Posted on April 2, 2021 in General
Toning in Your SMS Messages
Practices have tapped SMS messages for more targeted and efficient prospect outreach efforts, given its high open rates. Below are three factors that need to be considered when communicating with your target audience in text messages.
- Spelling
Spelling errors can change the meaning of your message, resulting in misinformation. You don’t want poor grammar to cost you new patients.
Conversely, correct grammar and good spelling give your audience more confidence in your practice. It tells your leads that you’re a professional, credible, and trustworthy practice that views all of its interactions with patients as equally important.
You can get your message across clearly by taking advantage of MDprospect’s SMS template that comes with pre-canned messages. With the template, your readers won’t be distracted from the message you want to convey, which is crucial given that you’re trying to get them to take action and become actual patients.
Further, a few extra seconds spent writing the full words in addition to proofreading can make a world of difference in regards to your message being understood by potential patients the way you intend it to be.
That said, it’s possible for prospects to text back using abbreviations that your staff may not understand, making it vital to provide the team in charge of texting prospects with the right training. This will help them know the meaning of common abbreviations from texts received. At the same time, encourage your staff never to use them when sending messages.
- Toning in Your Outbound Messages
The tone of voice refers to how you use language to give your messages their own recognizable and distinct brand voice. All the texts you send out should have the same tone of voice. When texts have a consistent tone, your prospects hear the same person whenever they read your messages.
That shows them you’re a professional, reliable, and consistent practice they can entrust their health care to and that every part of their experience with you will be just as good.
Using complete sentences and spelling out everything goes a long way in keeping the tone in your messages professional. Remember to emphasize the importance of your staff avoiding texting in all CAPS, using exclamation marks and emoticons, or typing acronyms and disjointed words.
Here’s an example of what NOT to send:
If you don’t know how to make sure your staff texts in a brand-minded way, you can consider enlisting the services of an agency like Miller Public Relations to train your team. And don’t forget to use the templates in MDprospects to help guide your staff.
All in all, toning is a two-way street. As important as it is to think about how your employees will communicate with potential patients via text, you also need to make your team see not everyone will communicate in a text to them the same way. Empathy and understanding will go a long way in this part.
So, your staff should not let a chat go on for too long without addressing the exact needs of the prospects. Empower your team to know when to ask the potential patient to do a call with them directly.
- Availability
Your audience expects immediate responses to texts. “SMS messaging is one of the fastest ways to reach consumers directly. 60% of consumers say they read a text within 5 minutes of receiving it.” per these statistics from Learning Hub. While the lead management software from MDprospects can do an incredible job of attracting high-quality leads, the fact is, prospects have a short shelf-life.
According to the Harvard Business Review, not responding to prospects promptly can increase your chances of losing them forever, thus the need for speed when texting your potential patients. Besides, your lack of a timely reply can be interpreted as a lack of concern.
This means that when someone goes into your CRM and sends out texts to several people to encourage them to take the next step or respond to recent inquiries, they should remain available to maintain responses, not leave prospects who are replying hanging. Moreover, you can make your available hours for SMS crystal clear on your auto consent message.
Leverage MDprospects to Engage and Convert Prospects to Patients
Adopting the best principles and concepts when texting your potential patients ensures they receive messages that feel both unique and personal to your practice. This will give your SMS messages a personality your prospects will really love. MDprospects can provide you with a top-of-the-line platform to successfully manage your text messaging in your lead nurturing processes. To find out how, please schedule a demo today.
