The ‘marketing mix’ revolves around developing a framework to cover all aspects of marketing a service or product. ‘Initially, there were four ‘P’s,’ Mark Holloway explained.
These were:
- Product
- Price
- Promotion
- Place
Three more were added to allow for a more service-orientated approach rather than one based purely on consumerism:
- Physical evidence
- People
- Process
For Holloway, the keys to success with OCT integration lie with promotion, people and process. ‘Promotion, because people can’t want or need it if they don’t know about it. There is a balancing act here,’ he continued. ‘You need to be careful not to prey on people’s worries while ensuring they understand the health benefits of accurate assessment and monitoring.’
‘People are important for delivering a service. It is important to ensure staff are well trained and knowledgeable about your OCT. Finally, we need to ensure there are processes in place to deliver the promotion and support the people.’
Promotion
Promotion includes regular reminders to patients, including a letter introducing Spectralis OCT and its benefits (figure 1). This also directs them to the practice website where there is a video explaining the OCT. These materials are available from Heidelberg Engineering to their customers.
For appointment booking, Holloway uses Optinet and this offers fields for recording examination category and related remarks. ‘These are useful to populate with information like family history glaucoma, diabetic status, family history of AMD and so on. They can then act as prompts for the people booking the sight test to ask if they’ve considered the scan – they should know about it because we have already told them about it in the letter. At the appointment, Front of house staff can use the “desktop talker” face to face to explain a little better what the scan can do and why it might be of benefit (figure 2). We have three optometrists who cover the practices and each of these had the initial training and can talk about and recommend knowledgeably about Spectralis OCT. In particular if there are things like family history of glaucoma or previous ocular history which may make OCT even more advantageous.’
2
Interaction
‘Next are what I term “customer interactions”. These, in my view, are about keeping your customers engaged with you as a business and in the front of their mind – so when they think “eyes”, they think your business.’
An example of this is the local press campaign that Holloway ran during National Eye Health Week in 2014, explaining how OCT helps in the identification and monitoring of a range of ocular conditions. ‘We use MailChimp, which gives some great feedback on how the campaign has performed. This email was received by 843 subscribers and was opened by 61% of them. This is far above the average for email marketing campaigns (average for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) 20 to 25%, depending on which data you look at). We were delighted that 515 people opened this email for effectively zero additional cost.
‘And then of course the best form of marketing…personal recommendation. We’ve had new patients based on existing patient recommendation and also existing patients attending specifically for OCT because their other half was recommended it and they were so impressed they thought their wife/husband/sibling/child should have it done.’
3
‘These interactions (summarised in figure 3) are, of course, not exhaustive, but should serve as a starting point.’
Read more
Part 1: Technology in community practice
Part 3: Technology in community practice
Part 4: Technology in community practice
Mark Holloway has practised as an independent optometrist since 2012 and qualified subsequent to ten years working in sales and marketing for which he holds a Chartered Institute Marketing Advanced Certificate. He first acquired a Spectralis in 2014
Further information on Spectralis OCT at heidelbergengineering.com