In the U.S. alone, small-to-medium businesses spend $40B a year on traditional and digital marketing to find new customers. Yet, only 20% of their revenue comes from the new customers they acquire — at a cost of 5x that of generating revenue from  existing customers. For healthy businesses that are effective at customer marketing, 80% of their revenue comes from their existing customers!

The macro problem is that small-to-medium size businesses can not afford sophisticated marketing consultants nor can they afford sophisticated marketing automation software tools to effectively market to their customers.

So case in point, after speaking to 1000’s of healthcare practices, what we’ve learned is that their patient (customer) marketing is not very effective at  generating enough business from their existing customers to survive.  And so, they are in a vicious cycle of continually having to spend more money on traditional and digital advertising to find new patients.   This is what we refer to as the Marketing Money Pit!

When we have explored why healthcare practices struggle so much with patient (customer) marketing, the reasons are glaring:

1. Generally someone on their staff is tasked, that has little or no marketing expertise, to do their patient (customer) marketing. Moreover, this person often has lots of other responsibilities. So, this ends up being someone with little time and little to no expertise trying to marketing to the businesses most valuable asset — it’s patients (customers). Summary: lack time and expertise.
2. The primary method used to market to their patients (customers) is email. And most often, they are not following any marketing best practices.  So, with open rates of 20% (which is high across all industries), this means that 80% of their patients (customers) are not even seeing their promotions.  And when we ask, what are you doing to digitally reach the other 80% that aren’t seeing your emails, we regularly hear that they are doing nothing. To make matters worse, the unsophisticated email marketing tools that they use do not give them any visibility into how much business they are really generating for these efforts. Summary: narrow patient reach and uncertain results.
3. The last thing that we’ve learned is that these harried resources with little to no marketing expertise are sending out email blasts to their entire customer database 1-2x per month. These are their patients (customers). They should know them and what they care about, yet you would never know it from their “one-size-fits-all” emails that go to everyone. They are not sophisticated enough nor do they have the time to send out emails to targeted groups of patients (customers) about topics they are likely to be interested in.  In the end, they do a very poor job of connecting with patients (customers) about topics that matter to them. Summary: poor customer engagement.

When you sum this all up, small to medium-sized businesses like healthcare practices need help to get out of the Marketing Money Pit.   That’s where eRelevance comes in — sophisticated customer marketing done for them, at a price point that fits within their budget.  Our Marketing Automation Service solves all of the challenges above and delivers results for businesses that they have never experienced before. Expert marketing done by marketing experts faster, cheaper, and more effectively.