| June 08, 2010
Yet, as important and as challenging as each element is to fully master and implement, they are merely a preface to the ultimate hospital marketers’ goal: conversions.
What is a Website Conversion? How Do They Affect Hospitals?
In the scope of online healthcare marketing analytics, conversions—or more specifically, conversion rates—are perhaps the most critical metric. Most simply, a Website conversion is when a visitor completes a desired action. For example, hospital Website conversions can range from something as simple as signing up for a newsletter, to as sophisticated as locating a specialist and scheduling an appointment.
Of course, click rates and other metrics for analyzing traffic and Website performance have their use and value, but conversion rates best illustrate what those visitors are (or aren’t) doing after they arrive at a hospital’s Website. As a result, conversion rates are among the most commonly scrutinized metric when determining how well a hospital’s Website is performing and its return on investment (ROI).
But, like any company or organization that is more focused on services rather than products, discussions and analysis of conversions and ROI can be a bit tricky, and especially for hospitals. This is because a retailer’s ultimate online goal is to sell products, and product sales produce hard numbers that immediately relate to the bottom line. For hospitals, the online goals are often more conceptual and intended to promote brand identity and consumer confidence rather than sales or direct affects relating to the bottom line.
Types of Hospital Website Conversions
Whether planning new conversion goals or reviewing existing ones, it is important for hospitals to first recognize the different types of conversions it wants to provide and measure. These can be divided into four categories:
- Leads: These conversions identify and track the origins of visitors that found your Website through links that you have actively placed elsewhere in cyberspace. The most common example of a lead conversion is when a visitor clicks on a pay-per-click (PPC) ad and is directed to a landing page on your Website. These usually are intended to attract visitors based on your hospital’s geography, conditions it treats and physicians’ names.
- Content: Perhaps the most common on-site conversion for hospitals, these conversions identify and track specific types of strategic content that visitors have engaged—for example, subscribing to a newsletter or “find a doc” physician searches.
- Customer Service: Whether it’s to offer basic “e-mail for more information” opportunities or to access a more advanced online appointment system, customer service conversions are perhaps the most important conversions for a hospital.
- Retail: As mentioned earlier, hospitals typically don’t sell products. However, they do often raise funds and accept donations, and the ability to do so online is quite similar to the process and best practices demonstrated by most online retailers.
Building a Hospital Website Conversion Strategy
Regardless of the type of conversion that a hospital is considering or using, having a well-designed hospital Website conversion strategy is the next step in increasing a conversion opportunity’s success. This begins with developing and implementing an efficient process that bridges a hospital’s goals with visitors’ needs and expectations.
The easiest ways to perceive the conversion process involves two key concepts:
- Solving a problem: A completed conversion opportunity can be thought of as a solution to a problem. For instance, subscribing to a newsletter: Why would you want somebody to do that? Who is that somebody? Where might they be on your Website? How did they get there? What would make them want to subscribe to your newsletter? If somebody subscribes to your newsletter, it should ideally relate to several of these types of questions.
- Working backwards: If the conversion opportunity is the last step in a process that can begin virtually anywhere on your Website, think of the process in reverse. Rather than starting at a landing page and trying to assume a path that a visitor might take to a conversion, start at the conversion area and work backwards towards the optimal points where visitors might be most willing to engage with the conversion process.
Even for smaller hospitals and healthcare systems, hospital Websites can become quite large, and with the exception of targeted PPC ads and their associated landing pages, there’s no telling where a visitor might enter your Website. However, if your Website was designed with an optimal navigation strategy, working backwards from the conversion area will most likely lead to obvious convergence points.
A Look Inside the Conversion Toolbox
Another way to understand conversions is to think of them as a communication bridge. Whether it’s to bridge your visitors to your newsletter subscription page or to your online appointment system, your visitors need to be given motivation and instruction to find and use that bridge.
An online hospital marketer has many tools as their disposal to guide visitors to a conversion area. Among them:
- Anchor text links and calls to action: If a visitor is reading about your hospital’s exciting new procedure for a treatment, encourage them to do more (e.g., watch a video, subscribe for e-mail and newsletter updates, make an appointment) by writing a call-to-action anchor text link into that page’s copy.
Most often, hospitals will treat these types of calls-to-action as afterthoughts or footnotes. However, eye-tracking studies suggest that the farther down a viewer has to scan a page of copy, the less likely they will actually read that copy. Therefore, calls to action that appear earlier in the text when the reader is most engaged will arguably produce higher conversion rates.
- Graphics and banners: Using hospital Web design best practices, take advantage of optimal areas on a Web page’s real estate that let you place graphics and other visual cues that link visitors to a conversion area. Of course, solid value propositions and calls to action are essential, so be sure to develop your visuals with strong copywriting.
- Audio and video: Don’t be limited to static text and images. Multimedia tools—for example, walk-on avatars—are an excellent way to provide personal guidance to a conversion. Additionally, studies show that multimedia (especially video) content can significantly increase a Website’s performance, and that directly impacts conversion rates.
Conversion Area Usability and Testing
As with virtually any Website design or content feature, usability testing is imperative to ensuring that it will be discovered and used optimally. Therefore, when planning conversion goals and areas, ensure usability occurs with testing.
Start within your department and other related hospital employees. They will presumably be most familiar with your Website and goals, so if they are unable to find conversion areas or consider them difficult to use, it’s a safe assumption that online visitors will fare much worse.
Additionally, A/B testing (the process of comparing the performance of differently designed pages for the same Web location) is another wise technique for improving conversion rates, as well as other important metrics such as bounce rates, length of page visit, etc.
AVID Design specializes in Website design and content strategy for hospitals and healthcare systems. Get a free Website assessmentfor your hospital’s SEO, conversion rates and other key performance metrics.
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