All the fancy tools and tricks of the digital marketing era can make it easy to overlook traditional channels. After all, you didn’t build out your medical office’s website just so people could send you telegrams or pedal their pennyfarthings to your practice’s door.
But going digital doesn’t mean ditching other channels. You want to reach out to your customers by any effective means at your disposal, and you want customers to be able to reach you, too. And though many people now prefer emails and “chats” for many of their communications, most patients still prefer a good old-fashioned phone call when they’re talking to their doctor’s office.
Making sure you have an easy-to-find, easy-to-use, click-to-call option on your website gives you the best of both worlds. Use your digital outreach to steer patients to your site, then let them contact you via their preferred method with just a tap of the finger.
You want effective marketing. They want an easy phone call. Click-to-call is the answer.
Why Phone Calls Matter More Than Ever
Emails, chats, and other internet-based communication may be more convenient in many ways, but they’re also more impersonal. Your patients still want human-to-human experiences, especially when it comes to their healthcare, and phone calls are the next best thing to an in-person visit (at least until video chat becomes as good as it should be).
Maybe that’s why 86% of businesses say leads from phone calls outperform all others. And why 29% of phone calls convert callers to customers. That’s more than ten times the typical conversion rate of a click-through on an ad, and significantly outperforms email contacts and contact form submissions, too. Clearly, no matter what channel you use to build their awareness and interest in your practice, you want to get them to pick up the phone if you can.
Then there’s the fact that mobile searches and web traffic have overtaken “traditional” website traffic—more people are looking for doctors and landing on your site searching from their smartphones than on their laptop or desktop computers. And 70% of mobile searchers end up calling a business directly from their mobile device. A great doctor’s office website will get great prospective patients to your site, but they won’t want to stop there. They’ll want to call in, and they will if you make it easy.
Let’s recap:
- Potential patients are online looking for a doctor just like you
- A growing majority of those patients are searching on mobile devices
- A great website will capture a patient’s attention and get them interested
- A phone call to your medical office will seal the deal
Putting it All Together with Click-to-Call for Your Healthcare Practice
Adding click-to-call functionality to your website is easy. I can do it right in this sentence, telling you to enter your phone number here then click the button. Enter your number, click the button and your phone will ring, connecting you to our sales line (or in your case, your clinic).
You could technically leave it at that—a simple button or text-based link with your phone number. If you have strong blog posts that provide specific, detailed information to interested patients, a click-to-call link like this might be a good thing to include at the end.
But you can do better.
Just like any call-to-action on your website, you want your click-to-call link to be prominently placed, designed in a way that draws attention and makes it easy to find, and—especially important for your mobile users—of a size that makes it easy to click.
A click-to-call link in your site’s header area can yield a lot of conversions. Consider putting one in the footer, too, and a click-to-call link should also be placed front and center on your contact page. Set your click-to-call link apart from other clickable elements so mobile users can make their call on the first try.
Your Click-to-Call Health Can Always Be Improved
Like everything else on your website, there’s always room for improvement. Experiment with different click-to-call placements and designs to see if you can improve your call throughs. Check out site heatmaps and figure out where the hotspots are to get your links right where your patients are looking.
And if you’re eager for more tips you can put to work for your doctor’s office website today, why not give us a call?
