If you scroll through Facebook or check email even once a day, you likely know two things:
- People value regular communications to make important pet health decisions.
- In a hyper-connected world, people are deluged daily with all kinds of information, from pet health emails and celebrity news to deals on clothing and everything in between.
To filter through it all, people commonly ask themselves, “Is this relevant? Does this information speak to me and connect in a personal and meaningful way? Does this apply to my life and the life of my pet?” If not, people are usually quick to scroll past information and send irrelevant emails to the trash.
To avoid this in your client communications, here are five tips to personalize communications and boost client engagement:
1. Strike a comfortable balance between formal and informal writing.
Clients trust you as an animal healthcare professional. That’s why they became clients. To maintain professionalism, avoid any liberal use of abbreviations, acronyms, texting language, emojis and other conventions of contemporary informal writing. Yes, a smiley-face emoji can lighten the mood, but even so. Such informalities should be used sparingly.
2. Know your audience
Who are they? Where do they live? Is your message for all clients or just some of them? Knowing such details helps clients feel that you know and value them as real people, which improves engagement and encourages better patient outcomes by motivating clients to act on your recommendations.
3. Keep communications brief
Concentrate on a single subject. Brevity and clarity hedge against information getting lost through oversaturation.
4. Know how to best utilize social media
Social-media channels like Facebook and Instagram are effective tools for practices to engage and share information with clients. Yet just like in any writing connected to your practice, maintain a professional boundary when posting socially.
5. Be mindful of tone
Sarcasm used in person, for example, can be humorous. Yet sarcasm can easily be taken the wrong way when used in an email or social post because there’s no wink-wink feature to let readers know you’re kidding. To stay safe, avoid sarcasm and frame your thoughts in a clear, straightforward way.
At its core, personalized communication ultimately serves the health of animals everywhere. According to Veterinary Practice News, regular personalized client communication increases after-care compliance, enhances client satisfaction and most importantly promotes better pet health outcomes. And all of this combines to promote good business health, engaged pet owners and growth for your practice:
- According to recent research by InfoTrends, 84% of people surveyed said they’d be more likely to open personalized communications.
- In separate research by Evergage, 10% of businesses surveyed reported improved business results greater than 30% with personalized communication.
The only downside to sending out regular, personalized communications is that it can be time-consuming without the right technology to help you easily manage it all more efficiently. With the right solution in your corner, you take full advantage of personalized communications without losing time and focus on your patients.
That’s why ALLYDVM was developed.
LifeLearn’s sophisticated ALLYDVM software system is one of the veterinary industry’s most powerful and trusted solutions for personalizing and improving client communications, engagement and patient health. Fully customizable with automated email and text templates (plus an onboard image gallery to increase personalization), ALLYDVM can even send out postcards to clients who may not be online.
Designed to safely sync with your practice management software in real time without sharing your practice data with anyone else, ALLYDVM allows you full control over all your communications, which ensures your messaging is always relevant to clients. Send pertinent messages just to dog owners. Send a single appointment or surgery reminder to a cat owner, then follow up with a text message to that cat owner to let them know their beloved pet is healthy and happy—and can’t wait to come home and pounce on that crinkle ball again.
Whatever the needs of your practice, ALLYDVM offers the solution to easy, personalized communications that connect with people and improve compliance to better serve optimal pet health outcomes.
