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5 CRO Recs for Boosting Prospective Patient Volume
Getting new patients for your practice is a challenging process. Ample competition from similar practices and an endless stream of conflicting priorities complicate attracting new patients and keeping their attention.
Yet, with some strategic website adjustments, you can create a much more compelling case for prospective clients to contact you. This post provides five conversion rate optimization (CRO) best-practices you can incorporate on your website with the end-goal of having more of your website visitors convert into new patients.
1. Be Direct With Your Messaging
Think about the ultimate action you want visitors to your website to take. Do you want them to contact you? Schedule a consultation? Sign up for your email list?
If your goal is to drive appointments, for example, say it! Don’t try and be cute with passive language. Use very obvious language such as “Make an Appointment” in front-and-center locations such as in the heading section of your homepage.
2. Place Your Calls-to-Action in Obvious Locations
As with the messaging, calls-to-action should also be very apparent on your website. Don’t limit options for contacting you to the top navigation area or in obscure locations.
Is your goal to get scheduled consultations? If so, place a button in the middle of your homepage with some quick supportive wording that states “Schedule a Consultation” and leads to a contact form.
To really make converting simple for prospective patients, consider having a contact form that scrolls down the page in unison with a visitor’s scrolling movements.
Here’s how this feature appears on the Sesame homepage:
3. Don’t Complicate Contact Forms
There is a simple formula for success with contact forms: the fewer fields you require people to fill out, the higher the conversion rate.
Why? Everyone’s time is valuable. Having an endless supply of fields people must fill out encroaches on their available time. A lengthy process leads to more people simply opting to not fill out a form.
Your best bet is to accept as little information as possible up-front while collecting further information later on in the onboarding process. If you can limit contact forms to requiring just name, phone number, and email your conversion rate will be considerably better than it will be if more personal details must be submitted right away.
4. Proof Sells
Use statistics and patient testimonials wherever possible.
Having no previous experience with you, prospective clients will be naturally pessimistic about your practice. By incorporating visible proof that your practice provides phenomenal service and results, you will help alleviate concerns prospective patients may have about contacting you.
Consider listing brief customer quotes and satisfaction rate (assuming they’re favorable) statistics on your website to provide proof-in-the-pudding information. Doing so will allow prospective clients to begin building trust in your practice.
5. Design for All Device Types
What looks good on mobile may not appear perfectly on desktop and vice-versa.
Consequently, responsive design is your best web design option. Responsive design entails designing a website that exhibits its layout based on the device someone is using. The actual information displayed should be uniform across all device types – only the layout will appear a bit differently.
Making sure that your website appears and functions perfectly on all device types is a crucial element of keeping people on your website and getting them to convert.
Shameless Plug – All Sesame Premium Websites feature responsive design. 🙂
The 5 CRO recommendations above provide a mere sample of the many site updates that can be made to improve conversion rates. If you have any further related questions please feel free to contact us!
—Mike Fitterer, Sr. Marketing Manager, Sesame Communications
This post was selected as one of the top digital marketing articles of the week by UpCity, a B2B ratings and review company for digital marketing agencies and other marketing service providers.