Find out how to increase patient lead conversion rates by asking your team these key questions.
For most sleep device businesses, the flow of media attention about the benefits of a good night’s sleep is a dream come true. It increases awareness of sleep-related issues and the products and treatments for it. And it helps to create abundant opportunities for them to create well-structured and managed direct-to-patient digital marketing campaigns that deliver healthy lead conversion rates.
It’s surprising then, that when we audit digital marketing accounts at Somnowell Marketing that’s often not what we see. The lead conversion rates are frequently below one percent.
What is a good conversion rate?
We’re often asked what a good conversion rate looks like for a sleep device business. For leads it should be around 10 percent. It could even be as high as 20 percent if targeting is good, and high intent search terms are used or audiences are extremely warm.
Many small to medium-sized sleep device businesses routinely spend thousands of dollars a month on digital marketing. But these campaigns have almost no chance of success if they are set up using poor targeting or search terms for example, and then managed ineffectively.
Lead conversion rates can be as high as 20 percent if your targeting is good, high intent search terms are used or audiences are extremely warm.
In a world where online advertising is becoming increasingly complex, today’s digital marketers need a high level of skill to track, manage and optimize campaigns if they’re to extract the most value from each dollar that your business spends, while continually reducing wastage.
They also need a deep understanding of what to do with the leads that are generated. This requires a knowledge of each type of prospective patient that you engage with, where that person is in the buyers’ journey, and how to properly manage them so they have the best opportunity possible of accessing your sleep devices and treatments.
When leads come in digital marketers must know how to manage them so these prospective patients have the best chance of accessing your sleep devices and treatments.
When digital marketers are creating and managing campaigns at a global, national and local level, they also need to know how targeting, language and creative assets need to be adapted to resonate with the individual you’re trying to reach.
If your sleep device business is suffering from low lead conversion rates, the following questions are designed to help you pinpoint where possible issues might lie.
8 questions to ask your digital marketing team
Focus on targeting first and foremost
- Are you targeting keywords that have the highest level of intent? Understanding which keyword search terms to use at various stages of the buyers’ journey is essential for healthy lead conversion rates. That includes being able to uncover new keywords that your prospective patients might be thinking of. Testing can help digital marketers identify collections of search terms that they may not have thought of before that could produce results at a low cost-per-sale.
- Are you targeting the best audiences? Conversion rates and targeting are closely related. If you have the right traffic coming in it will always convert better, so the quality of your traffic is critical. Your digital marketing team needs to be able to identify who your target audience is and how to properly locate them within the channels you’re using. Each channel offers different possibilities with regards to this.
- Does the tone and messaging you’re using resonate with our audiences? Speaking the language of your target audience builds consumer trust and boosts credibility. It’s also essential for effectively educating prospective patients about their condition and why your treatments or sleep devices are better than others. Online customer survey tools from the likes of SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics offer ways for digital marketers to gather feedback about the quality of your content and on a broader scale, your brand’s overall customer experience.
- Are you split testing ads and landing pages? This is critical for improving conversion rates. It can also make a huge difference to your results. You can take a landing page, which might be converting leads at say, five percent and increase it to 20 percent by working on elements such as the messaging and the way your value proposition is defined. How quickly you can make judgments about the results of your split tests does depend on the level of traffic that your website receives, though. If it’s low, focus on increasing the volume of high-quality traffic it receives first, so you can be confident during split testing that one variation is performing better or worse than another.
- Are you continually testing to improve lead conversion rates? It’s important to test audiences, keywords, ads, sales pages or sleep device product pages, messaging, and calls to action. These are all critical points that could drastically change your ROI. Behaviour recording tools such as Crazy Egg and Hotjar can help your digital marketing team identify patterns in the way prospective patients are interacting with pages on your website. Getting inside the mind of the person on your page to understand why they’re behaving in a certain way can also really help to create different hypotheses to test. For example, your team may think somebody is exiting at a certain point because your call to action is too far down the page. To improve lead conversion rates, they could include multiple CTAs at varying points in the content.
- How do you determine where each patient is in the buying process? Knowing this is critical for offering prospective patients the right CTA. Digital marketers should be continually testing different versions to see what resonates best with each segment of your target audience. Again, that can become quite complex. They can make it more manageable by breaking the segments down into groups and testing different approaches with each one.
- Are you studying each part of the sales funnel? Your team should be trying to improve conversion rates at each stage. Click-through rates, sleep device landing page conversion rates and email open rates are all essentially micro-conversions. Working on each of them can make a huge difference to your cost per conversion and ultimately your cost per sale.
- How are you nurturing new patients? Email nurturing improves the quality of your leads because it enables them to self-educate about their sleep-related condition and your treatments or sleep devices. Almost all of your Baby Boomer audiences will be using it. Consider how many engagements you have with each prospective patient across email and other touch points. If it’s only one, look at ways of increasing this. In this case study, we were able to increase the number of engagements per patient from one to nine across multiple touch points by introducing a lead distribution and response software that we developed to improve results.
The amount of time it takes for changes to your digital marketing strategy to impact your leads really depends on your website. It’s possible to see a significant uplift quite quickly if it’s in poor shape and critical steps aren’t being taken to continually optimize it.
Other times, it can take longer to see a definite improvement if for example, your business is operating in a competitive segment or your competitors are extremely active on SEO. It’s important to keep in mind though, that SEO changes are cumulative, so making constant ongoing changes is key to achieving the best results.
How we increased lead conversion rates for 'the Somnowell' sleep device
Somnowell is the sleep device side of our business. Almost a decade ago, when we first launched our oral device for sleep apnea our conversion rates for generating leads and enquiries from our website was around two percent. Fortunately, we were able to change this by bringing in experts who gave us a deep understanding of how to use digital marketing more effectively.
When our efforts paid off and Somnowell started receiving more new patient enquiries every day than we could process manually, we developed our lead distribution and response software to automate this process. It responds to each prospective patient and nurtures them with educational emails and SMSes until they’re ready to connect with dentists in our network. The solution has been so successful that today, many of our Somnowell Marketing clients use it to also overcome the challenge of how to respond efficiently and effectively to the high volumes of new patient enquiries.
Over to you
You can put a stop to low conversion rates by taking steps to ensure your campaigns are properly set up, well managed and continually optimized. When executed well, digital marketing offers incredible opportunities to generate awareness, connect people with sleep device treatments and products, and educate those who are not currently in the market for a product.
Our free Digital Marketing For Growth Guide shows how digital marketing delivers results at each stage of business growth. It explains why specific tactics – such as SEO and paid search – work well for some stages but not others. And it includes handy checklists to help you benchmark growth.
