*Updated November 2024*
For busy and understaffed veterinary teams struggling for precious time, client-education marketing helps save time and reduce staff exhaustion by reducing phone calls, walk-in inquiries, and curbside queries by pet owners that may not necessitate an immediate appointment or consultation or are not of an emergency medical nature.
Here’s an example of how client-education marketing helps save time:
According to a survey by Packaged Facts, top pet health questions/concerns for cat owners today include:
- Pet anxiety/stress (with 24% “especially concerned”)
- Immunity (21%)
- Caring for senior cats (13%)
So, in the same manner that pet owners will often call or visit veterinary practices for general, non-urgent information (e.g., microchipping, puppy care, preventive tips to avoid having to pay for an appointment), cat owners may be inclined to similarly call or visit your busy practice for information that addresses their questions/concerns.
As a veterinary professional, you’re naturally focused on pet health and well-being, and understand the importance of client satisfaction. To this end, you understand the value of providing pet owners with the pet health information they want and need. Yet against this, the reality of time and solidly booked appointment schedules means spending time answering non-urgent pet owner inquiries that can wait can further cut into time, ramp up stress, reduce workflow efficiency, and add to burnout.
How do you use client-education marketing to help alleviate this?
You get ahead of pet owner questions.
Here’s an example for practices using ClientEd, the pet owner education resource that supports efficient client education.
By sending relevant ClientEd handouts as general FYI information to clients before they phone, email, or visit your practice with non-urgent questions, you get ahead of questions and reduce the need for pet owners to call or visit. This helps your team save time, allows more time for patient care that is pressing, and strengthens overall client loyalty by letting pet owners know you have them in mind.
In other words, client-education marketing is not complicated. As a tool to save time, client-education marketing is nothing more than:
- Thinking about what pet owners may be thinking about
- Sending them information to pre-empt non-urgent calls or visits
The trick to making this as expedient as possible for your busy veterinary team is having fast access to a single trusted resource of pet health information (rather than having to spend time hunting around for information), and practices using ClientEd have this time-saving benefit.
With more than 2,100 pet health handouts (and growing), ClientEd is the veterinary industry’s largest and most trusted online pet health library. Written and reviewed by animal health and communication experts, ClientEd handouts use easy-to-understand language and cover a wide range of topics.
Handouts include:
- 260+ medication handouts, which help practices in states like California comply with consultation requirements as mandated by law
- 172 Spanish handouts to serve the 22 million Hispanic pet owners in the U.S.
- Relevant images and medical illustrations to improve comprehension
Widely accessible online to your entire veterinary team, ClientEd integrates into many popular practice management systems, and handouts can easily be emailed, printed, or shared online, with the ability by practices to brand and personalize handouts and add special instructions for home care.
To further save time for veterinary teams, ClientEd can be integrated into your practice website and comes with the Plus and Pro editions of WebDVM, custom veterinary websites.
By upgrading to WebDVM or integrating ClientEd into your existing practice website, you provide your clients with easy, direct access to pet health resources when they need them, 24/7. All you need to do is message your clients along these lines:
“You have pet health questions and concerns. We have answers. Visit our practice website today and search ClientEd.”
See what we mean. Try ClientED free for 30 days. Get instant access to 35 of ClientEd’s most relevant handouts and see for yourself why practices like yours choose ClientEd to save time while strengthening client education.
