Embracing Marketing Automation: A Turning Point for Senior Home Care Sales
Why investing in marketing automation can generate new opportunities to expand your home care agency
A marketing strategy without automation might look something like this: Excel spreadsheets full of the names of client leads and their contact information, email copy saved in Word docs, a queue of social media copy waiting to be uploaded to platforms individually, a list of reminders jotted down on post-its or saved on a calendar to follow up with this lead or that.
Automation marks a turning point for senior home care sales. When marketing campaigns are planned and deployed through marketing automation platforms, contact information, correspondence, notes, emails, newsletters, digital brochures, sales collateral, social media posts, and client insights are consolidated in one place, linked by client and categorized by customer journey stage.
Every interaction with a lead is tracked, mined for insights, and put back to work, helping you add more ideal potential clients to your funnel. It’s a money-saver, time-generator, and insight-creator.
Why use marketing automation for senior home care sales?
Proponents of automation will tout its power to save sales teams time and money. That’s true. Here’s what you can do with that time and money:
- Home care sales staff can use the extra resources to develop their skills through eLearning, hands-on training, mentorship, or peer-to-peer shadowing. They can also spend time with caregivers and client experience teams to learn more about other points of view within the business.
- Make more human contact with referral sources. Automating marketing efforts doesn’t mean eliminating the human factor. On the contrary—it creates time that home care sales reps can use to visit discharge coordinators at hospitals and clinics, call leads, and talk to doctors about referrals.
- That time can be used to address the concerns of your leads. Invest the extra time in hearing directly from potential clients about their questions and hangups, which can help you assuage their concerns and develop better marketing materials.
- Reach out to current clients and find out what’s working for them. Your long-time clients can provide rich information about the value you offer and the gaps you need to fill. Home care sales teams can gather vital information about the business and craft better marketing messages.
- Saved money can be reinvested into the sales cycle, whether that’s in training for the sales team, larger ad campaigns, long-form content marketing materials, community events, or educational webinars.
Using automation to optimize senior home care sales
So, how do you do it? What should be automated and why? End-to-end marketing automation means that once a client enters your funnel, they remain in your database—along with their referral source, records of interactions and communication with your agency, tenure, and contact information—for as long as you need them. That information can be used to optimize their experience and the experience of future clients.
Design a seamless journey for your client leads
Clients don’t care to know if they’re on a journey, they just want to know whether you can meet their needs. Automation can make the process of moving from one stage of the sales process to another totally seamless—the client only knows that their contact with your agency is consistent, helpful, and easy to navigate.
Automation platforms can consolidate every lead and client interaction in one place, including phone calls, emails, text messages, social media messaging, so you never lose track.
Well-equipped tools can even automatically pause outreach in response to out-of-office replies.
Categorize more leads quickly so you can meet them where they are
Clients can enter your sales funnel at all different stages. Some are exploring home care for the first time, considering it for sometime in the future. Others are checking out of the hospital and need help yesterday. Marketing automation categorizes leads so you can quickly get to the ones with an acute need and work on education with those at the top of the funnel, ensuring that they get the right information in the right sequence.
Tailor and automate sequences for your ideal clients
Think of these reminders as push notifications that prompt a salesperson to take the next step in lead nurturing. That might be initiating contact with a client after they’ve filled out a learn-more form on your home care site, then a push notification to prompt a follow-up phone call three days after that. No leads fall through the cracks, from phone call to final agreement.
Automation can be used to trigger welcome emails for fresh leads, send onboarding forms to new clients, and notify existing clients of new services.
Personalize messages based on client needs
Why send a generic message when you can send one that specifically addresses a client’s needs? Marketing automation can help you build single-message emails or design drip campaigns for long-term client education. Platforms equipped with generative AI can even help compose emails and fine-tune messaging and tone.
You can even A/B test marketing messages to find the wording, images, and calls to action that are most compelling to your ideal clients.
Identify your most lucrative referral sources so you can optimize your marketing efforts
Leads can also be tied to their referral source, so you can see where your most lucrative clients come from and reinvest. Track changes over time and identify where referrals have dried up. For example, if your agency used to see a lot of long-term senior care clients referred by one gerontologist, but then referrals fall off, marketing automation can prompt you to look into the situation.
Ready to get your home care agency started with marketing automation?
Home Care Marketing Pros' CareFunnels program is designed to help your agency nurture leads and get the clients you need through unique and customizable automation. Find out more by watching our demo!
