Benefits of running an effective newsletter campaign to retain more customers

In reality this is a highly complex challenge because it needs constant attention to the behaviours of email customers and fluid segments where customers can move from segment to segment depending on the actions they take. Where there is the resource, this means using a centralised CRM tool that captures all customer information to enable the holy grail of ‘single customer view’.

This focuses on the structure you can build to manage your retention marketing campaigns. 

• Create a monthly newsletter to communicate news and developments:

• This is the relationship building tool of your retention program: revenue is a target but not the primary focus; the goal is to increase brand engagement amongst your opt-in customers and increase their understanding of what you do and how it benefits them

• Use features like dynamic content to reduce the campaign admin and need to create multiple campaigns.

• Showcase new products and services to raise awareness of changes ie: do you have a new yoga class or women's only clinic running on a specific day of the week or do you have some offer or discounts then let your customers know. 

• Promote your social media presence strongly and ask people to join you socially. Try to spread your presence across several platforms and control your presence on Hootsuite to make things easier

• Include interactive content that encourages people to take actions e.g. use polls to get customer feedback and then publish poll results in the next newsletter.  

• Showcase customer content to demonstrate that there is a community to get involved with. Here you can use your customer reviews or look at articles past clients have written about you in blogs or newspapers. With local search being so important it is better if you can showcase reviews that have been placed on your Google Local Page.

• Promote value-added content such as videos, blogs, white papers, articles etc.

• Include content that isn’t about your company but is relevant to what you do and would further establish you as ‘thought leaders’ or ‘interesting commentators’ e.g. a physiotherapy clinic using snippets of professional sportsperson using one of their products and allowing customers to share comments and bookmark socially about this

Create a separate sales cycle email campaign to drive conversion:

• This aims to give customers relevant promotions and offers to drive more appointments and more revenue 

• At the same time, you need to ensure that your email content is relevant to your email customers; this often means producing some bespoke content for email that isn’t being used in other marketing channel

• Learn from past campaigns to tailor promotions and offers based on what your customers respond best to

• Promote top rated customer reviews to encourage conversion.

• You can use segmented sign-up to get customers to subscribe to alerts services as well as general newsletter programs.

• You could also provide RSS feeds to enable people to get instant updates.

The key challenge in the Retention Program is to build a campaign schedule that is interesting and relevant to customers, not just about what you want to sell.

You will keep more email customers active if you engage with them and involve them in your email marketing. Don’t be afraid to use polls and surveys to find out what they like/dislike and use the feedback to evolve your marketing strategy. Again feel free to drop by and leave any comments.

How To Get Your Practice On Apple Maps

Right about now everyone knows just how bad Apple MAps is and the majority of us have already with Iphone have already reverted back to the old Google Maps App because Apple Maps was well and truly driving s insane with lots of false data and business which did not even exist. I decided to write this post after seeing several posts on the topic and the importance of what being included on Apple MAps is to local business and healthcare practices in general. This may mot be the case now with all the confusion but the day will come that Apple sorts everything out and when they do Im sure you will not want to join to rush.

So why the need for your practice to be included in Apple Maps. Well this is simple. There is an estimated 1,000,000,000 iOS devices projected to be in the hands of consumers worldwide by 2015. Yes this is a big number and if we are thinking on a local level the numbers of people who will be searching for your business will undoubtedly be high as well so no matter how much the app sucks now it is something that as a practice you need to address and get listed.

The most frustrating thing so far from the information I have gathered is there is no consistent way of getting yourself listed.

Search for Your Business
Get your hands on an iPhone or iPad that has been updated to iOS6.  Open the Maps app and enter your business name and location in the search box.  Make sure you use the location.   In its current state, Apple Maps can get easily confused if the query is not precise.  In fact, because the app suffers from quirky data consistency issues, I recommend you do the following searches, just to make sure your business shows up for all of them:

- business name + city
- business name + street address
- business name + street address + city
- business phone number

If your business listing does not appear for any of these queries, it’s possible that you may have one of the following issues:

- Apple Maps does not have your business in its database
- Apple Maps is confusing your location with a different location (e.g. Miami, FL v. Miami, OH)
- Apple Maps does not have your location in its database

Here are some ways you can try to correct the situation:

The way to add your Business to Apple Maps

There are three main ways to currently add a US-based business to Apple Maps:

Report Your Location to Apple Map

i. Search for your location

ii. In the location detail click the “Report a Problem” 

iii. Choose the appropriate proble

iv. Choose “Other” on the Report a Problem s

iv. Choose “Other” on the Report a Problem scree

Add your business data via the various fields and submitIt’s unclear how often Apple is updating the maps based on user-submitted data, but my guess is they are furiously figuring out how to do it asap.

Add Your Business to Yelp

Yelp syndicates reviews and other content to Apple Maps.  If your business has been verified on Yelp, there’s a good chance that it will show up on the maps.  If you do not already have a business listing on Yelp, check out How To Add Your Business Listing To Yelp.Again, it’s unclear how often Apple updates the Yelp data, but my guess is this is some of the more frequently updated data on the maps.

Regular Checks of Your Business Listings
With so many things going wrong with Apple MAps just to make sure it may well be worth your while just regularly going to Apple MAps and seeing what information it is grabbing about your business and correct it when necessary.

I will be updating this post regularly as updates from Apple and other sources are constantly changing on this subject. I would like to thank Andrew Shotland however for providing me with the bulk of this information.

Is it worth advertising in GP practice booklet?

This is an interesting thread which I came across recently in a Linkedin Forum and wanted to share my thoughts and advice on this because it seems to be a regular thread that comes up again and again and I feel needs some guidance.

GP practice booklets have notoriously low conversion rates and this seems to be the norm especially in my experience and feedback I have had from several therapists who have plaed there ads there. The healthcare sector seems to be the worst hit in conversion rates in comparison to other verticals such as plumbers and electricians and decorators who advertise in the same space. Conversion rate measured as the amount of referrals who have told you they came directly from the GP practice booklet and those we have been able to measure in some way. For a financial outlay of lets say £100 to advertise and only to get 1-2 referrals is not a good investment. I feel the initial idea of advertising in this space needs to look more at not the niumbers of direct referrals you get but what is your strategy what are you looking to get out of it? How are you going to measure the amount of people who see your ad and come through to your site? When they do come through to your site how will you then be able to measure  those that then went on to make a booking if you do not have some sort of e-commerce tracking installed on your website?

These are the question you need to ask yourself before you do any sort of advertising to avoid disappointment 6 months down the line when you evaluate your results. As human beings rarely do we act on impulse when we see something advertised. After seeing an ad for the first time we acknowledge its existence, go home ponder over what we thought of the ad then go back several times again over the next few weeks after we have noted the website address, ask friends for their opinion, thought again then do another Google search, this time we see another advert in the Google organic searches or in their paid ads section and on this occasion you decide to click through and go to the website or ring up to make the appointment. Who then gets the credit for that conversion, the person who finally after several months makes the appointment. Do we attribute the client booking the appointment from the GP advert he saw 6 months ago, the Google organic search results or the Google paid per click ad? We could say they have all worked together to help in the conversion but as the great marketeers we are as health professionals we will probably forget all about Ad placed in the GP practice booklet and atrribute to the last click to the Google organic search result. Looking at things this way brings a whole different way of looking at things. The point I should be making is that instead of wondering if our ad has worked is to ask ourselves the question are we really measuring the success of all our advertising.
The internet has come a long way and gone are the days where we have to guess if things have failed or worked. Now everything is at our fingertips and Google has made it easy for everyone to access their Google Analytics tool to help you measure your campaigns. This is something that should be set up straight away on your website and you should get your web developer to install this. I will provide some Analytics dashboards in future posts which you can download to help you get started.


MEASURE EVERYTHING
you can't capture every bit of ROI, but you can capture alot. Measure everything

Websites that do not invest in measuring their campaigns are losing an opportunity to understand their patients and what they are looking for and ultimately what works to attract them to your practice.

I strongly believe to make your practice a success you need to be advertising in several places at the same time and keeping track of what is working and what is not so that in the future you are not wasting your time doing something which gives minimal returns whilst maxing out on things that do work. In todays world of small business the demands of the business demand you to increase footfall into your  practice to increase your bottomline straightaway. Those needs are understood so why not make your advertising spend more efficient by measuring it in the first place. When we do measure it is simply not a case of looking at the raw numbers like for example the ad attracting several clients but we need to bring a context to this number and look rather at increases made throughout different times of the year or comparisons with the same time last year. Was there some other kind of advertising you did that in tandem helped to drive up referrals or visitors to your website.

I strongly believe in a multifaceted approach to advertising a practice website to increase its visibility so that includes using offline and online marketing channels like email, search engine optimisation, sponsorships. I truly liked the quote which James Butler at the Painless Practice quoted

"however connected and social media led the world becomes there is still merit in the old fashioned tactic of building relationships in person face to face. Google is a great place to attract people you dont know at all. Networking and word of mouth attract people who almost know you."

Please feel free to drop any comments to this post or if you like it share it with your friends and collegues.

Local SEO - Be Patient

Local SEO needs to be consistent and demands patience

This is something we have continuously highlighted to our customers search engine optimisation is an ongoing process and to be successful one needs to be patient and persistent. This often ets lost with the demans of running a small business where demands to drive up revenue and footfall immediately puts what the benefits SEO will bring to the business into the background.

Improve Your Practice with Customer Feedback

Being able to gauge what your customers think about you is very powerful and makes your business more agile to respond and react to their customer desires. I have included in this post some ways getting more customer feedback to gain insights and drive more referrals and customers to your practice. 

Reviews

There are so many ways todays that your customers should be able to reach you whether it is on your Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter accounts what you need to be doing is cafully datamining this data and pulling some insights into what you are doing that your customers want to change. There is nothing better that drives customer engagement and loyalty. It will also gives you a sense of just how your patients are discussing you and how they are describing you and what they are asking from you the next time they have an interaction with you.

In person

This way you can call some your patients and just see what they thought about the service that you provided and can simply be a matter of spending an hour a day for a week calling some of your customers and seeing what their responses are. this is an authentic way of creating a community and find out what they are saying about you and your business.

Blog Posts

This is a simple way to get your customers talking about you by posting and getting comments and reviews asking your customers to drop their comments. This post could be from the person in charge of writing the posts or from one of team asking for example their opinions on the plans to build a new gym or have more yoga classes on a Wednesday morning. This is brilliant and avoids a probable disaster for you in creating something for the business when there isn’t even a need in the first place.
What was your reason for cancelling today. Most people will go for the but then they have the opportunity to give you some more reasons and insight into the exact reason maybe it was that they do not need the service right now or that the price point was too high. If you can take these answers and react to them, as a practice you will be seen as more agile and react to your customers needs and desires and solving your customers problems and increasing customer sentiment.

Customer Boards

What about going to your social platforms Facebook and Linkedin and ask your customers what they think of you as a company and if they can describe you in a phrase. This is gold and not only do you have your customers engaging with you but they are replying to your questions and at the same time you are showing them you are interested in what they have to say. The option to this is doing alot of data mining. This way I have explained is much better. 

Teams

Why not try to make use of the teams that you work with and even if you are a small outfit it can be as simple as asking the secretary what the questions and complaints customers have come to her with or asking your collegue who recently went to CPD training what new developments have been happening out there that you need to be aware of and if so improved upon. This is not something to do once a year but should be done consistently to make sure your practice is up to date with all the latest news and developments in the industry.

Use of customer surveys
There are various online customer surveys available such as 4Q which allow business owners to evaluate the online experience, measure customer satisfaction which allow you to quickly implement website improvements based on real visitor feedback. Use of these tools are easy enough and there are some free trial of these tools available but it is an excellent resource.

Most surveys are done as a pulse read, we have a thought in mind, a question we want answered, a project we are doing and we do a survey. That is great. But surveys can be hugely powerful as a continuous and ongoing measurement system. Having surveys continuously deployed on your website will mean that you will always have your finger on the pulse of your visitors. More importantly it will mean that you can account for seasonality, external influences (like press releases or company events) and marketing campaigns. 

I hope this has provided some ways of using customer feedback to gain insights and make your healthcare practice more robust and agile to your customer needs and desires. Please feel free to drop by and leave a comment if you have found other ways of getting more feedback from your customers.

Local SEO 101

How is Local SEO different from National SEO?

While all of the elements that apply to national SEO also impact local SEO (on-page factors, links, social, indexing, etc.), local comes with a few unique elements.

The first and probably most important is that for local SEO you need to create and claim a local profile on Google (and other platforms as desired.) Your local listing is what will show (usually) for localized search results.

The second most important thing is called a "citation". A citation is any place online that uses your company (name, address, phone number) all on the same page, in the same format as your local listing. It is extremely important that you include these details always in the same way regardless of where you will provide a citation. This is just to help Google index your business address more effectively and will help you not lose a potential citation because you have listed it in a different format and Google has mistaken it for another business address. So for example if your business address is 113 Gauden Road Clapham SW4 7BQ, it is imperative that you stick to this format everywhere.

Third, reviews are extremely important. The more reviews that can be left on your Google Places page the better and the more authentic the reviews that you have with both good and bad reviews wil add genuinity to your business and make people more believe that your business is human after all. This is an important ranking factor. In a previous post I highlighted a number of ways for you as a practice to get reviews. 

How does on-site optimization differ for Local SEO vs. National SEO?
All of the same elements apply, but there are four things you should strongly consider mixing in. One, make sure your name, address and phone number are used on every page of your site, in the same format as your Google local listing (in the footer is an ideal location.) Two, use your City and County names in your Title tags, Meta descriptions, and the content on your site (as it fits, don’t just force it in there.)  Three, make use of Schema Local Mark Up to better help search engines identify and show your location. 

What are the most important signals that boost local SEO rankings?

The three biggest factors in local listings appear to be the number of citations, the number of reviews (primarily on your Google Places listing, though other places do count), and how positive the reviews are overall. Positive reviews do beat citations for obvious reasons, so persuading your customers and clients to leave great reviews on your Google local page is the single most important thing you can do. Of course, there are some things that have a big impact and that may not be directly in your control, such as how close your business is to the city center. I will include a later post on how to set up Google Places account.

What does the location of a business close to a town center have to do with anything?

Google uses something commonly called “centroid bias”, which means that if someone searches for, say, Clapham Physiotherapist, there will be a bias towards the physiotherapist locations that are closest to the center of the city. While it is possible for a business in a neighboring city to rank for a metro keyword (i.e. a business in Cambridge trying to rank for a Boston keyword), if you’re on the outskirts of a city, or in a city neighbouring a major metropolitan area, you’re going to be at a disadvantage.

Can you outline a brief action plan you’d recommend for new company looking to compete for local search results?
First, claim your local listing on Google Places, and make sure to complete your listing until it’s at 100%. This will require adding images, videos, and more. When creating this listing, DO NOT use any keywords or location names in your business title or business description that aren’t a part of your official business name or absolutely critical to accurately describing your business.

Second, use a service like Yext to make sure that the information from your Google Places page is spread across all of the other major local platforms, in the same format. Each of these will become a citation, which is hugely valuable.

Next, make sure you have your on-site SEO in order, and that at least some of the links you build contain your target City/County combo (you can also use some postal codes in your anchors as well, to spice things up.) 

Last but not least, do everything you can to get your happy customers to leave positive reviews for you on Google Places. You aren’t supposed to directly solicit positive reviews, but there are plenty of ways to encourage great reviews.

What are some of the best ways a local practice can use to get citations
You can use a tool like the White Spart Local Citation Finder to locate the best citation sources for your city. There are many other tools available to find citations but industrywide this one is recommended and easy to use. Guest blog posts are also a fantastic way to get citations, as you can often work them into your author bio. The only thing is it will take time to build relationships with bloggers, this is the time that it takes them to feel confident in you and do some research into you to see what type of content you write and if you would be a good fit in with their practice. Obviously you will need to measure this vs the time you have and necessities of the practice to make money.

How can a local practice get reviews?
Let your customers or clients know that they can rate their experience with you on your Google Places profile. Have logos up in your windows or in your office showing the places where people can leave reviews. Include your profile links in your email communications (particularly in follow-up emails after a purchase or visit), direct mail, and anywhere else you can think of to get it in front of customers. Bear in mind to get positive reviews you need to provide excellent service and engage your customer to make them fell that they are special and that your business is special as well that they want to go back and tell their friends, they want to talk about you on Twitter and Facebook. You get positive reviews by providing an "excellent service". Nuff said.

One of the things you are encouraged to avoid is going out and buying links. A few years back this was common practice but now it is not something that is advised and most of the major search engines will look down very badly on you if you are caught out which means you could lose your site rankings and positions which will affect your business bottom line. Once you have lost these rankings it may be extremely difficult to get them back

Will getting your practice in directories help?
Getting your practice placed in local directories will help immensely and the easy way to do this is simply finding what local directories exist in your local area and get yourself a listing. Say for example I have my practice in Clapham all I have to do to find the relevant local directories is to do a google search with the search query;

directories "clapham"

Is it recommended for a practice to do its own SEO or an SEO expert?
What are the pros and cons of each? This depends entirely on your budget. There are plenty of guides out there that will walk you through local SEO, and you could quite easily put an intern in charge of reading those posts and following instructions (getting citations isn’t terribly complex.) Of course, if they mess things up, neither you nor they may realize it until it’s far too late. An agency will almost certainly be able to do the same things much, much faster, and while an agency may cost more upfront it might end up being worth it for the speed and accuracy.

Are there any specific services, websites, or tools that help companies with local SEO?
The WhiteSpark Local Citation Finder should be your first investment. It’s pretty cheap, about $16/mo, and is the best tool available for finding citation sources. You’ll also want to set-up Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools, so that you can effectively track what keywords are driving search impressions and traffic to your site.

Is Local SEO an ongoing effort, or is it something I need to do one off and that is it?
There is alway a cost for an SEO service but the most important thing is that is SEO is an ongoing effort to be able to reap the rewards in the future and for a small business the need to bring in customers and show the effect on bottomline immediately may for some outweigh any benefits that may arise from anyone coming in and helping you out with your SEO effort in the long term if you are only going to use him for one month and then stop. Rome was not built in a day and just as things change in life your rankings in the search engines will change as well so to reap the benefits local SEO is a longe term project. The most important thing is that as a customer you need to be able to measure what your ROI is from these efforts. So if you establish that you need a local SEO service for six months costing £200 per month then you know that in six months the amount you have invested needs to be at least doubled in revenue  from your SEO effort for it to be worhwhile.

Do I have to get a mobile version of my website?For the past few years everyone has been saying that it is the year of the mobile. In 2013 mobile and tablet use is expected to overtake desktop access to the internet. So this will have an effect on my local SEO efforts. To make sure that my local SEO efforts are optimised, you should

• make sure your website is optimised to work on mobiles and tablets
• your business is listed on Apple Maps
• your Google+ listings is displayed in Google Maps
• your business is listed in all prominent local apps (for example; I did a search for Clapham for this and I got back 2-3 apps which were relevant to my area)

I hope this guide has been of some help and if there are any comments anyone would like to include any more ways please feel free to have your say.

Local SEO to Your Website in Quick and Easy Steps

SEO is a skill and it takes time to get good at and we working within this sector your time will be more taken up at times with the business and you will not have the time to get to grips of how the search engines rank websites and today it is even more of a puzzle as search engines like Google continue to change their algorithms every other month whereby you start to believe that it may be more worthwhile to get someone to do it for you. However, if you do not have the money to do this or in your spare time you like to get deep down in computer code well here I have included a few quick steps to get your website ranking as quickly as possible. Lets call it the Internet Marketing 101 for physiotherapists and osteopaths. 

1. Update Your Page Titles

The page title or “title tag” is perhaps the most important element of SEO. These are the words that appear at the top of your web browser when you are on a page. They are also the words that show up in the blue links in Google.

Put the search terms you are targeting in your page titles. In general keep the titles as brief as possible while at the same time making them appealing to searchers. No easy trick. Put the most important keywords at the beginning of the title. Don’t worry about getting this perfect the first time as these are very easy to change and Google usually reacts to these changes quickly. This is something that is pretty easy to do and if anyone like your web developer tells you different then get another one.

2. Figure Out Your Target Audience

Until you know who you are targeting there is not much point in doing SEO. What words are your potential customers searching with when you want to be found? What keywords are your competitors using to rank for and what your potential customers are using to which your competitors are ranking for? What are different modes are they in when they are searching? Are they ready to buy? Are they just doing research? 

In general pick terms that match up with the service you are providing, for example a physiotherapy clinic may use a keyword phrase such as sports massage clapham or sport physiotherapy clapham if I had a clinic in the Clapham area, the important thing is to make sure that there a sufficient search volume for the keyword or keyword phrase for it to be beneficial to optimise the webpage you will be directing the traffic. To get an idea of search volume use can use the Google Keyword Tool.

3. Make Each Page Title Unique

It is also important that all of the pages on your site have unique page titles. A quick way to see if you have more than one page with the same title is to do the following search in Google:

site:yoursite.com intitle”the words in the title”

The results of this search will show all of the pages in Google that have these words in the title. Once you identify these problem pages you can update the titles to make them unique.

And make sure you add your city name to the titles as a lot of people search for your service in your city.

It also couldn’t hurt if you added some text to the actual page that uses the keywords you are targeting as well, in both the body of the text and the

h1 tag, which is typically the headline of the page. If you don’t have a page that targets the keywords you are using, add a new page that does.

You also should check the meta descriptions tags of each page to make sure those are unique as well.

4. Add a Few Internal Links

The number of links a page gets from its own site and which pages link to it matters. The home page is the most important on the site and so the pages that are linked to from the home page are also important. Figure out which pages you want to rank the most (and don’t say all of them) and add links from other pages to these pages. Make sure you use relevant keywords in the text of those links. For example if you want to rank the page for “pizza” use the word “pizza” in the text of the links that go to that page. Try not to use the exact same phrases in each link to make it look more “natural”. For example in some of the links use “best pizza” or “man that’s a helluva a pizza”.

5. Add Your Address to Every Page

Ideally every page should have your address and phone number. This is helpful for users but it also reinforces your location to the search engines. If your business has multiple locations then you may want to create a separate page for each location or at least a single page that lists all locations. Make sure you link to these pages from as many pages as possible on the site. 

6. Claim Your Profile on Google Local Business Center, Yahoo Local, etc.

There are a huge number of yellow pages-like sites that allow you to update your business information for free. These sites get a lot of traffic and tend to rank well. At the least you should go to each one, claim your profile and make sure they are linking to your site. There is alot of value to be got from listings in these directories and even better they are free.

7. Make a Video

Making a video is more harder than it sounds and can be as simple as plucking up the courage to mention and provide value to your clinic. Explain your service and try to be charming. Mention your website a lot. Then upload it to YouTube and every other free video site and title the video with your top keywords (ie: Balance Physiotherapy Clapham). Make sure your website is linked to from your profile. Then link to these video pages from your site with the keywords in the link text. You will be amazed at how easy it is for these pages to rank for your search terms.

8. Add a Blog To Your Site

A blog is just a simple way to add pages to your website and can be set up pretty easily in a few minutes. If you don’t want it super customized it shouldn’t cost that much. Once it’s up start writing. I am not talking novels or even journalism. I am talking keywords. If you want to rank for “Pizza in Pleasanton” write a blog post called “Pizza in Pleasanton: What’s Cooking Tonight At Joe’s Pizza”. Go to http://blogsearch.google.com/ping and add your blog’s URL to Google’s blogsearch engine. Now everytime you write something on the blog it will rank for these keywords.

9. Make Sure You Don’t Have Any Technical Issues

There are a number of technical issues that could be preventing your site from ranking. An easy way to identify them is to sign up your site to Google Webmaster Tools at www.google.com/webmasters/start. By copying a short line of code to your site you can get an idea of some of the common problems that Google is having with it. Google provides you with some detail about the problem. There is not much you yourself can likely do about these problems, but you can at least show them to your website developer or a SEO guy and ask him/her to figure it out.

10. Get Links

Now none of this stuff will work very well if you don’t have any links to your site. The big search engines look at links from other sites as a sign of quality and trust. So you should spend the remainder of your five minutes thinking about what other sites you think you can get links from. Here are some of the obvious ones:

- Chambers of commerce/local business groups

- Local business directories/Local newspaper site

- Friends who have sites (including your kid’s blog)

- Partners/Vendors

There are hundreds of other ways to get links like writing articles for other sites, sending out press releases, adding your business info to social media sites, making a fool of yourself in public, etc.

It’s important to understand that SEO is not a one-time thing just like running a TV ad campaign is not a one-time thing. It’s a marketing tactic like any other. And as more people use the Web to find local services, SEO could become one of the more important components of your marketing plan. SEO takes a little time to et used to but in the end it will be well worth your while. Use these quick steps and your website will be well on its way to rank in the search engines.