SMS Marketing for Healthcare: Best Practices + Examples

Do you use SMS marketing for healthcare? In this blog post, we’re going to explain why you need to use this channel to market your business and keep in touch with your loyal patients.

Also, we’ll let you know the best practices and successful examples of healthcare SMS marketing to help you make the most of it. You can also contact the WP SMS support team for more information and try our demo to see if it’s suitable for your SMS marketing campaigns. 

Why Use SMS Marketing for Healthcare?

First, let’s see if SMS marketing is useful for healthcare businesses. 

Benefits of SMS Campaigns for Your Healthcare Business

Although new channels like social media have revolutionized marketing methods, SMS marketing is still effective. Here are some reasons why you need to use SMS marketing, especially in the healthcare industry:

• Improving Patient Engagement: SMS is best for two-way communication with your patients. In fact, SMS enables patients to engage with you in many ways like appointment confirmation, asking questions, or rescheduling. This is great for enhancing the patient experience and increasing your brand loyalty.

• Cost-Efficient: Although you have to pay per message, SMS marketing is one of the most affordable marketing methods for bulk outreach.

• Reducing No-Shows: One of the biggest problems of healthcare businesses is patients who forget their appointments. You can greatly reduce the rate of missed appointments by sending SMS reminders for appointments.

• Fast: You can easily automate and schedule your messages. As a result, you can save time and effort when sending messages like reminders, confirmations, welcome messages, etc.

• Segmentation and Personalization: SMS platforms like WP SMS allow you to segment your patients and personalize messages. This way, your patients feel VIP and believe that they’re part of your story.

• High Open Rate: The majority of people open their text messages but many of them don’t check their emails each day. So SMS marketing is the best channel for reaching out to people outside of their businesses.

Types of SMS Campaigns for Healthcare Providers

Here are the ways you can use SMS to reach out to your patients:

1.  Appointment Reminders

Reminding patients of their appointments is one of the most important uses of SMS. Instead of calling them personally, you can automate reminders to be sent at the best time before the appointment. 

2.  Prescription Reminders

A big problem for patients is that they forget to take medication. You can offer a prescription reminder service to solve this problem. This way, you can make sure that your patients are healthy and also gain their trust.

3.  Health Tips and Wellness Advice

You don’t have to use SMS just for advertising. You can appear like a thought leader by sharing health tips and wellness advice. 

It’s good to prepare useful health tips specifically for each group of patients to keep patients informed and engaged.

4.  Follow-up Notifications

Your relationship with your patients isn’t finished after a treatment or surgery. You have to keep in touch with them with follow-up SMS messages. This way, you can kill two birds with a single stone. 

First, you’ll ensure that patients are following post-care instructions. Second, you can gain the trust of your patients more and more because they see you’re taking care of them and this is great for your business reputation.

5.  Blood Test Results and Emergency Notifications

You can save your and your patients’ time by sending the test results and updates by SMS. In fact, your patients don’t need to come to get the results, and this is a great service you can offer using automated SMS tools.

6.  Promotions and Lead Generation

Last but not least, you can leverage the power of SMS marketing to promote your healthcare business and generate more leads. You can send ads and text messages with a link to your business site/page and convert people into loyal patients.

Best SMS Marketing Practices for Healthcare + Examples

Now that you know the importance of using SMS marketing for healthcare, it’s good to learn some techniques to optimize your marketing campaigns:

Consider Compliance with GDPR and HIPAA

Data protection is a must in SMS marketing, and healthcare SMS marketing is no exception. As a healthcare provider, you need to comply with laws like HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) in the U.S. and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in Europe.

These regulations ensure that the personal information of your patients like names, phone numbers, diseases, etc. are confidential and secure.

Be Creative to Obtain SMS Consent 

Apart from keeping personal data safe, you need to get consent from your patients before sending ads. This means that you can’t run SMS marketing campaigns without getting your audiences’ consent. 

Healthcare businesses usually get this consent when patients use their services. If you want to find a new audience, you have to try other channels to increase the number of subscribers.

You can use a creative opt-in message on your website, social media channels, etc. For example, you can use this sentence to encourage them to subscribe:

In this message, you’re asking the audience to send a short phrase to a short code number to subscribe. 

Create Clear and Concise Texts

As you know, SMS has a limitation of 160 characters. So you have to include all of your messages in a couple of short sentences. You need to ask what you want clearly and politely without any superfluous items.

Here is a sample healthcare SMS that has all the necessities while it’s short:

Segment Your Audience and Personalize Your Messages

You can’t send a single SMS to all patients and expect the same result. Each type of patient might need something different so you have to talk to them differently. So you have to segment your audience into several groups based on important items like:

• Age
• Gender
• Illness
• Previous appointments
• Location 

Then, you can send specific messages to each group. This way, you can better target the audience and get higher conversion rates. 

Also, you can personalize your messages to increase your intimacy with your patients. For example, use their first name and mention their previous interactions to make them feel comfortable.

Here is an example of a personalized message to a patient:

Send Your SMS at the Best Time

Timing is key in SMS marketing, especially when it comes to medical text messages. You need to consider several factors to send text messages to avoid annoying your patients.

First, try to avoid sending updates, ads, and reminders late at night or early in the morning. However, you can send confirmation messages immediately after the trigger. For example, if the patient processes the payment, you can send an automated confirmation message to them.

For bulk marketing messages, you have to pay more attention to timing because it’s important to send the message at the best time to get maximum exposure.

Although there is no certain formula for the best timing for SMS marketing, the following image shows the hours with the highest chance of engagement.

Avoid Over-Messaging

Apart from the time of sending your messages, it’s also important to pay attention to the number of messages you send to each audience. 

Many people don’t like to receive too many text messages on their mobile so you have to avoid over-messaging. If you frequently send SMS to your audience they will highly likely opt-out of your SMS subscription list.

So try to only send up to 2 messages per week, unless there is an important message like an appointment reminder or payment confirmation.

Include A Compelling CTA

In each marketing message, you’re asking for a favor. You don’t have the luxury of a traditional letter to write as many words as you can. So try to be clear, polite, and compelling.

You must include a creative CTA to encourage your audience to take action after reading the message. You can create a sense of urgency to increase the conversion rate. 

For example, if your patient used a specific service last year, you can advise them to use it each year due to their health. Here is a sample message of this CTA:

In this SMS, you’re giving a piece of advice to encourage the audience to use your clinical service once again. This is the best approach for writing a compelling CTA because it doesn’t seem promotional.

Offer Something Valuable

You can’t just ask for something without offering something in return. You have to include something valuable in your message. 

This could be anything like:

• A helpful health tip
• A reminder about seasonal vaccines
• Discount for a health check-up

For example, you can send a message and warn the patient of the flu:

Use the Right SMS Marketing Platform

You can win the competition in marketing without the right tool. If you think you can send some text messages and get results, you’re wrong.

Try to use a suitable SMS marketing platform that fits your requirements. For example, if you have a website, you’d better integrate your SMS marketing campaign into your WordPress dashboard using a plugin. WP SMS is one of the best SMS plugins for WordPress.

It offers lots of features like scheduling, automation, newsletter, and segmentation, and supports more than 300 SMS gateways.

Using this platform, you can easily use your visitors’ phone numbers to send notifications and run SMS marketing campaigns for your healthcare business.

Cross-promote Your Campaigns on other Channels

Last but not least, you shouldn’t rely solely on SMS. If you want to get maximum results, you have to integrate your SMS marketing with email campaigns, social media, and your website. This helps you reach out to patients across different channels.

For example, you can send an email campaign to encourage patients to sign up for SMS reminders. In the email, you can offer exclusive health tips or appointment slots.

Here is a sample email to promote your SMS marketing campaign:

Final Thoughts

Healthcare businesses can greatly benefit from SMS marketing. From service promotions to appointment reminders, you can use SMS to keep in touch with potential patients and boost your business. 

Remember that you don’t have to push too hard for it. People don’t like to be annoyed by SMS on every occasion. So don’t send too many text messages and try to appear like a doctor, not a seller. 

With a friendly approach and using a suitable SMS platform like WP SMS, you can expect great success in your business. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you need more help.

FAQs