Managing a practice can be tough. You obviously need a great staff to help with everything from billing to appointment scheduling to sales (or pre-sales). Fortunately, there are tools you can and should be using to help your staff.
A CRM, or Client Relationship Management, software will help with stay organized with all of your patients. There are many different tools out there that fall under the CRM umbrella, so evaluating each one can be time-consuming and difficult. My hope is to help clarify the general differences between some of the most popular medical and aesthetic CRMs.
In this breakdown I’m only diving into the marketing solutions. I don’t touch on EMR (Electronic Medical Record) or practice management software. Nextech is the most well known EMR (Electronic Medical Record) software. Other notable EMRs include: ADP AdvancedMD EHR, athenaClincals, NueMD, and iSALUS EHR Software.
On the practice management side you have a lot of options, and you’ll see a variety of solutions that can handle scheduling, billing, record management, and more. Here’s a nice breakdown, from softwareadvice.com, of some of the best practice management solutions for medical (and aesthetic )practices.
Point-of-sale + Appointments + Email Marketing software
The following are just three of many solutions out there that can do a variety of different tasks. The first two market to the aesthetic industry, while Infusionsoft is a more robust solution, but has a much higher learning curve.
Demandforce: This is a great software for scheduling appointments, auto-sending reminders, and collecting money as a point-of-sale. It also integrates with many practice management softwares. Arguably the best feature is that it’ll follow up immediately after appointments to ask patients for reviews. These tend to get indexed well by Google. As an email marketing software, you can send to your entire patient list or break down by previous purchases. For example, target only those who’ve spent $1,000 in the past 12 months. The biggest drawback, besides the price tag, which starts at about $400/month (they’re no longer transparent about their pricing on their website so I apologize if I’m way off base), is that you cannot collect emails from leads that have never come in the door. Therefore, you can only do email marketing to paying patients.
Solutionreach (formerly Smile Reminder): Like Demandforce, Solutionreach gives you the ability to schedule appointments, send follow-up reminders, create surveys, and email your patient list. I’ve heard many claim that Solutionreach is not only easier to use than Demandforce, but that their customer service is better. That said, both Demandforce and Infusionsoft have live chat support and Solutionreach does not. Both Demandforce and Solutionreach have similar features, yet both do not show pricing on their respective websites. That said, Solutionreach does offer a “price for life guarantee.”
Infusionsoft: This is a very robust software that takes some getting used to. They provide great support and there are even 3rd party experts you can turn to to configure your software. It can integrate with many accounting, practice management and other softwares. Plus, there are developers who can likely integrate with your software if the feed isn’t currently configured.
With Infusionsoft you can customize your “dashboard” to highlight revenue for the week, month, quarter, and year. You can also set up appointment reminders and sales opportunities with lead scoring based on quality. Their “Complete” package, which includes both sales automation and ecommerce, and allows for up to 5 users, is $379/month. This has a limit of 10,000 contacts. Keep in mind that even if you don’t invest money in getting set up with Infusionsoft, you’ll certainly be investing your time. This learning curve is arguably Infusionsoft’s biggest weakness.
Other software solutions to consider: HubSpot, Lighthouse 360, Web3
Email Marketing Alone
iContact, Constant Contact, Mail Chimp: These are all basic email marketing platforms that have no practice management, appointment scheduling, or e-medical record functionality at all. These solutions are all inexpensive, especially compared to the softwares above, but they simpler. You can send emails out to your list, segment email campaigns based on list attributes and tags, run surveys, and integrate with your social networks.
MailChimp has the best “free” plan, but the paid plans for all three a pretty comparable. For up to 2,500 subscribers, their prices range from $29-35. For 5,000 subscribers the prices range from $47-55. All have great customer service so you really can’t go wrong with any of these three.
Here are some other low-cost email marketing solutions:
– Vertical Response
– Campaigner
– Aweber
– StreamSend
If you’re invested in digital marketing you’ll need software to help you out. I highly recommend you sign up for a free trial and demo for every software you’re considering. Have their sales team walk you through the features and then make an informed decision.
If you’d like to learn more about stepping your digital marketing game up then drop TRBO a line here or simply call us at 877-673-7096 x2.
