Drug Rehab Admissions Leaks – How to Plug the Holes
There are dozens of places where you can be leaking drug rehab admissions and you would have no idea this is happening unless you take a closer look at your business and are open minded to reevaluating how you are doing things. We are going to look at the actual transactions of the business vs. looking at the offering of the business (i.e. accepting insurance and not accepting insurance.)
Call Center Admissions Leaks
This has to be undoubtedly has to be the biggest leak centers in the admissions process. Being a professional marketer it is easy to make the phone ring but bringing the client into admission during the phone call is a skill set that requires training and experience. How many calls do you get per day? How many calls do you require before you have an admission? 1 in 25? 1 in 50? 1 in 100? 1 in 300? Improving on these numbers can have a significant impact on your business.
Sometimes owners of the drug rehab business are processing the admissions themselves by taking the phone calls which is great but there might be a couple of areas for improvement that will make the difference between 1-3 additional admissions per month.
How do we measure performance of the drug rehab call center agents? We record the calls and listen to them and we use drug rehab call tracking software to track performance on call center agents.
Call your 800# on your website. How many rings does it take to be answered? If you aren’t picking up after the 3rd ring chances are you are leaking admissions here.
Drug Rehab Referral Leaks
Let’s face it referrals are probably going to be your most dependable admission sources.
Often many drug and alcohol treatment centers depend on a steady supply of referrals to keep their business at a respectable census. Some of these referrals come from interventionists, therapists, counselors, treatment centers and other sources. The challenge becomes keeping in front of all of these folks on a regular basis. The treatment center needs to set up a “system” to do so. If not, many of these referral sources can refer to your competition. One of the easiest ways to do so is using direct mail. Direct mail is probably the most cost effective dependable a treatment center can use to give the referral source an actual physical document to share with the referee so they can call or visit the website of your treatment center.
If you calculate your on-ground marketers databases of referral sources you will find hundreds if not thousands of potential referral sources. Why not send them at least a postcard every month just to remind them that your services are available? Figure if you send 1,000 postcards per month you should get at least a 2% response rate which is 20 additional phone calls. Chances are you will close a percentage of those 20 calls plus any other interactions with those referral sources.
Building your list is probably one of the single most powerful and cost effective ways to build and sustain your business as far as marketing goes. Sending out e-mails are helpful but sending out postcards get virtually a 100% “open rate” or at least they get looked at where e-mails often never get opened.
E-mail Referral Leaks
Like direct mail e-mail can be highly effective. There are two audiences we want to send e-mails to:
1) The prospect who visits the drug treatment center website
2) The referral source who sends admissions into your drug treatment center
The prospect that visits your website and fills out a web form can also opt into your newsletter. Building this list will help your branding and any residual admissions. At the same time anyone who calls your call center it is important to try and capture their e-mail so we can get their permission and add them to our newsletter. We all know that over time someone looking for treatment in January chances are they might not decide to go in to treatment in January but might get treatment in June. Why not stay top of mind with them by sending regular emails?
As far as sending e-mail to referral sources, they require a different type of mail than the website prospects. I find that many centers are sending regular e-mail to their referral sources. The best recommendation I can make here is to “segment” your list. The interventionist should get a different e-mail than the partner treatment center. I use an e-mail marketing system called Infusionsoft and one of the many things I like about it is the ability to segment the lists. This is not as hard as you might think it is. What you can also do is create all the e-mail’s at once (let’s say a dozen or 2 dozen) and release them in a monthly sequence over the next year or two years. Setting up a “system” like this is extremely powerful because you can focus on your business while the system does the work when you are sleeping. I call this leverage.
Drug Rehab Website Admission Leaks
Like the call center if we can significantly boost the visit to call ratio chances are we can also significantly boost our admissions. Fixing the website is the cheapest way to generate additional phone calls. Many businesses fail to test their current “landing page” (homepage) vs. a different split test page. This is easiest to do in a PPC type of environment. In the PPC environment send a portion of the website visits to the split test page and measure the visit to call ratios. We really need at least 200 calls to both versions to get a probability of 90%+. While visit to call ratios are important and easy to measure we really want to measure the admissions from the two different versions.
It might only be a small copy or image change to significantly boost your conversions. The one item of note is we really are going to need some volume of website visits to measure this in a reasonable time frame of a month or two.
Keyword Admissions Leaks
Paying attention to which keywords that are converting can be an important factor to driving the right buying traffic to your website. Some drug rehab keywords will convert better than others. For example keyword descriptors like Facilities, Centers, Programs, Rehabs tend to be much better buying keywords than keywords like Cocaine Addiction. People seem to do a lot of research on the different types of addiction but when they are ready to buy they will include terms like Facilities, Centers, Programs, Rehabs in their search queries.
In order to track which keywords that are converting it can be done in Google Analytics as well as your call tracking software. This is simple to set up and it is critical that you do and then make sure you look at the conversion reports and act on them. We can track both the PPC and SEO traffic.
Drug Rehab Employee Leaks
We all like to believe that we have the best employees but let’s face it, in today’s world it is unlikely that any one person will stay at the same place of employment for a life time. If this is true then we want to control employee communications especially in the call center, admissions and treatment areas.
It is critical that the treatment center issue cell phones and e-mail for the employees. When the employee leaves then the center can access the e-mail and phone residuals. The treatment center has paid for the inquiries, why let the inquiries migrate to another treatment center after the employee leaves? On the e-mail side the best way to control this is with Google Business Apps or Microsoft Exchange Server. Call us if you want help with this.
Drug Rehab PPC Leaks
Let’s face it PPC is expensive. When was the last time you did a PPC audit? When was the last time you took a look at your negative keywords? While some of your ad groups might be generating a lot of clicks they might not be generating many phone calls nor admissions for that matter. Simple keywords like drug rehab can generate a ton of traffic but typically it is not traffic you can take to the bank, unless you are Google.
Call Us If You Want a Drug Rehab PPC Audit, It Could Be the Best ROI Investment You Make in the Next 12 Months.
