Websites have come a long way from the days when they were a brochure for your practice and not much more. Today, with so many clients receiving care online, their interactions with you need to be smooth and easy from start to finish. The best place to accomplish this is through a website performing as your 24-hour client hub. You can run just about everything you need to manage your practice through your website, including secure contact and intake forms, appointment scheduling, and billing.
Today we’re looking at what you need in your website if it’s going to serve you as a true client hub.
This blog post was adapted from a recent webinar conducted by Hushmail and Hushmail partner Brighter Vision.
Once upon a time, a good website told potential clients who you were and if you provided the type of care they needed. It stopped there. Today, a good website goes much further and serves as a powerful lead generation tool working for you 24/7 to bring in new clients that are well suited to your practice.
A good website also gives your clients a place to go for everything they need to maintain their relationship with your practice. They can securely contact you for the first time, schedule their appointment, fill out their intake forms, and pay their bill. Because doing all of this is possible in one place, the transition from potential client to happy client is so smooth it’s barely noticeable.
Many therapists are tempted to go the do-it-yourself (DIY) route using website platforms like Squarespace. While it’s true that these platforms make it possible for anyone to create a visually appealing website, they don’t go far beyond that. There’s a lot more that goes into creating a website that delivers quality leads for your practice.
For one thing, you need strong calls to action (CTAs) in specific places on your site. These are the places that ask a client or potential client to do something (i.e., contact you, pay their bill, etc). When these CTAs are in the right places, clients will flow naturally from reading the content to selecting an action that furthers the relationship. This is where a website works so brilliantly to generate leads while you’re off the clock. Once clients have the information they need to make an informed decision, the next step is right there waiting for them.
For this reason, you’ll want your website to have plenty of great content tailored to your best-fit client, that person who will benefit the most from the unique care only you can provide. A client who is right for your practice should land on your website and, after reading about you and your services, feel as if they’ve discovered their therapy home. Once that connection has been made, taking the step to contact you through the strategically placed CTA is easy.
A CTA will often require a form that your client will fill out with the information you need to make that action happen. For example, a CTA to contact you will give your client a secure contact form. It’s important that it’s a secure form because communication with a potential client needs to be protected from the very start of the relationship.
Not all forms are secure. Someone putting up a DIY website might be tempted to use a standard form to collect this initial information. However, even the most basic information, such as name and email address, is considered to be protected health information (PHI) and needs to be secure according to HIPAA requirements.
It’s also beneficial to ask for more detailed information so you can determine if a client would benefit from your care. You can only ask your potential client to open up about their situation if you give them a safe place to submit information. That’s where a secure, HIPAA-compliant contact form comes in.
Your website should support all of the other applications you need to ensure your practice runs smoothly. This could be secure web forms that your clients can fill out online, a way to pay their bills, and a simple appointment scheduler so clients can select their date and time without ever picking up the phone. This is your client hub. Everything is easy to find right there on your website, making the transition from discovering your practice to meeting for their first appointment easy and stress-free.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is often overlooked when choosing a website. To put it simply, SEO matches up search terms potential clients are using to find you to what’s on your website. For example, if clients are searching for “therapist marriage with kids,” you want those terms to show up in various places on your website, both in your website content as well as the metadata. If you don’t know what metadata is, that’s no problem if you’re going with a website service that pays attention to SEO. Doing it on your own on a DIY platform can be tricky.
SEO is so important because it’s what gets you on the first search page. When you search for something online, do you find what you need on the first page that comes up, or do you click through to page two of the search results? Most people will scroll down a little on the first page and stop there. For that reason, you want your website to show up at the top of that first page of results for those searches that match what you offer as a therapist. SEO can make it happen.
Brighter Vision makes custom websites just for therapists that include SEO, help with content, and options for billing and scheduling. Hushmail provides encrypted email and secure, HIPAA-compliant web forms with the therapist in mind. It’s a partnership that’s extremely advantageous for our customers.
A Hushmail for Healthcare account provides you with an email account (or several, depending on your plan) and web form templates you can use immediately, or you can build your forms on your own using our drag-and-drop form builder.
When you combine a website from Brighter Vision with a Hushmail account, you get the best of both worlds. Here’s what you get when you take advantage of this partnership.
When you get a Hushmail account to go with your website, Brighter Vision takes care of your Hushmail account setup so your encrypted email and web forms are integrated seamlessly into your site. There are no hidden costs, and you get unlimited communication with the Brighter Vision team.
If you’re already a Brighter Vision customer, you can request HIPAA-compliant email and web forms by contacting them through your website dashboard, filling out Brighter Vision’s HIPAA Package In-take Form, or sending an email to Success@brightervision.com.
Or if you’re still getting around to launching your new website, click below to get started with Brighter Vision and be sure to request the HIPAA package to include secure email and web forms from Hushmail.
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Once upon a time, a good website told potential clients who you were and if you provided the type of care they needed. It stopped there. Today, a good website goes much further and serves as a powerful lead generation tool working for you 24/7 to bring in new clients that are well suited to your practice. Brighter Vision makes custom websites just for therapists that include SEO, help with content, and options for billing and scheduling. Hushmail provides encrypted email and secure, HIPAA-compliant web forms with the therapist in mind. It’s a partnership that’s extremely advantageous to our customers. Related posts: |