Keeping Your Contacts Organized with a CRM

Effective follow-up communication is an indispensable practice for orthodontic offices. For people to commit to starting orthodontic treatment, particularly at your office, it often takes careful guidance through the sales funnel. By offering personalized follow-up, you can make the best impression and earn new patients. But if your communication is going to have this personalized touch, you’ll need to keep your contacts clearly organized. 

Using a CRM to Segment Contacts

An essential tool that will allow you to keep your orthodontic practice organized when it comes to your communications with your contacts is a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM), such as Hubspot. CRMs allow you to import your contacts and create a variety of qualifiers for each contact, such as their patient status and how the lead was generated. Based on this information about each contact, you can get a quick glance at where the patient is in the sales funnel and get an idea about which patient persona they may fall into. For instance, you could see that the lead contact was generated by the patient providing contact info in order to download a brochure on early orthodontics. This tells you that this patient most likely isn’t interested in Invisalign Express or teeth-whitening but rather would like to receive information about treatments like palatal expanders. 

Information like this about each contact allows you to generate new lists, which make it much easier to break down your contacts into more manageable sizes. Rather than simply looking through all of your contacts to send an email, you can select a filter and narrow down your results. For example, you can create a list for your leads that entered a contest in order to make it easier to follow up later on. And by changing your leads into patients when they start treatment, you can make sure you aren’t sending current patients content or promotions that are useless to them. 

Automate Your Emails

Make life even easier for yourself by automating your emails using your contact lists. Since most patient-tracking systems don’t include an automated feature for emails, you’ll need to use a separate system to do this, like Mailchimp. Tools like these will allow you to schedule newsletters to patients who are on specific lists, such as contacts with kids who may need braces in the future, or patients who will need a retainer after their treatment is over. 

Having these automated emails set up for certain lists will help you avoid accidentally sending irrelevant content to certain leads or patients while taking some stress off your shoulders. Just be sure to keep your contacts updated when any changes happen, such as if they start treatment or if they have already been emailed about a certain promotion. 

By making use of a CRM and finding the right automation tools for your office, you can avoid confusion with your contacts and keep your communications organized. In the end, these simple steps will make personalized communication with your patients and leads much more seamless.