Automating Healthcare Marketing: Increasing Efficiency and Outcomes with Marketo
Marketo
Many businesses struggle to grow because of poor positioning and ineffective marketing. It’s especially apparent in the chiropractic industry where many doctors find themselves spending their valuable time trying to attract new patients. Not only is this costly, it also distracts doctors and staff from providing meaningful care to their patients.
At ChiroTrust, we position and promote chiropractic practices, taking virtually all their marketing off their plate, saving practices an enormous amount of time and money. Our proprietary marketing program covers everything they need—both online and offline. An essential component of this program is a robust email marketing automation platform to accommodate a list of more than half a million active email addresses, to which we can easily send over 5.43 million emails per month.
We had originally set up the ChiroTrust email program with a well-known vendor in the digital marketing space. In time, our list grew—and so did the headaches. Despite claims that their infrastructure could handle a large database, their systems ground to a halt whenever we needed to perform basic functions. For example, it could take several hours for an email broadcast to process and send. In addition, they kept adding new features we didn’t need while changing the ones that were critical for our business. In order to continue to grow our members’ practices, we needed a marketing automation platform that could keep up with our expanding customer databases.
A Marketing Checklist for a Growing Company
During our Marketing Automation evaluation we had very specific criteria. We identified the following needs:
- Personalized sequences with customized data for each individual ChiroTrust member.
- Ability to merge fields to link readers to our members’ websites.
- Robust infrastructure that can keep up with a growing database with very little processing time.
We spent months evaluating vendors who had the potential to meet our needs. Even after half a dozen interviews and two demos, no company came close to what Marketo offered.
Marketo Has Elevated Our Members’ Marketing With Zero Problems
When ChiroTrust made the switch to Marketo, all the pains and frustrations we had with our previous vendor disappeared. For example, the mind-numbing repetition and resource drain of altering a large group of templates has been replaced with master templates. Now, we can update one template and Marketo handles the rest.
Importing, which used to take days, is now almost instantaneous. This alone saves our team countless hours. Plus, Marketo helps us keep our lists clean by automatically merging duplicate contact records.
Our Most-Valued Feature: Marketing Activities
Have you ever watched a sci-fi movie in which all of the onerous everyday chores are handled by little robots? Well, with Marketo, that future has arrived.
Marketing Activities automates manual, repetitious processes. For example, many marketers set parameters for frequency of emails to new addresses. With Marketo, rather than having to move new recipients into these buckets every time they’re added, you can set up conditional activities that transfer an email into the right list automatically. In fact, just last week, we were able to set up a marketing activity that now saves us roughly 10 minutes a day. Though this doesn’t seem like much, it adds up to 40 actual work hours per year.
Just this morning, we sent 200,000 emails to a segment of our list in just a few minutes. It was as simple as opening a Smart List—a great feature that identifies contact records that meet a very specific criteria—and then selecting the email template and hitting send. This is just one more example of the time saving benefits that we have experienced since implementing Marketo.
Our Biggest Revelation: Marketo Never Stops Innovating
Not only do features like Marketing Activities save time, but Marketo remarkably improves their product with each update. For example, when ChiroTrust first started with Marketo, a large import could take 30 minutes or so. Now, with improvements to both hardware upgrades and software efficiency, that 30 minutes has been reduced to just a few.
Together, Marketo and ChiroTrust Are Growing and Building Something Special
At ChiroTrust, we are revolutionizing the chiropractic industry with a fresh approach to practice building. Of course, this wouldn’t be possible without the right marketing automation platform. With Marketo, we’ve found the best partner to continue to grow our business.
Backed by the reliability and efficiency of Marketo, ChiroTrust is able to give our doctors something invaluable: Time. As a result, the majority of our members work only Monday through Thursday. A three-day weekend, every week!
Marketo has allowed us to expand our marketing efforts—not only for us but for our members. It has increased the number of new patients we attract for each practice. All of these amazing numbers and incredible results pale in comparison to the feeling we get when we receive comments like these:
“ChiroTrust has got me to the point where I don’t have to think about the practice.
Every weekend for me is a vacation…”
– Ray Marquez, D.C.
“For the first time in the past 8 years, I have HOPE and BELIEF that I can pull through
this and have your PLAN OF ACTION to get it done. I have you to thank
for that, so from the bottom of my heart…”
– Phil Scheets, D.C.
"The marketing is eloquent and tailored in a way that is gets information to the patients
without making them feel like I’m selling them on something. I like
your approach on this and continue to enjoy it."
— Eric Lambert, D.C
Thanks to Marketo, our doctors can focus on giving their patients the care that they deserve, and in turn, help spread the word about the service and results that ChiroTrust delivers.
