Marketing automation is a phenomenal tool for lead nurturing and much more in the behavioral health industry. Treatment providers can and should explore leveraging marketing automation to increase their efficiency, improve their conversion rates, move prospects through the funnel, and improve patient experience. In this article, we’ll explore how to use marketing automation in SUD treatment.
Let’s start by taking a look at how valuable marketing automation can be when it comes to prospects and your acquisition efforts. According to DemandGen Report, “nurtured leads produce, on average a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads” and according to The Annuitas Group, “businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads.”
It doesn’t stop there though. Marketing automation can improve performance and experience across your referral partners, patients, and families.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is the use of technology to automate different marketing processes such as communication with prospects or clients across different channels. This automation can increase efficiency but also offers deeper personalization as you built out campaigns based upon user behavior. Marketing automation can be used for lead generation, lead nurturing, and other activities such as client onboarding, retention, and satisfaction.
How does Marketing Automation Work?
It all starts with prospects. These prospects can come from a variety of sources such as your digital advertising campaigns or referral partners. Once you’ve collected that prospect data, your marketing automation tool can help you segment audiences, target them with the right message, and send that message at the right time – with a completely personalized experience. Of course, marketing automation can be used well beyond the initial prospect experience and can be highly effective in keeping your customers, referral partners, and advocates engaged.
Typically, marketing automation contains audiences, triggers, and actions. Your team will build out the process with rules to execute these actions as the audience and triggers are met.
What is an Audience?
An audience can be defined by simple or complex sets of variables. For example, you may decide on having a simple audience of contacts that are opportunities or contacts that are referral partners. Or you may create an audience that is a little more detailed, such as contacts that are opportunities and are located in New York.
What is a Trigger?
A trigger is an event that causes an action to take place. In the case of marketing automation, triggers may be events such as a contact being added to a list, a contact opening an email, or a contact’s stage in the process being changed – among others. For example, if you are creating a campaign for sending travel information, your trigger may be when an opportunity stage is updated to “ready to schedule travel.”
What is an Action?
Actions can be communications such as email or text, tasks for your team, and or field updates on records. For example, when working with alumni management, you may have a trigger when a contact has been discharged successfully to complete the action of sending a congratulatory email.
Marketing Automation Use Cases for SUD Treatment Providers
Within SUD treatment and behavioral health, there are many use cases for leveraging marketing automation to improve operations patient experience, and increase in sales opportunities for your Behavioral Health brand. Here are just a few examples:
- Prospect Nurturing Campaigns Directly to the Prospect
- Prospect Nurturing Campaigns to Family Members
- Travel Information Campaigns
- Welcome Campaigns to New Patients
- Engagement Campaigns for Current Patients
- Alumni Campaigns
- Referral Source and Partner Campaigns
In conclusion, marketing automation can help you become more efficient and free up your team to perform higher value activities. Through marketing automation, you can nurture your leads, engage better with patients, follow up with alumni, and forge better relationships with your referral partners. Sunwave offers a marketing automation component that is part of your comprehensive behavioral health providers unified treatment platform. To learn more, schedule a demo with one of our experts.
