Over 57% of patients today expect to receive appointments, reminders, and follow-up messages from their dentist. This means that regular communication with your patients via text or phone call is key to establishing loyalty for your dental practice.
You may also have several dental marketing campaigns already in play to increase the number of new patients who visit your practice. By enhancing your communication system, you can increase your conversions and improve your marketing investments’ returns.
While phone calls offered an excellent communication medium for talking to your patients a decade ago, the current generation doesn’t really like phone calls. Even Gen Xers (born between 1965 and 1980) will not respond well to phone calls at times not scheduled by them. Text messages and email offer a much better way of updating your patients and following up on engaged leads since they are free to reply on their own time. An excellent platform for doing this is WhatsApp by Facebook.
Should Your Practice Communicate with Patients via WhatsApp?
WhatsApp was started in 2009 with the purpose of sending messages in text, picture, video, and voice formats while also providing access to free calls and video calls. Today it is owned by Facebook and is the most popular instant messaging application in the world.
While many people like to keep work and businesses limited to SMS texts, this isn’t the case with millennials and Gen Z. Many young people prefer using social media to communicate with the businesses that concern them, including dental practices.
What is WhatsApp Business?
Using WhatsApp to communicate with your patients will also bring you the additional features of WhatsApp Business. This sub-platform within the WhatsApp Platform allows business owners to grow their digital presence while effectively communicating with customers. It includes features such as:
- Free-to-Download Application
- Free Instant Communication with Patients
- Mobile Catalogs for Showcasing Your Practice’s Services
- Instant Reply Templates to Save Time
- Labelled Chats for Effective Organization
- Automated Messages for When You’re Unavailable
- End-to-End Encryption
- Global Reach
- Opening Hours
Combined with Facebook’s practical analytics tools, these features will help you optimise your communications and even help showcase your services to new leads. Today, dental practices need to be mindful of how they communicate with patients and ensure that no stone is left unturned in achieving a patient-centred dental marketing approach. WhatsApp Business is an effective platform to let you achieve this goal.
WhatsApp Business comes with Catalogues that offer a storefront for your services right on your WhatsApp Profile. This allows practices to showcase various information such as Services, Descriptions, Prices, Special Offers, Features, and more.
This feature was implemented to help optimise the WhatsApp-based workflow of various businesses. Previously, businesses would send pictures of their products/services and text each customer with their descriptions. However, with the implementation of Catalogues, practices can just request patients to look at it for any service-related information while keeping the direct chat free of unnecessary clutter.
How to Create and Manage a Catalogue?
Creating a WhatsApp Catalogue requires you to have a WhatsApp Business Account with the corresponding app installed. This would allow you to create your Catalogue and make changes to it as your practice introduces new services, offers, and events.
If you ever want to add more information to your catalogue or edit it, the same steps as above will apply.
To view your business catalogue or share it with your patients, you can use the WhatsApp direct messaging chats. First, tap the attachment button at the bottom field (represented by a paperclip) and tab the catalogue. From here, you can either share a single dental service or your entire catalogue with a potential patient.
If you want to share your catalogue with multiple users at once, use the following steps:
- Open the WhatsApp Business application
- Open the Catalogue Manager with the steps mentioned above
- Select all the services you wish to share and tap the Send button
- Select the contacts you wish to share your catalogue with and click the Send button once again to share your catalogue
With this method, your dental catalogue will be shared in the direct messaging chats of all the selected users.
Should You Hire a Designer to Make Your WhatsApp Catalogue?
While it is possible to design your entire WhatsApp Catalogue without any outside help, it can be a troublesome process. Hiring a designer will not only allow you to post the most beautiful and eye-catching pictures for your services catalogue but also include ideal descriptions.
Hiring a dental marketing expert will allow your practice to have a carefully crafted WhatsApp Business catalogue which would be more likely to increase conversions and win patient loyalty than a catalogue you make yourself. In addition, the marketing expertise that an expert can provide you will go a long way in giving you a competitive edge over other practices in your vicinity.
Get Exceptional WhatsApp Catalogues for Your Dental Practice
If you’re looking for assistance in getting your WhatsApp Catalogue up and running, Head45Dental has your back. We are a team of dental marketing experts that provide SEO, Social Media Marketing, dental website design, and a whole range of services to help dental practices boost conversions and incorporate time-tested strategies in their campaigns.