Text Marketing for MedSpas and Medical Practices
In this economy many medical spas and aesthetic medicine practices are looking for more efficient ways to communicate to their existing patients and find new patients. I hope you are are all getting your patient’s email address, but are you also getting their cell numbers? More and more practices are adding SMS text messaging to their practice mix, first it was to send out appointment reminders, but many are now incorporating texting into their marketing strategy. Here are some tips taken from the IAPAM’s Aesthetic Practice Startup Workshop that will help you learn how to use Text Marketing for your medspa.
So what exactly is SMS texting? SMS stands for Short Message Service, and it allows mobile phones to communicate between each other by sending short messages. Today, all cell phones (& smart phones like the iPhone and Blackberry’s) come with this feature, and many monthly voice/data plans also include a certain amount of text messages.
How can a MediSpa use texting? I’ve seen three primary uses:
(1) Texting appointment reminders to patients – The day before their appointment, text them a reminder!
(2) Educating patient on procedures – This is when you send one of those “For more information on ….. text ######”. You can use this on all your brochures, print & radio advertising.
(3) Sending out specials – Here you would send your list a text about a special you are offering (i.e. Buy laser hair removal package for legs, get bikini 4 free!)
In order to truly maximize their effectiveness, my suggestion would be to utilize all three of these approaches together.
How do you start? If you don’t already have this wording on your patient intake form, you’ll want to add a check-box that gives you permission to send your client emails and text messages that may be of interest to them. If you are a private pay medical spa that doesn’t accept any insurance, that “opt in” check-box is usually all you need. However if you are accepting insurance, Medicare, and/or Medicade patients you need to comply with HIPPA and OSHA (please check with your healthcare attorney!).
Now that you have accumulated these mobile numbers, how are you going to contact your patients? First check with your medical spa’s EMR, many medical spa oriented EMR’s (i.e. PatitentNow.com) include a texting option, and it truly makes it very easy. However, if you are using paper charts or an EMR that doesn’t support texting, you will have much more work to do. Here are some texting services: EZTexting.com, Texthub.com, or Involvemobile.com. If you use a texting service, you’re going to need to export all the mobile phone numbers into a file, and upload them into the texting service (requires basic technical knowledge). It is much more work, but at least you can now communicate to your patients! Please note, texting of patient appointment reminders is much more difficult with a text service, but it’s very easy to send out informational or promotional texts to all your clients.
Happy Texting!
Cheers, Jeff Russell
web: www.Jeff-Russell.com
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You are absolutely right today text marketing is the new tread of marketing products because of uses of mobile phone. According to recent survey about 90% US people read sms and this shows how people interested in mobile. Sending sms through shared short code or own brand short code to customer helps to reach your products to customer. Short code is now used by all popular reality shows, programs, games and election campaigns to send or to populate their message to targeted audiences. See also http://www.txtimpact.com/shared-shortcode.asp
Text marketing is the most growing marketing strategy these days to promote brands, business, services and organization. Mobile marketing come in focus in recent few years, especially due to fast growing mobile phone uses across the world. Analyst Estimate that in 2008 about 3.4 billions text messages send worldwide and the response rate of these text messages were about 70%, this statistic attract marketing c. Today all top brands and organization using mobile marketing campaigns to promote their products.