This is most likely to irk some healthcare marketers, but if it does, consider yourself lucky, because it means that you are on the right path.

Missing the easiest balls can waste tremendous opportunities for glory. Don’t let missed calls to action do this to your hospital’s marketing efforts.

But first take a look at the list below. If you are missing these opportunities to extend a call to action to your audience, it means that you are at least performing the essential actionables that create the opportunities. If you aren’t…well, let this serve as a list of some of the activities for which you should immediately start pursuing!

Blogs

If you are regularly writing a blog for your hospital, good for you. If you are getting a solid base of engaged readers that share your blogs (e.g., RSS, Twitter, social bookmarking) and comment on them, even better.

However, if you blogs aren’t regularly extending an explicit call to action that encourage a visitor to click a link to your Website or subscribe to a newsletter or any other type of action, you are overlooking some of the most prized members of your online community: active ones that are trying to interact with you!

Subscription Confirmations

This one might seem ironic. After all, if somebody subscribes to a newsletter or another feature of your Website, doesn’t that mean they’ve already converted on a call to action? Yes. But why stop there?

When that subscriber completes the subscription process and is then directed to a confirmation page or sent a confirmation e-mail (or both), ending the conversion process is another tragically missed opportunity to continue engaging with clearly active Web user. Keep going by encouraging this person to not consider the confirmation the end of a process, but the beginning of another.

Subscription Cancellations

After all of the work it took to get a subscriber, it’s always a shame to lose them when they unsubscribe. However, just because they unsubscribe to one of your Website’s features doesn’t mean that you are fully divorcing yourself from that person.

Similar to a subscription confirmation, use the cancellation confirmation page or e-mail to extend a new opportunity to keep the user engaged with your content.

E-mail Signatures

Every person to whom you or anybody at your hospital sends an e-mail has the potential to join your ever-expanding roster of social media and blog followers.

Adding something even as simple as “Follow Us” or “Join Us Online” with links to your blog and key social media accounts

Offline Marketing

This is perhaps one of our favorite examples. Although print and other traditional “offline” media have taken a backseat to online marketing tactics, it doesn’t mean that there can’t be some overlap. On the contrary, the more overlap—or integration and interaction—the better.

For instance, if you run a print ad, don’t just stick your hospital’s URL at the bottom of the page. Instead, try to connect your ad’s message to your Website’s functionality. An example: Instead of touting your hospital’s awesome doctors, invite the reader to use your Website’s physician directory to find a physician and then make an online appointment.

Speaking of calls to action, why not take a moment to visit our Website to subscribe to our monthly e-newsletter?

AVID Design is an award-winning interactive healthcare marketing consultant.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 11:07 am and is filed under Blogs + Blogging, Marketing, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.