The average healthcare business invests up to $10,000 to create a website,1 not including the cost of routine monitoring, maintenance, and updates. Ideally, your website is the equivalent of a big, shiny brochure, successfully beckoning new clients to your door.
Given that over 60% of people look for healthcare,2 including addiction treatment, online, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a new client (or their loved one) who hasn’t checked out your website before coming to you for treatment. With so many patients beginning their journey online you can’t afford to have a website that only just meets expectations – you need a website that exceeds them.
Average conversion is about 2%, which means 1 out of every 50 users who visit your website will make an appointment.3 So where does your behavioral health website conversion rate stand? Whether you know the answer to this question or not, conversions can always be improved.
Find Out What’s Not Working
There are weak spots on every website, but few addiction treatment marketers know what theirs are. Your site certainly isn’t converting 100% of visitors, so you need to ask: where are you losing them?
This question is easily answered with a heatmap. A heatmap allows you to see where on your website people are clicking, the sequence of their clicks, and, ultimately, at what point they’re leaving your site. The goal is to identify trends in the user journey and make adjustments to prevent potential clients from disappearing from your website before you capture their information or before they take action on your site.
Go Faster
One thing that stops users from staying on your site is the load time. Did you know that if your website takes longer than two seconds to load, more than half of your visitors will leave?4 It’s true. Not only do people want your site to load quickly, they expect it to do so. Fail to deliver on that expectation, and you risk losing an opportunity to gain a client.
Every second counts. Getting to two seconds or less is the goal; if your website just can’t go that fast yet, keep working to improv your load speed. But just remember that with extra every second of load time, you can expect to lose an additional 7% of site visitors.5
Add a Pop-Up
Pop-up messages are an excellent method of encouraging conversion. Of course, pop-ups will look a little different for addiction treatment than for an e-commerce website. But your pop-up can say something like: “Click here to talk to an addiction treatment specialist now.”
Pop-ups really work! Pop-ups convert 3% of the time, although it’s not unheard of to see a 9 to 10% conversion when combined with compelling copy and great design.6
Offer 24-Hour Chat
In the last several years, online chat has emerged as an essential communications tool for every website. Users now prefer chat over all other forms of communication. And chat has an 83% customer satisfaction rating.7
Online chat also has powerful conversion power. Forty percent of chat users8 are highly likely to convert after having used a website’s chat feature. In the case of addiction treatment centers, this is yet another opportunity for you to break down walls, build trust, and encourage patients and their families on their road to recovery.
Include Testimonials
We cannot understate the value of quality testimonials, especially for addiction treatment centers. The visitors to your website are in the midst of a highly emotional and painful journey. Seeking addiction treatment is regrettably stigmatized, and as a result, only 10% of the people who need treatment receive it.9 Adding first-hand accounts of successful treatment can be the deciding factor for a user or their loved one to seek treatment at your facility.
Forty-six percent of people say they’d avoid an addiction treatment center that doesn’t show any testimonials about their treatment services.10 And potential clients or their advocates who interact with reviews on your site are 58% more likely to seek treatment with you.11
Conduct A/B Tests
Conducting A/B tests is one of the best ways to gather the data you need to determine how to better convert leads. For example, if you have two strong headline options for a landing page but aren’t sure which to use, you can install A/B software to randomly direct half of the users to version A and the other half to version B. The tool will quickly reveal which headline converts better.
Headlines are valuable to test because eight out of ten people read headlines12 and nothing more. So, in most cases, the headline is your only chance to capture a user’s attention and persuade them to stay on your site. But that doesn’t mean you can’t A/B test other aspects of your website. You can A/B test everything from images to videos and even different versions of blog articles.
Don’t have the time to stay on the cutting edge of digital conversion tactics? Dreamscape can help. Contact us today at 888.307.7304 to learn more.
For a list of references, please contact us.