The healthcare industry is divided into payers and providers. At every step along the payer and provider value chains, automation is revolutionizing healthcare operations and delivery. From appointment bookings, chatbots and claims processing to robot-assisted surgery, automated drug manufacturing and healthcare analytics… intelligent automation (IA) is enhancing the patient experience, cutting costs for payers and providers, and driving growth across the industry by streamlining processes.

Simultaneously, automation is alleviating the high burden on the healthcare workforce. Not only are automated systems doing the heavy lifting that would’ve otherwise been done manually, but they are also unlocking new functionalities that humans just can’t practically implement by themselves.

When players across the healthcare value chain are making the most of automation, why shouldn’t sales and marketing teams do so, too?

Sales and marketing automation in healthcare

In a McKinsey & Company survey of healthcare payers, 45% of respondents said that automation in sales and marketing could yield the greatest cost impact for their organisations.

Providers, too, can use automated communication and outreach strategies to grow their practice faster. Writing for Forbes, an industry expert notes that healthcare providers who use marketing automation often achieve better results than those who don’t.

For instance, a cancer treatment centre in India aimed to provide people, especially in remote areas, with timely, effective and affordable treatment. But their manual process of extracting and distributing inquiries to calling agents took two to three days, a delay that could completely alter the course of treatment for patients. By deploying a CRM to automate workflows, the cancer centre not only reduced response time and improved patient outcomes, but also improved communication and agent performance, streamlined reporting, and ensured data privacy and security.

Similarly, other healthcare providers have increased patient conversions by 5x, reduced lead leakage to 0, and streamlined reporting and analytics by equipping their sales and marketing teams with the right automation tools.

While results vary based on therapeutic specialties, patient demographics and location, a common goal for healthcare providers is to achieve a patient lifetime value (LTV) to patient acquisition cost (PAC) ratio of at least 3:1. As a healthcare provider, the best way to improve your LTV:PAC ratio is to reduce your patient acquisition cost. That’s where automation plays a big role.

By helping you target the right audience, earn referrals and use data to inform your decision-making, sales and marketing automation can help you reduce your PAC and achieve sustainable, long-term growth in the healthcare industry.

Singapore’s healthcare sector leaders are winning with sales and marketing automation

Among all the countries in Southeast Asia in 2023, Singapore had the highest life expectancy of ~84.3 years. Consequently, an increase in chronic diseases needing specialised care and a shortage of healthcare workers has called for technology-based solutions to improve healthcare availability.

Given its strong business environment and position as a leading healthcare innovation hub in the region, Singapore has also emerged as a gateway for health-tech startups to the rest of the Southeast Asian market of 600 million+ people.

According to RedSeer Consulting, the online health sector in Southeast Asia is expected to grow 10x by 2025. Singapore and Indonesia are projected to account for 50-60% of this growth. Already, hospitals and other healthcare players in Singapore use digital tools to improve their operations and patient experience. From appointment bookings, referrals and digital self-service portals for patients to billing and claims processing, automation is a mainstay in Singapore’s healthcare system.

For instance, using automation helped the National University Health System (NUHS) save ~USD350,000 over three years by processing 75% of its 40,000 annual bill adjustment requests.

With strong public and private players in Singapore’s healthcare system, sales automation is powering the growth of market leaders. If you, too, want to get ahead in this competitive market, sticking with the same ol’ manual processes just won’t cut it. You have no time to lose in adopting intelligent automation solutions to scale your healthcare business and stay competitive in this crucial Southeast Asian market.

How to improve your healthcare marketing outcomes with automation

Getting the best results from a sales and marketing automation tool involves a step-by-step process. It begins with identifying your goals. Whether your goal is enhancing patient engagement, increasing appointment bookings, reaching more leads or streamlining communications, having a clear goal sets the stage for effective tool selection and performance measurement.

After outlining your goals, you need to select the automation tools that can best help you achieve them. HubSpot, Marketo, Hootsuite, ZoomInfo and other such tools can help you with appointment scheduling, patient intake, analytics, lead generation, and social media scheduling.

Next, you need to develop a strategy i.e. how you will use the tools of your choice to achieve your marketing goals. You need to set up your workflows. You need to train your team to maximise the use and benefits of your tools. And finally, you must monitor key performance metrics and use them to refine and optimise your marketing efforts.

This is never easy. It is a multidimensional process that requires a careful understanding of not only your business and industry but also your audience, the latest communications strategies, and the marketing tools themselves. That’s why agencies like Purple Turtle are your best bet to get the most from marketing automation.

Here’s how Purple Turtle can help you automate your marketing, reduce your PAC, and grow exponentially in an increasingly competitive healthcare market.

Generate high-quality leads.
As a healthcare provider, the best way to attract new patients to your practice is to speak to your existing patients and understand what keeps them coming back. Automation tools can help you to not only gather patient feedback but also analyse it to understand how your patients feel about the care that you provide.

Such sentiment analysis can complement any relevant demographic data that you have to identify your strengths, the characteristics of your most loyal patients, and what a potential patient may look like. You can use this information to target your communications on your website, social media, and other digital channels to the right audience and generate high-quality leads for your business.

Manage leads and increase conversion rates.
Marketing automation tools like HubSpot have multiple functionalities that help you to efficiently collect, organise and access lead information.

Whether you collect lead information from your website, a patient referral, a physician referral or any other source, the right tool can help you collate all that data in one place. It can segment these leads based on location, patient age, the services that they’re interested in, or any other characteristic.

Using this data, you can tailor email and other digital communications to show them information that is relevant to them. For instance, based on your lead segmentation, you have a list of parents of young children. You could show them content at relevant times, reminding them to bring their children to your hospital or clinic for routine immunizations. If a particular vaccine has a multi-dose schedule, you can also send timely reminders to ensure that they visit you on time for subsequent shots.

Nurture leads using dynamic content delivery.
When you have a lead in your system, you need to nurture them over time to build a relationship that will convert them into paying customers. You can do this by keeping them engaged through automated content delivery based on their online behaviours.

Let’s say a lead clicked on an email link about a diagnostic test that you offer at your facility. Based on this behaviour, you can show them targeted information about the health condition in question. Whether it’s through Instagram, email or WhatsApp, you can nudge them to convert their online scrolling into a call or visit to your facility to set up an appointment for the test.

Retain patients.
You don’t always need fresh leads to grow your business. Retaining patients over long periods can help you generate more revenue and reduce the amount you spend on acquiring new patients. This is why you should invest part of your marketing spend on patient retention.

The secret to retaining patients is keeping them engaged with relevant communications at regular intervals of time. It hardly needs saying, but this doesn’t need manual effort – it needs a good automation strategy and tool.

For instance, you could use automation to send health surveys to your patients after they visit you for the first time. Through the survey, you can gather information about their health needs and concerns. Using this data, you can automatically SMS or email them lifestyle tips, reminders about annual check-ups, and preventative health strategies.

Such consistent personalised engagement not only makes your patients feel seen and taken care of but also enables you to build lasting relationships which help grow your business.

Get referrals.
At the end of the day, healthcare is a trust-based industry. Given the big role that referrals play in helping patients find reliable healthcare providers, one happy patient translates to revenue from many more.

You can use automation tools to send your patients a feedback form after they meet you. If they leave a positive review, you can follow that up with a request for a referral. If you give them the option to automatically send a referral to their relatives and friends by email, there’s nothing like it!

While patient referrals play a big role in growing your business, many healthcare marketers overlook the role of referrals from other physicians. Using your CRM, automation tool or referral management software, you can establish and nurture connections with healthcare professionals from allied fields. So that when they need to refer a patient to an OB-GYN, ENT, heart surgeon or whatever specialization you may have, your name is top of their mind.

This is only a small peek into the many impressive results that marketing automation can help you achieve because, at the end of the day, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy for success as a healthcare business.

What works for other healthcare leaders in Singapore may not work for you. What you need is a tailored marketing strategy based on the services you provide, the scale of your business and your target market. What you need is the perfect mix of human insight and digital prowess that Purple Turtle offers.

At Purple Turtle, we’re all about custom marketing strategies that put you front and centre. We study not only your business and audience but also your competitors and the industry at large. We also research adjacent industries and other markets to find unique marketing strategies and tactics that can help you bridge the gap between your marketing efforts and the results that your business deserves.

We identify what makes you you, why your customers love you, and then we tell the world your story. After all, why do only what your competitors do when you can share and be recognised for your unique offerings?

Whether you’re looking to build brand credibility, increase patient LTV through upselling and cross-selling, generate more high-quality leads or enhance your patient experience, Purple Turtle can deliver the data-backed communication strategies that you need.