For both veterinary practices and pet owners, things tend to sneak up—including seasonal issues affecting pet health, like flea and tick season. This means that without a reminder, pet owners can forget to contact veterinary practices to renew their pets’ preventive care and medications. So, launching a seasonal pet health campaign is important to the health of pets. Yet seasonal pet health campaigns represent more for veterinary practices. They represent an opportunity to connect with clients in a meaningful way to strengthen client relationships and support the health of your practice.
“Throughout my more than 35 years of practice and management consulting, it’s become abundantly clear to me that focusing on seasonal campaigns like this represent a huge opportunity for our profession,” says Dr. David Goodnight, Executive Vice President of Business Development at LifeLearn. “Taking a proactive promotional approach can dramatically impact pet owner compliance, pet health, and your practice’s bottom line.”
Practices, however, often hold back from seasonal pet health campaigns in the belief they take too much time. Or practices simply don’t know where to start.
To help with that, here are three key factors that must be considered when developing a seasonal pet health campaign:
Client Education: An Opportunity for Growth
Client education is cornerstone to pet health, and your staff is knowledgeable enough to give your clients the right advice and information. Yet without takeaway information, access to practice blogs, or other sources of credible, factual, and scientifically sound information that answers client questions and support pet health campaigns, clients can forget what they were told or simply be unaware of seasonal pet health issues—all of which undermines your veterinary team’s roles as animal health educators.
Being proactive in client education saves time for veterinary teams, eliminates stress, and supports effective pet health campaigns. Some keys to this:
- Keep your staff up to date. With access to the latest scientific information and research about pet health subjects, your team stays current, which saves time and eliminates the stress of scrambling around for information.
- Use the pet health information you’ve collected as a reference guide when developing blog posts for your practice website.
- Share client education articles directly with clients. Bring up information on a tablet or mobile device during in-clinic or curbside appointments. Or email clients a link to an article so they can read more at home.
- Evaluate your success. Send out a satisfaction survey to your clients. When you better understand questions that clients may have around important seasonal pet health campaigns, like flea and tick prevention, you can strengthen the effectiveness of pet health campaigns—and strengthen client relationships—while extending the life of a pet health campaign.
Communication: A Chance to Open New Doors
Pet owners consume information across a broad range of channels (websites, social channels, etc.). The more channels you include in a seasonal pet health campaign, the more pet owners you reach, which increases the effectiveness of a pet health campaign. Yet beyond this, using a broad range of channels introduces your practice to pet owners who may not know about your practice, which opens new doors of pet owner engagement and attracts pet owners to become clients.
A few tips:
- Send a compelling email blast. Sending out an email message such as “here is why flea and tick prevention is extra important this year” provides pet owners with a compelling reason to click through to your practice website. (Remember to track your email clickthrough rate to see how your email blast performs.)
- Promote seasonal pet health campaigns on your homepage. Add a graphic and/or block of short text that links website visitors directly to a blog post or landing page connected to a seasonal pet health campaign.
- Share information in your clinic. Create a simple in-clinic poster and client handouts that both highlight a seasonal pet health campaign and why pet owners should take action regarding a pet health issue. Reminding pet owners that it’s flea and tick season, for example, is certainly good information. Yet some pet owners don’t know that fleas and ticks put pets at risk of heartworm disease, Lyme disease, and other diseases. Knowing the risks to pets provides pet owners with a compelling reason to take action with things like flea and tick prevention.
Timeliness and Relevance Are Essential
When it comes to pet health campaigns about flea and tick prevention, that time is now.
To help practices save time, reduce stress, and maintain workflow efficiency, LifeLearn’s Practice Solutions include two solutions to help practices easily meet the above campaign objectives:
- WebDVM, custom veterinary websites, come complete with a suite of industry approved pet health content and educational resources designed to help you communicate with pet owners more efficiently while improving compliance and saving your team valuable time.
- ClientEd, the pet health education resource for pet owners, is a unique pet health education library designed to strengthen the veterinary team’s roles as animal health educators and encourage client compliance through easy-to-understand information. Written and reviewed by animal health and communication experts, ClientEd contains over 2,100 handouts that cover a wide range of pet health topics and species. Written in plain language, handouts are quickly accessible to veterinary team members, and can be shared with clients in print or digital form.
WebDVM and ClientEd are just two of the ways that LifeLearn is helping veterinary practices educate and communicate with clients with ease.
Click here for more information about WebDVM or click here for more info about ClientEd.
