How to Create a Winback Campaign to Attract Former Patients
When your practice loses a patient for whatever reason, it’s never a good feeling. Sometimes there are signs and other times you never see it coming. You wonder what it is that made them choose another chiropractor or to stop seeing a chiropractor all together and you try to think of what you could have done to improve your retention.
Whether it’s been six months or two years, we’re here to discuss the importance of a win-back campaign to reach out to those patients who stopped coming to your chiropractic practice and how to bring them back.
If it has been a long time since you last communicated with some patients, you must create a strategy that will address the needs of those patients and encourage them to return to your practice.
What is A Winback Campaign?
Before we even begin on the best ways to tackle a win-back campaign, let’s delve into what a win-back campaign is.
A win-back campaign specifically targets those patients who have stopped engaging with your content or stopped using your products or services. The objective of a win-back campaign is to convince those people to come back to your business.
6 Tips to Increase Retention Rates With A Win-back Campaign
How can you craft a great win-back campaign that will interest your lost patients and persuade them to book an appointment with you again?
Don’t worry, if you aren’t sure about the anatomy of a win-back campaign and how to configure an email for one, we’re here to help you get started. Get ready to welcome back old patients and increase your retention rate with these 6 tips.
1. Identifying Old Patients
In order to know what specific patients you need to target, segmenting your email list is of utmost importance. Email segmentation involves dividing your subscribers into smaller lists or segments. When you can identify the characteristics of each of those groups, you can tailor the content that you send to them.
When creating a win-back campaign, this should be one of your first steps because you want your practice’s emails to actually get sent to people who are no longer patients of yours. It would be very unusual for someone who comes to your office frequently to receive an email that reads “We miss you!” or “Come back to us!” So, in order to avoid this type of awkward interaction with a loyal patient, be sure to segment your subscriber list.
According to MailChimp, segmented campaigns performed 14.3 percent higher than those that weren’t. Subscribers were more likely to open the email because it was tailored to their specific interests! Once you’ve identified who these people are, you can get started on creating the emails.
2. Personalizing Your Win-Back Emails
When you think about getting old patients back to your practice with the use of emails, what do you think is one of the most important aspects? Subject lines, of course! Since it’s the first thing patients will see in their inbox it plays a critical role in the success of your campaign. In order to get these patients interested once again, you have to write a subject line that is sure to capture their attention.
When writing subject lines to re-engage with patients, you can be as serious or as fun as you like. It is up to you to decide what tone of voice you want to utilize for your email. But try to stay true to the voice of your practice. Some examples of win-back subject lines include:
- “We miss you at Anderson Chiropractic!”
- “We would love to reconnect.”
- “It’s been a while.”
- “We haven’t seen you in a while, (recipient’s name).”
Mentioning the patient’s name in an email creates a more personal interaction between the two of you and makes the patient feel appreciated because you know who they are.
3. Giving Them a Solution
Do you know why your patient decided to stop booking appointments at your practice? It’s important that you completely understand the reasoning in order to provide a solution and avoid making the same mistake twice with your patients.
What’s the best way to get this information? Just ask! When people are not satisfied with a product or service, they usually feel inclined to say why.
Mockup an email template that your practice can send out to patients who no longer come see you.
You can decide the time frame for when you would like for these automated messages to be sent out. Whether it’s a few weeks or months, be sure to set a time for these messages to send so that your patients know you’re thinking of them and value them.
After you discover the why, you now need to figure out the how. How can you convince this person to come back? Did they not get the outcome they were hoping for? Did pricing deter them?
The feedback that you get from your emails will give you the necessary insight to each patient so you can respond accordingly and find a solution that works for them and your business.
4. Emphasize Your Benefits
Patients want to know how going to the chiropractor can be beneficial to them, and if they have yet to see those benefits, they may be reluctant to return. Was this patient in a car accident, do they experience back pain from work?
You can send them an email that highlights the benefits of chiropractic treatment for their specific problems while also addressing the advantages it has for their overall health. There is nothing wrong with reminding your patients about the benefits of your services!
5. Be Consistent
Sometimes reaching out to an old patient and bringing them back won’t be easy. But that’s alright; you’re willing to go the extra mile! When running a win-back campaign, you can’t expect every person to begin booking appointments again after only one email send.
There are no magic spells that will help you formulate the perfect email to get your patient back. This is why your campaign should be comprised of multiple email sends. Create your campaign to send several emails over a period of time to rekindle that connection between you and the patient.
A general rule of thumb is to send between two to three emails in an attempt to re-engage. If they don’t respond to or open any of those emails, they are probably no longer interested in what you’re offering and you can remove them from your email list or segment them into another list. That happens to the best of us and this is why it’s important to know when to let go.
You don’t want to continuously bombard someone with emails if they never open any that you send. It is your decision to choose which email subscribers you want to remove from your list after a certain period of time.
Be upfront with your patients and let them know that if they don’t respond to your win-back emails in that allotted time frame, they will be taken off your subscription list. It can be as simple as saying, “We’ve noticed you haven’t responded to any of our emails in quite a while, we’ll go ahead and remove you from our list.”
6. Offer Incentives
We’ve said this before and we’ll say it again… who doesn’t love discounts? You can offer patients a gift or a discount to persuade them to come back. If you really want to capture their attention, make the discount offer part of the subject line in your email.
You could, for example, write “20% off your next chiropractic adjustment!” Patients will see that you’re willing to give them a special rate for their next visit to get them back in your office.
But remember that some patients are willing to come in with no discount offer at all so try to send your incentive email in your second or last email send.
Let Us Help You Win-Back Those Patients
Losing business is never easy, but luckily win-back campaigns offer a solution to this problem. Just because someone has not come into your office for some time doesn’t mean all is lost. You still have the opportunity to reach out to them and encourage them to come back.
Our patient relationship management service would be an excellent tool to help you stay in constant communication with your patients by sending automatic reminders through text and email and increase the retention rate of your practice. Call us today at 888.792.8384 or click here to learn more about patient retention.
