How To Practice Owners Can Implement Missed Call Texts To Help Improve Their New Patient Generation - Copy

How To Not Sound Like A Robot When Sending Texts

Introduction:

I wanted to write a quick article to show practice owners the main problem we see when they are sending out texts.

The main problem that we see when practice owners are sending out texts or emails or any kind of automation is that they aren't very human. The text they send out comes off like a robot is texting them, and the person on the receiving end knows and is well aware that it wasn't a human that texted them. Everybody kind of knows that when they get a text from a company, it's most likely not going to be the owner or the therapist texting you, I'd say, nine times out of ten its a robot or automation.

But there are ways to make it feel more personal and more human in order to get better responses, right? Usually people will send out a text maybe for an offer, and they'll say something like: 

“hey, it's blah blah from _____ physical therapy. We are running a special for $27 evaluations. Reply YES to schedule, reply NO to unsubscribe.”  

I’m not saying those kinds of texts are bad, but they can be improved. 

We like to do a few things in order to tackle this problem. 

Let’s Jump Into It

The first thing is we like to send out texts that we would send to one of our buddies. If it were one of our friends who scheduled an appointment and you were handling it personally, you wouldn't text them something like reply yes to do this and reply no to do this. You would probably say something like: 

“Hey man, heard your back was bothering you, let’s get you in for an appointment tomorrow maybe and I’ll see if I can help.”

Or 

“Hey man, we're running this new deal in our practice. You should check it out, let me know if you want more info.” 

That's very much a text you would send somebody that's close to you.

And with these patients, the goal is to make them feel as close to you as possible, right? We want to treat them like family, and so we don't want to send those robot texts, as I like to call them. 

That's step number one. So when you are running your campaigns and sending your texts think:  

Would I say this to a friend or is this really a robot text?

Another thing we do is we like to purposely misspell words or leave stuff out that we need to correct.

I know for me, if I were to misspell a word when I was texting somebody, I would say the corrected version of the word and then put a little star (*) next to it or send a second text saying the correct version. 

With this in mind what we will do in a campaign is send out the first message but spell a word wrong in it. For example: 

“Hey [First Name], we missed you today! Still wanting to come in for help? Would an appointment tomorow work?”

Now, some people will notice, some people won't. But we spelled tomorrow wrong, and that's on purpose, because one minute later, we are going to send a text saying “tomorrow*” with that little star. 

That's really only something a human would do, right? If I were to send this manually to somebody and I just happened to spell tomorrow wrong, I'm going to send a text after correcting that mistake.

Then after a day we would send another follow up text saying something like: 

“Just a heads up, I'll leave the ball in your court after this text if I don't hear from you. Do you want to reschedule your appointment?” 

Again, these are all very short texts. These are not long paragraphs. 

One other thing, when you are using the misspelled word trick make sure to use it sparingly. If you use it too many times people will start to catch on and see right through it. 

Really, the goal of these short texts and human like tricks is to get the potential patient to reply back to us. Once we get a reply from the lead we can turn that into an appointment if the patient is really in pain. The sale doesn't always have to be automated, especially if somebody was interested in your practice.

For example if someone called you guys they would talk to your front desk and ask whatever questions they have to them. Think of texting them as the same thing. When someone texts you guys we want them to be able to have a conversation with another human. This conversation can then lead to an appointment or whatever else they need. 

So those are a few cool things that we do to really make it seem human when we're texting people. Again it’s using the short and sweet messages and just using words that you would normally use. You're not going to use big words, big fancy words, right? When you're texting a buddy, you're going to use a little bit of slang. Maybe something like using the letter “U” instead of spelling out the word “you”. 

And then another thing is misspell words on purpose, especially if you're creating a campaign like I just showed you guys, that was a no show campaign. 

Again, if people feel that somebody real is on the other end, they're going to respond faster and they're more likely to respond in general. So give that a try and let me know how it goes.

If you need help or have any questions about anything just covered or about texting your past and current patients shoot me an email at thomas@followuphelper.com or a text to (919) 533-2368.