Don’t you love it when you go to the doctor’s office and they ask you to fill out paperwork, scan your palm, give your insurance card, some some more stuff, wait 15 minutes, answer more questions from the nurse, wait 15 more minutes, and then finally get to see the doctor and tell him everything all over again?
Oh, you don’t?
Then why are you doing basically the same thing to your potential patients?
Search all over my website, fill out this online form with 10 questions, get half a dozen emails, wait for someone to respond or call you back, maybe we can fit you in next month.
It’s like you don’t want anyone to work with you.
To get more patients, start by making it easier to get in contact with you however they want.
And an easy place to do that is your online forms.
I know, I know, you’ve got some automation set up to use all those fields or you want to organize everything perfectly, and you never know when you might want to use their birthday and favorite color in a marketing campaign.
But none of that matters if the patient doesn’t contact you in the first place!
The optimal number of fields for an online form is 4: Name, email, phone, message/question.
Adding just one more field–doesn’t matter what it is–can drop your response rates by up to 50%.
That’s a lot of patients you are sacrificing for your recordkeeping.
Wouldn’t you rather get their email or phone number than their potential diagnosis?
You can always ask any questions you want while you talk to them and fill out another form for your automations or marketing yourself.
Even better, let your patients skip the form altogether if they want.
Put your phone number prominently in the header of your site and make it sticky so they can always see it.
With so many people browsing and searching on their phones, you may get more leads from direct calls than from forms.
That’s great!
Unless you hate making money and helping people.
Anything you can do to make it easier will get you more.
People are already reluctant to get care.
Don’t make it like pulling teeth.
You don’t want coming to see you to be like going to the dentist.