Patient Marketing Automation
Patient marketing automation platforms automate targeted outreach to prospective and existing patients across multiple channels—email, SMS, search engines, and social media. They aim to drive patient acquisition, retention, and engagement by delivering personalized health information, screening reminders, and promotional campaigns for relevant services.
Unlike traditional appointment reminders or scheduling systems, these platforms focus on patient acquisition or net-new appointments and services. They are also distinct from push-message or email marketing platforms; to be included within our category, vendors must use personalization and automated targeting, as opposed to mass messaging across an entire patient population or basic transactional emails.
Product Usage: Fertu is used to engage with pediatricians and their staff at scale through cold calling and fax-based communication, oversee continued nurturing of relationships, and manage newsletters and webinars.
Strengths: Fertu is very focused on the customer’s requirements, has broad communication capabilities (phone, SMS, direct mail, and fax), and provides personalized service.
Weaknesses: The personalized service model that Fertu employs might not scale with the growth of the company, creating potential challenges in the future.
Overall Judgment: Fertu is a valuable tool for outreach and engagement, especially when dealing with audiences that require more traditional methods of communication. Issues and bugs are promptly addressed, and the integration with HubSpot is seamless. Fertu is seen more as a high-quality custom service than just a product.
Product Usage: The product was used as a HIPAA-compliant patient engagement and marketing across a variety of communication channels.
Strengths: The product showed strengths in commitment to compliance, customizability, and an ability to effectively manage multiple communication channels.
Weaknesses: A noted weakness was the lack of self-service options aside from reporting, which required a significant amount of time and effort from the customer.
Overall Judgment: Despite the need for more self-service options, the product was seen as valuable in achieving high activation levels among customer populations and providing necessary scalability. The team deemed their decision to use this product as correct.
Product Usage: The reviewer uses Customer.io to track patient follow-ups, with most of its use being to communicate with patients via SMS and email reminders regarding their need to follow-up on a visit.
Strengths: Customer.io excels at providing efficient message orchestration and flexible campaign set-up, along with capabilities such as time-delays, prompt customer support and generous messaging volume in their pricing structure.
Weaknesses: The integration process had its challenges, specifically with automated tracking of back-end events, and analytics reporting regarding successful attributions needs improvement.
Overall Judgment: The reviewer views the decision to choose Customer.io as the right one, and intends to continue using it in the future due to its out-of-the-box capabilities and cost-effectiveness.