC): Mobile carriers require “10DLC registration” in order to text through their networks. Your texting service should help you get registered but know it’s a requirement. This will also ensure you use a business phone number rather than your personal cell phone number, which wouldn’t be compliant.

Get opt-ins: Whether it’s for medical or promotional purposes, you should only text contacts who have opted into receiving messages from you. You can ask people to opt in on your patient forms, verbally, on your website or by using keywords like “Text CHIRO to get your first session free.”

Be respectful: Tell contacts how to opt out of messages (again, a texting service should handle this for you), and only send the types of messages they opted into. For instance, if they opted into SMS conversations about their healthcare, don’t send promotions about events. If someone opts out, respect their opt-out.

With that taken care of, you can now use SMS marketing to keep your appointment calendar and your wallet full.

1. Set your team up for success

Take a few steps to ensure you and your employees will be able to text effectively day-to-day. Add relevant employees as users on your account, keeping in mind that you may need someone to fill in for someone else at times, like during lunch or after hours. Create templates for common messages you’ll need to send, and for answers to FAQs. This way you can also keep communications consistent and compliant across employees. Download your texting service’s mobile app if you want to text compliantly from your smartphone, and think through any other day-to-day operations that may be important to you.

2. Import your subscribers and gain new ones

You might already have SMS opt-ins from previous marketing or contact forms. If so, upload those contacts into your texting service, along with any relevant details that will help you better communicate with them, like last appointment date, location or birthday. It’s particularly helpful if you begin to segment your contact lists from the start.

For instance, if you have multiple DCs on staff, create contact lists of each DC’s patients. If you have multiple locations, create a separate contact list for each. Other good lists could be patients who are overdue for their next appointment, patients who are athletes or those who never completed their treatments. Contact lists can be whatever you want them to be, so get creative; they will help you keep your appointment calendar full later on.

To gain new subscribers and steadily build your contact lists, you can:

Ask for opt-ins on your contact and patient forms
Use an SMS web chat widget on your website to start text conversations (which helps bring in new leads, too)
Promote SMS keywords wherever you market, like “Text CHIRO to get your first session free.”

3. Send your SMS marketing campaigns

A good SMS marketing campaign is relevant, creates urgency, gives clear instructions and points to a next step for patients to take. For instance, you might send a campaign like: “Spring is here! Fend off allergies by scheduling your next chiropractic appointment at [yourwebsite.com/schedule] and enjoy spending time outside again. See you soon!”

Some of the best opportunities to send campaigns include:

Beginning of the season: Welcome to spring, have your best fall ever, take care of yourself this winter even if you can’t get outside much, new year new you, etc. The changing of the seasons is always a good excuse to connect with people.

Before big events: Athletic competitions happening in your town, or know people are traveling for one? Send a campaign about getting treated before the big event so they can give their best performance.

Overdue for treatment: Has it been more than six months since a group of patients has come to see you? Did people get busy and never complete their treatments? Send a campaign to those contacts to bring them back. This works especially well for replacing last-minute cancellations.

Ask for Google reviews: After you’ve treated a patient long enough for them to see results (which could be after their first visit or their 20^th; it’s up to you), text them to ask for a Google review and include the link to leave that review. This will improve your marketing for new patients, too.

Promote your products: If you sell supplements, equipment or other products, send a monthly or quarterly promotion advertising a discount on a particular product to give your revenue a boost.

Motivation-style newsletter: You can share tips or encouragement with patients on a regular basis. SMS is great for these bite-sized messages and sets you up for more effective promotions later.

4. Be available for responses

Even if you intend for your campaigns to be one-way, people are going to reply to you. In fact, you want people to text you — that creates revenue opportunities. You can’t be available 24/7, but there are a few things you can do to make it feel like you’re there for patients around the clock.

First, set up an out-of-office message — an auto-reply that will respond to inbound messages outside of office hours. This tells people you got their message and when they can expect to hear back. Also consider using your texting service’s mobile app, so you can text from your office phone number while remaining HIPAA compliant anytime day or night (how available you are outside of standard hours is up to you).

Just be sure a real person is able to respond. Human interaction is increasingly valuable in a world where too much is automated.

5. Analyze, tweak and improve

You should see positive results as soon as you start sending HIPAA-compliant SMS marketing campaigns, but there will be room for improvement. If your goal is to keep more appointments on your calendar, you want to focus on the following things:

How many subscribers are you adding each month?
How many are you losing?
How many responses do you get when you send a message?
How many people click the link in your message?
How many new appointments (or other campaign goals) do you get?
How much revenue is this bringing you?
How much time are you saving by texting to schedule these appointments instead of using other channels?

As you continue to send campaigns, continue to look for ways to improve your results. Consider sending campaigns more frequently or less. Consider changing your message or making your call-to-action more direct. Consider discounts and other offers to bring people back.

Keep this process going, and before long, you won’t have to worry about keeping your calendar full. That’s a beautiful thing.

Final thoughts

Text messaging is the number one channel for speed and engagement, and you can use it as your biggest marketing advantage. Text marketing enables you to communicate with your patients instantly, give patients a more personalized experience, spark meaningful conversations with your patients and enhance practice growth and revenue.

KENNETH BURKE is the VP of marketing for Text Request. He’s written more than 1,200 articles on business growth and has helped companies of all sizes and industries get found online and achieve their goals. He can be reached at kenneth@textrequest.com.

Reference

2024 State of Business Texting Report. Text Request. https://www.textrequest.com/ebooks/state-of-business-texting-2024. Accessed July 11, 2024.