Why leading healthcare providers track inbound calls
Written by Natalia Selby
The phone is the first choice for customers contacting a healthcare provider. With call tracking, marketing managers can understand exactly what prompted each person to pick up the phone.
Web, mobile, social: new technologies have changed the way patients, customers and clients hear about, and get in touch with healthcare organisations.
One thing hasn’t changed, though: many still prefer to book important healthcare appointments and services over the phone.
A Healthwatch survey found that nearly 100% of respondents listed a telephone call as their first, second or third choice for booking an appointment with their GP.
This poses a problem for marketing managers. Customers coming from a digital channel often leave a footprint showing if they came from an email blast, web ad, or other online source. But with a phone call, you often won’t get any insight into:
- How the caller heard about your organisation
- Which marketing activity convinced them to pick up the phone
- Which other channels they’ve used to engage with your organisation
Why is that a problem?
As more customers consume and share media through more digital channels, it becomes very challenging to know where to focus your marketing budget for best results. And it only gets harder when your inbound calls don’t give you any insight into what led the caller to pick up the phone.
If you can’t see what’s prompted someone to call you, you can’t tell which of your marketing activities are working, and which ones are failing to deliver a return.
Without this data, you’re left guessing:
- Was it word of mouth advertising?
- Did our search optimisation pay off?
- Is our PPC strategy hitting the right notes?
- It was that advert in the local paper, surely?
Put an end to the guesswork with call tracking
Marketing leaders in healthcare organisations no longer have to rely on assumptions, gut feelings and guesswork. Modern call tracking solutions offer real, actionable insights into which marketing channels and campaigns prompted someone to call you.
- With this information at your fingertips you can:
- Understand which marketing efforts have been successful
- Divert budget to the most successful channels
- Clearly prove marketing ROI across online and physical media
- More effectively target different demographics
Call tracking in action
Lighthouse Healthcare provides care and support services for people with learning disabilities, mental illness and personality disorders. The marketing team was determined to keep one step ahead of the market, and needed a way to assess how effectively their website was generating phone enquiries.
By implementing call tracking and monitoring the data in Mediahawk, Lighthouse Healthcare were able to refocus almost 60% of their print media budget, taking it away from poor-performing advertising and reinvesting it in areas that demonstrably generate the most enquiries. Since doing this, it has reduced the number of ineffective calls to its service by almost 20%.
Get on track with call tracking
Call tracking is the secret weapon for healthcare marketers who want real insights into how their marketing spend is performing. It helps healthcare providers of all shapes and sizes generate more inbound calls, and get much more from their marketing budget.
