Healthcare Website Personalization: Why It Matters and How to Do It Properly?

Patient engagement is getting smarter day by day as new and improved strategies for medical social media marketing and mobile optimization surface. Among them, perhaps one of the most useful ways to make patients feel cared for and welcome when they click on a medical site is site personalization.

Put yourself in your patient’s shoes for a moment. As a patient, when you click on a medical site, you expect to see information about medical topics and services that are relevant to your needs. If you find that the site doesn’t contain what you want in one glance, you may exit it immediately. While shaping your medical site to a message that feels relevant to all your patient base feels near impossible, website personalization makes it easier.

By applying website personalization strategies, you can create an improved patient experience when they visit your medical site which will help you boost patient engagement, generate leads, and develop your revenue, all while strengthening your medical business among your competitors.

What Is Healthcare Website Personalization?

Website personalization allows you to create different messages and tones to suit your separate patient groups based on the patient data you accumulate from prior interactions. In simple words, it refers to identifying what your patients want and providing outreach accordingly.

To personalize your medical site, you will require valuable insights about your patients, such as their medical needs, preferences, demographics, etc. Collecting this insight can be achieved by either directly asking your patients to fill out information forms to provide them better medical services or using the patient data your medical system accumulates daily. You can then use this data to align your medical site with it to improve your patient user experience. 

Six Easy Steps to Implement Website Personalization for Healthcare Businesses

Website personalization takes patience, effort, and a whole stack of patient data. While you can always select a medical marketing agency to do this for you, here are the six easy steps that can help you get started with it on your own:

1. Gather Valuable Patient Insight

The primary step you need to complete when it comes to medical website personalization is patient data collection. It is important to gather data not only about your existing patients but about your potential ones too. Some valuable patient insights can be:

• Which platforms (such as social media or display ads) are attracting your patients?
• What medical keywords and phrases are guiding patients to your medical website?
• What is the page patients land on and which page do they click next to visit?
• What medical services do patients require from you or which of your medical services are the most popular among them?
• What time and days are the patients most active on your site?
• Do patients fill out any quizzes on forms available on your medical site or do they download any medical content on your medical site?

This type of data can help you gather a strong insight into who your patient base is and what they want from you, which can help you improve their user experience ultimately.

2. Assemble Your PPPs (Powerful Patient Personas)

After you have gathered the appropriate insights about your patients, you can proceed with creating your patient personas for website personalization. Creating a patient persona helps segment your patient audience and curate relevant medical content for them. It considers their interests and preferences up to now and offers estimations about the medical services they might want in the future, which help you adapt your medical business to them.

3. Set Your Immediate Goals

After creating your patient personas, you can now set goals about what you want your personalization to look like for each persona. Your personalization goals can be anything, from generating leads to boosting patient engagement. Your goals can also differ for each patient group and even on geographical locations.

Keep in mind that the goals depend on website personalization and not on customization. While customization may refer to curating your medical site for individual patients, personalization is adapting your medical site for different patient groups/personas.

4. Put Together a Personalization Strategy

After you have decided upon what you want to accomplish from your personalization strategy, you can begin putting together its components. Here are some of the features of your medical site that you can include in your personalization strategy:

• Banner Image: Your medical site may have a generic banner image that is visible to every patient when they visit your landing page. Instead of using that, you can create different banner images suited for different patient personas. This can help increase patient engagement and help them feel valued.

• Medical Service Recommendations: All patients wish to see medical services suited for them when they click on a medical site. They also appreciate it more if they see personalized medical services recommendations on landing pages. You can use algorithms to display personalized medical service recommendations to different patient personas based on their searches. This captures their attention and plays a big part in helping them choose your medical business. 

• Medical Site Content: Aside from medical services, featuring the right and relevant kind of medical content is another big aspect of website personalization. You can display medical articles related to the relevant patient searches, including customized greetings, banners, appealing infographics, and compelling CTAs to help them feel encouraged to select your medical services.

• Navigation Tab: If your medical site has a dropdown navigation menu feature, you can use patient searches to feature relevant medical content and services targeted to specific patient groups. This helps them save the trouble of browsing through your entire medical site and increases the patient-user experience. 

Test and Refine

Similar to how you would proceed with any other medical marketing strategy, after creating your medical site personalization strategy, you need to test it out and refine your medical site personalization campaigns. Once you begin with a personalization campaign, you can run A/B testing against how your medical site was before applying any personalization strategies to obtain the campaign’s performance data.

You can utilize visual editing tools to make these changes to your medical site and test them out with set goals. Regularly testing these small changes in your campaign can help you detect the errors in it and help you edit them out for an optimal online patient visiting experience.

Measure Your Successes

Like how you set goals in the beginning, you can set performance metrics to evaluate the success rates of your medical site personalization campaigns. Not only does it map the performance of your personalization campaigns, but also helps you see whether you are earning back your ROI.

It helps you determine if your primary goals for implementing site personalization are being accomplished and if you need to add in new ones. It is important to measure the success of your personalization campaign in the early, mid, and late stages of implementation.

Medical Website Personalization Matters More Than You Think

Medical website personalization assists you with targeting your patients with relevant medical content and services regarding their wellbeing. It is a cost-savvy method for further developing patient commitment, generating leads, and creating a loyal patient base for your medical business. Ultimately, site personalization adds individuality to your medical business and helps it set apart from other medical competitors.