The road to success is a varied one, that’s the old saying, right? Well, it should be!
The bottom line is, no matter how much help and advice you might get from others, the key to your success will be in understanding your clients and working with them, rather than for them.
Here’s some insight from our marketing manager on getting to know your clients and using that data to grow your business!
Where is your business coming from?
It is important to know where your custom is coming from so that you can appropriately nurture those sources to ensure continuing success. In the same way, it is also important to understand where you are lacking, enabling you to decide whether to invest more time in certain ventures or focus your energy on your successes. In analysing your prominence amongst your target market you can work towards a more successful marketing strategy.
How can PPS help?
The first step towards understanding your prevalence amongst your target market is recording ‘source of introduction’. Knowing where your custom is coming from is key, PPS gives you the ability to capture this at the point of registering your clients. On the client details screen, under the profile section, you will see a box titled ‘source of introduction’ when registering new clients simply ask the question and choose the corresponding answer from the drop-down menu.
Customise it.
PPS comes with a default list of answers for any existing questions within the profile section of the client details screen. As you begin to capture referral sources, you might find the need for a more diverse list of options; with PPS you can customise the list of answers which appear in your drop-down menu, enabling you to capture even the most obscure referral sources! This information gives you the chance to explore the unknown when it comes to marketing opportunities.
Make sure you’re capturing the information that you need by making it mandatory; this means whenever you register a new client your staff will be prompted to ask for a source of introduction before they can save the new record.
Get personal.
PPS gives you the tools you need to capture the information that’s important to your practice. Capturing referral sources is a great starting point for really understanding your target market, but there are countless variable factors which dictate customer behaviour. Use the custom lookup fields in PPS to capture information that matters to you.
Just like the source of introduction field which is hardcoded into every PPS system you have a further 5 customisable fields which work in the same way, for each field you can define a question, the list of answers to choose from and whether this information is mandatory for registration. The more information you record, the easier it is to filter and therefore really understand your clients.
Analyse it.
So what can you do with all of that information? Using the reports wizard you can extract or analyse any information which is recorded using PPS. With a whole range of reports available it has never been easier to find exactly what you are looking for! Each report can also be customised to really drill down into your data, the perfect tool for identifying specific groups of clients and understanding their behaviour; marketing gold!
Target your market.
Putting all of that time and effort into capturing data and analysing the results puts you in the perfect position to undertake some targeted marketing. Understanding your client groups, including demographic and behavioural aspects, allows you to define your clients into segments by grouping those with similarities. Once you have a clear understanding of your segments you can then focus your energy on creating individual marketing campaigns which will appeal to each segment on a more personal level, which should have more resonance with your audience.
With PPS, you can use the reports section to create your segments. Once you have your segments defined you can use the marketing and mailshots feature to design your campaigns and send them out to your clients with just a few clicks of a button, you can even save your favourite reports to save you time in future, meaning quick easy access to your marketing segments!
Using PPS to reach out to your clients also means that you can always refer back to previous material, as a copy of every mailshot is saved to your client’s log.
Communication is key.
Now that you have all of the tools and know-how, it’s time to focus on getting your communication channels right. No matter how much data analysis and effort you put into creating your emails and newsletters, your time will be wasted if nobody actually reads what you’re sending out! Most clients will have a preferred method of contact such as email or SMS and this may differ for different types of communications. It’s really important to pay attention to your clients’ preferences, specifically for marketing purposes as ignoring this could have more serious consequences than your emails just going unread.
Your clients have a right to choose how to be contacted for marketing purposes and when you register your client in PPS, you can record their preferences in the client details screen. If you use the client preferences section right and also set up your system communication preferences, you won’t have to lift a finger! Whenever you send out any marketing via PPS, it will automatically check your system contact preferences against each client’s contact preferences and act accordingly!
Click here to find out how to use client contact preferences
Some of the points above may seem a little alien, especially if you have never thought about marketing beyond sending out a newsletter before now, but trust me, a little time spent recording, analysing and utilising that data can make a big difference.
If you’re already capturing the data, but don’t know what to do with it, check out our reports webinar. The reports webinar explores how to customise your reports to find the exact data that you are looking for!
