Webinar: Build the Best Use-it-or-Lose-It Campaign

Hi everyone, I'm Caitlin. I'm on the product marketing team here at NexHealth. And I'm so excited to talk to you today about how to build the best use it or lose it campaign at the end of the year. So it's a great time to get patients in, it's a great time to start to fill your schedule, kids are home for the holidays, college students are back.

It's an awesome time to let everybody know that their benefits might be expiring. So I particularly love this time of year, and I love how easy NexHealth makes it to send offices, for offices to send emails and text blasts to patients. Even if you aren't a NexHealth customer, you can still take advantage of the tips and strategies we're going to go through today.

So like we talked about, dental benefits expire at the end of the year. So you want to use the use it or lose it mentality to drive urgency with your patients. And that really helps you stand out in the crowd. I want to just let everyone know before we keep moving that I'm going to be recording this session, especially since we had a couple of technical glitches. So we'll be able to send this out to everybody at the end. So feel free to absorb the information and we will get started.

And thanks to those of you who also filled out the poll at the very beginning. So surprisingly, the correct answer is that 25% of patients don't use their medical or dental benefits by the end of the year, which means that both patients and practices like yourselves are losing money.
So what are we going to go through today? We're gonna start with strategies for a successful campaign. So that applies to both folks who are using NexHealth and also those who maybe are not yet. We'll also go through a live demo of setting up a campaign in NexHealth and how it will save you a lot of time with our templates. And then finally, at the end, we're going to go through any questions.

But I have my colleague Sabrina here with me today. So if you have any questions throughout the process of the webinar, feel free to drop them in the chat and I will address them as we go along. Additionally, you can receive one CE credit through CMFI by completing a 30 second questionnaire at the end of today's session. So I'll be sure to put that in the chat and then also send it out in our follow-up email. So with that in mind, let's dive in. I promise I don't have too many slides for you today. We'll get a lot of value out of actually looking at NexHealth, but what is a campaign? So technically a campaign is a series of automated actions that you take to elicit a certain kind of action in a person who's receiving it. So for our purposes, a campaign is really the email or text blast that you as the office send out to try to encourage patients to book an appointment before their benefits expire. And considering the average person receives 121 business emails per day, you really wanna make sure that your emails and your texts stand out.

Which brings me to my next point, should we use emails or texts in our campaigns? And the answer is actually both. So even though the modern patient is glued to their phone and SMS or texts have a 98% open rate compared to a 22% email open rate, only 25% of smartphone users prefer to receive their business communications via text. They actually prefer email.
And a lot of patients are used to receiving communications from their healthcare providers through email as well. So it's a great idea to use both modes of communication with your patients.

We're gonna go through four tips for a successful campaign.The first one might seem a little bit obvious, but you definitely want to use an enticing subject line with your emails. So a strong subject line helps grab those patients' attention. And it can be something like time is running out, 58 days left to use your benefits, or even quick, your benefits are about to expire. And you'll notice that each of these kind of drives a particular feeling in the patient. It can be fear of missing out.
It can be a clear number, I need to pay attention to that. And it also can be action oriented words like quick, which definitely spurs that sense of urgency. Uh, one of our customers here at NexHealth is really strong with campaigns and they typically use an email subject line, like the one you see below, which just says your benefits are expiring soon and definitely that's the patient now, like, Ooh, I don't want to lose money.

You also want to use an educational image that is designed to stand out. So that can be an image that speaks to the urgency or anything else that you're trying to tell your patients. So clear messaging, color pop, and any kind of memorable quote or tagline that you can put on the image are all great things to use. Our customer, the Smilist, uses a image of some smiling people. And then they also put on a little bit of information about how their benefits, how patient benefits are expiring soon. It would be great to take advantage of them.
You also want to keep your message short and sweet. So especially with texts, you're going to lose your patience. If you have too much copy in there or you're trying to say too much, no one wants to read that much. So you want to keep it concise, educational and engaging. So you can see that this previous text message on the left is better served by the text message on the right, giving the patient a clear pathway to book their appointment.

And finally, you want to create an effective call to action. So a call to action is essentially the thing or action you want a patient to take after reading your campaign. For our purposes, that means actually booking an appointment. And NexHealth has a proven way to really make this a frictionless experience for the patient and have a super effective call to action. And that's called one-click booking.

So one click booking actually decreases the amount of time it takes a patient to book an appointment by 80%. And that's just booking an online appointment. You can imagine that booking an online appointment is already much quicker than calling the office and booking over the phone. So this is definitely one of the most efficient ways you can get your patients to book this season.
So what did we just talk about? We talked about grabbing patient's attention with that enticing subject line, using an educational image, so something that helps to prove your point, also keeping your message short and sweet and having a super effective call to action. I don't think we have any questions quite yet in the chat, so we can go ahead and move into putting some of these into practice using Excel.

I'm going to switch over here to my NexHealth account. And what you guys are looking at, if you are NexHealth users should look really familiar. This is just the dashboard when you first log in. For a quick disclaimer, I'm using an internal practice account today that we typically use for training, practicing, testing our product internally. So some of the language and some of the things in it might look a little different than your guys's accounts, but everything is in the same place.
And this is a great way to make sure that we aren't accidentally sharing any patient information since we are recording today and I'll be sending that out afterwards. All right, so let's look at NexHealth's campaigns. You're going to go to your top navigation and click on campaigns here. And then you're gonna see that it takes you to this standard page where you have a bunch of different templates or basically pre-made campaigns that you can use quickly and easily. We're actually going to start with building a campaign from scratch so that you can see if you already have like a use it or lose it email that you sent in the past and it worked really well and you want to just plug that in here, you can definitely do that. If you were to start from scratch, you would click on new campaign over here on the right. I'm gonna go ahead and select just Better Dental of San Francisco as my location I'm sending my campaign to. If you are a multi-location practice, you can select all of your locations here so that you save yourself a little bit of time.

I'll go ahead and click next. And then here's where I can filter down and segment out the patients that I want to send my campaign to. So use it or lose it benefits probably applies to most of your patient base and you can definitely send it to all of them. But if you really want to narrow down and capture those patients who maybe missed an appointment this year or haven't been in in a while, you can absolutely do that. So let's do that by looking at past appointments, for example.
Say I decided I wanted to specifically reach out to all of my patients who missed or canceled an appointment this year. I would put in starting on January 1st. Let's say my office opens at 8 a.m. and then we'll do today's date, November 3rd, going to 1 p.m. Pacific. From here, I can filter down the type of appointment that the patient missed or canceled. Let's say I wanna target all of these patients, so I'll go ahead and keep all of these filters on. But if I just wanted to look at patients who missed, examined cleanings and maybe periodontal appointments, that's quite easy to narrow down as well.
Then I'm going to look at my appointment status. So it defaults to completed, but we actually want to do something a little bit different here. So we're going to select missed and canceled. And we're also going to keep it on all of our providers. The last filter is really critical. It's filtering by patients with appointments, without appointments or both. Because it's a use it or lose it, you're wanting to encourage those patients to come in. You don't necessarily want to already reach out to patients who may be already booked for an appointment. So we'll keep this as without an upcoming appointment.

I would click next, I would save my recipients, and now I'm here in an untitled blank campaign. And this is where you can start to really tailor it to your practice. So remember when we talked about how it's important to have both email and text in your campaign? The way that you can turn those on is just by toggling here with email.

And also toggling on here with SMS. And from there, it's really easy to start customizing directly within the blue bubble for the text message or within the body of the email here. We're gonna go into a few more customization details when we look at the next help template for use it or lose it. But it's a simple way for you to really customize this blank one to your practice. I'll go ahead and call this test campaign for now.
I'll save my draft and then I'm going to take you back and we're going to look at that use it or lose it template that we've been talking about. Because NexHealth really aims to make your practice as efficient as possible. So all of these templates are available to really help you get a jumpstart on reaching out to your patients. The use it or lose it template is here at the bottom. If you go back to the main page and scroll down.
You'll see that we have that same educational image we talked about. Even though it looks a little stock photo-y, it does still give that urgency message up at the top. We also have some basic educational information about use it or lose it benefits, but not so much text that you're going to lose the patient. And then finally, there's a very clear call to action at the bottom directing patients to book their appointment.

Say you wanted to use this, wanted to send it to a group of patients, wanted to do it this afternoon. We can do that. What you'll do is you'll go to the far right over here and click clone and create new campaign. This is going to take you to the edit screen. So this is where you can start to really customize and make NexHealth use it or lose it template exactly what you want it to be.
One of the great benefits about NexHealth's campaigns is that there are no code campaigns. You don't have to configure a bunch of stuff on the backend. You don't even have to really be worried about like backend code or how it links in with your practice management system because NexHealth is constantly reading your schedule and your patient base. We can add all of that information in by actually using smart commands over here on the right. So, for example, if I were receiving this email and where it says, hi patient first name, I would get, hi Caitlin, and it will do that for every patient that's on your list. And speaking of adding patients to your list, what you'll do is go up here where it says zero patients. And even though it says this campaign will be sent to the following zero patients, you'll just click back. And then we're back here at our filters.

So you can narrow down by specific types of patients. You can even send to multiple different patient groups by reusing and cloning this campaign in the way that we're doing it here. I'm gonna go ahead and select all patients. So we have 59 patients in this location. I'll click next, and then I'll click yes, apply selected filters and save. Now I see that I'm sending it to 59 patients. Again, your practices probably have far more. This is just our NexHealth practice account.

Then I can come in and edit any information that I want to change here. For today, I want to point out how you'll be able to add in one-click booking. And one-click booking also lives in your smart commands over here on the right. In order to change anything, let's say I want to take out this command, which just gives me my general booking page. And I want to encourage patients to book an examine cleaning with just a single click.

To do that, I will go to appointment slots, which is here on the right with your smart commands, and I'll select time slots, exam, and cleaning. What this will do if I click load preview up here in the top right, is it will send my patient this email. It will say, hi, Jane, end of the year is approaching. Jane can then click with just a single click to book her appointment. NexHealth will pre-fill her patient information because we can read that from your health record system and it will automatically insert that appointment into your schedule. And your office doesn't need to do a thing.
You can pick from any of the smart commands that you have here on this right side, if you wanna add in your location address, location phone for patients to call you with questions, and that will all be auto updated into the messages that patients receive. And considering I want to send a text message as well, I can go ahead and edit this to include my time slot for exam and cleaning as well. And then just make sure that I save.

From here, I can send my campaign and all my patients will receive their enticing subject line of use your dental benefits before the year ends. They'll have basic educational information about what use it or lose it benefits are, and they'll have a really clear call to action where they can book with just a single click. I'm going to go ahead and go back to my campaigns. When I'm under the All button here or the All filter, I can see every campaign that I've sent. And then here are campaigns that have actually been sent. You can use all of these fields and filters within the Campaigns tab itself to navigate around and see which campaigns you've sent, which are drafts, archived, all of that good stuff.
And you'll probably want to know how your campaigns are performing. I would. So to do that, you will click into a previously sent campaign. This one was sent just as a test for internal purposes. And then you'll be able to look at the actual analytics here on the right. Something that some offices do that are really strong with sending campaigns at the end of the year is they can even try out and test different subject lines, different images, it's super easy to send those and then come in here and compare and contrast how things are doing so that you can make sure you're really targeting your messaging to what works for your patients.

And it looks like we have a question. If we upload a patient CSV for a campaign being used across multiple offices, will NexHealth recognize which office each patient is associated with? That's a great question. So it depends on your health record system, but typically if a patient is in location A and that's where their patient file lives in your health record system, the patient will still get the notification from that location.
I think that was from Joe Litchie. Joe, I'm happy to verify that with you, or verify that for you with the engineering team, but it's typically going to be the location the patient's file is in, it's the location that they'll receive the message from. And in fact, if we look back at this particular template. 
We could even add in book your own appointment with location name by clicking below before it's too late to really call out exactly where the patient is supposed to go. I'll go ahead and save that.

All right, and then if you've already sent a previous campaign, again, if you've already sent a use it or lose it campaign, you can go back in, select it, clone it again, just like we did with the template, and then send it out. There are lots of ways to really make campaigns as efficient as possible for your office, and we're all here to help make sure that happens.

So for a brief recap, what did we talk about with campaigns and NexHealth specifically? We talked about how to filter your patients either in a new campaign or by reusing a previous one. We also talked about how to use the use it or lose it template here towards the bottom of your screen so that you don't have to spend a bunch of time building a nice email or text from scratch. And also we talked about how to really customize a from scratch email or the NexHealth template to match your patients and your practice, making everyone feel like they're valued, like you have their information, and you truly want them to come back in the season for a cleaning or exam so that they don't lose their benefits and so that their overall health is taken care of.
And as a recap, how to build a successful campaign. We want to grab patients' attention with the enticing subject line. We want to use an educational image that will help prove our point. And we also want to keep our message really short and sweet with an effective call to action. Oh, and it looks like we have one more question. Will cloning the campaign clone the patient list that we would like it to get sent to? It will. It will clone the patient list. But you can go in and adjust that patient list just like we did when we clicked on the zero patients and then went back to the additional filters.

All right, so now that we've recapped our live demo and all of our tips and tricks, I wanna remind everyone that I'll be following up today's session in about 24 to 48 hours with the recording and some other resources. If you've registered for the Continuing Education credit, I will include the link to the questionnaire in the comments and also in our follow-up email. It just takes 30 seconds and it helps you fill those CE credits to the end of the year. Everyone's busy. Everyone would love a way to quickly get that done. So we're super happy to work with CMFI to help you out there.

I'll go ahead and post it now actually just make it easy for you. Perfect. All right. One other thing that I wanted to let you all know, if you thought that this webinar was valuable, we've got more awesome content coming up. So on November 17th and then December 6th, we're hosting a two-part webinar that will be about how to have full circle secrets to fill chairs. That's a bit of a mouthful, but it's going to be absolutely amazing. The team's been working really hard on it. And again, our goal is to support your practice. It's to help you guys fill your chairs, be as efficient as possible, and we're all really committed to that. So if you have any other questions, our support team is here for you. You can reach out to them in the following email that I'll be following up with all of their contact information, and also just by visiting nexhealth.com, all our information is there as well. I really appreciate everyone's patience with the technical difficulties.

It's all a learning process. So I hope to see you guys on the next webinar and we'll make sure that we have all our links in place at that point. And finally, here is the link for our second webinar coming up and I'll include that in our followup. Thanks again, everybody.