Getting your patients to come through the door for their appointment is an important piece of your practice’s revenue stream. One way optometric practices attempt to keep their patients coming back is by sending automated patient recall messages to remind them of appointments. But, sometimes, the messages may not be optimized enough to bring them back. If you’re failing to get your patients to return to your practice, maybe it’s time to update your recall message.

Below are some of our favorite tips to recharge your patient recall messages.

How To Revive Your Patient Recall Message To Bring Patients Back

Personalize The Message

When a patient steps foot into your optometric practice, your goal is to provide exceptional, individualized care for that patient. Because, when you treat your patients as an individual, you begin to form a bond of mutual respect. Why should this end when the patient leaves the practice?

Personalizing your patient recall messages by addressing the patient by name and using the second person point-of-view helps you continue to strengthen your relationship with the patient and helps make the message more conversational.

Get To The Point

Because of information overload, your patients (especially millennials) have a shorter attention span. If your goal is to get your patients to read your email and take action, then you need to get to the point early in the recall message.

If it’s time for the patient’s annual exam, let them know and ask them to schedule an appointment. After that, you can explain the benefits of a regular eye exam.

Include a Call-to-action

Whether you want your patient to confirm an upcoming exam or you’re trying to bring them back with a particular promotion, your recall message needs to have a call-to-action so that the patient knows exactly what it is you want them to do.

Your recall message should have one call-to-action, and it should be short and use action-oriented verbs.

Strengthen Subject Lines

There may be a few reasons as to why your recall messages are getting ignored, but one of the first things you can do to change that is creating stronger subject lines. Because your patients receive many emails a day, your subject line may be the only thing your patients read. If your subject line is not optimized, then your patient may gloss over it and miss the message.

Strengthen your recall subject lines using best practices like using numbers, asking a question, or creating a sense of urgency.

Hear the advice of your fellow optometrists for practice growth tips.