This is a challenge across all industries as nearly 8 in 10 marketing leads never convert into customers, and advancing consumers from awareness to conversion can be even more challenging in healthcare. Find out how a content-focused lead nurturing strategy helped Baptist Health close the gap between consumer engagement and patient acquisition.
The Organization
Headquartered in Louisville, Baptist Health is the largest not-for-profit health system in Kentucky with more than 300 points of care and a physician network of more than 3,000 employed and affiliated physicians.
The Challenge
Hospital and health system marketers face a long sales cycle for the highest value service lines, lack of visibility into the customer base, and multiple consumer touchpoints during the patient journey. These realities require healthcare marketers to design lead generation and nurturing strategies that personalize the consumer experience and reduce friction on the path to a patient encounter.
For many years, Baptist Health has executed campaign strategies that center around the use of health risk assessments (HRAs) from Medicom Health. These are evidence-based personal health assessments that identify at-risk users through a combination of questions including family history and lifestyle.
Since implementing HRAs in 2013, approximately 30,000 leads have been generated across cancer, bariatrics, cardiology, GI and other priority service lines; however, Baptist Health struggled to close the gap between HRA completion and actual patient acquisition.
The Solution
As Baptist Health continued investing in their technology stack and the HRA functionality evolved, an opportunity emerged to optimize lead follow up in an automated way. The marketing team at Baptist Health worked with True North to plan and create unique email strategies to engage consumers and convert prospects for priority service lines.
The lead nurturing strategy started with the breast cancer service line with the goal of increased mammograms and includes a number of email messages delivered in the weeks immediately following HRA completion. The email journeys consist of follow-up and nurturing messages based on the consumer’s risk level. Content is specifically designed to drive patients to schedule a mammogram appointment, as well as to cross-promote other women’s health services.
The Results
The lead nurturing strategy has been highly effective for Baptist Health, as evidenced by both engagement rates and downstream patient encounters:
- 44% average email open rate
- 70.59% average conversion rate from HRA completion to appointment
- 63 service line encounters, a 125% increase YOY
- $233,478 total charges, a 185% increase YOY
As further evidence of the program’s success, Baptist Health and True North were selected to host a master class on marketing automation in healthcare during the 2020 Healthcare Internet Conference.
