Home care companies do best to retain their current clients
You’ve heard of “Love Potion No. 9,” right?
Those of us in the home care industry fall prey to the same impulse as any other business: we chase after the shiny new object.
Yes, that new internet idea or flashy advertising method has a magical appeal that takes hold of us like a love potion.
In Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, a mischievous fairy drops a magic potion into the eyes of a woman named Titania. This potion causes her to fall in love with the first person she sees when she awakes.
Another fairy plays a trick on a man named Bottom, transforming his head into that of a donkey. When Titania awakes, the first person she sees is the man with the donkey head. She falls madly in love with him.
The thought that finding a huge rush of new clients, and lots of new revenue, is like a potion that turns our heads away from reason. In fact, business experts have always reminded us that our current clients are the best source of ongoing and growing revenue.
The Harvard Business Review says that, depending on which industry you are in,
“Acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. It makes sense: you don’t have to spend time and resources going out and finding a new client — you just have to keep the one you have happy.”
#1 Tip: Ascending your home care clients
In his book, No B.S. Guide to Maximum Referrals & Customer Retention, direct marketing expert Dan Kennedy says,
“The best retention is ascension. When you figure out how to structure your business with ‘membership concept’ and then levels, so customers move from one level upward to the next, and then to the next, you will have constructed a way to automatically improve retention.”
Home care clients can be reminded and encouraged to increase their involvement with you in various ways. One obvious way is for them to increase the number of hours your home care worker comes to their home. As your clients get older and more feeble, they will need to advance from, say, ten hours a week to twenty. They need more personal care, help with washing dishes, more physical therapy and so on.
Remind them of the availability of such services through email and printed newsletters.
#2: A printed newsletter
One home care agency owner whom we know sends out a monthly printed newsletter through the mail. He emphasizes that personal stories in the newsletter make it very homey and form a bond with his clients. “People mention that they enjoyed the newsletter and reading about my family’s vacation,” he recalled.
Email newsletters are important, but the baby boomer and older crowd seem to pay special attention to newsletters sent through the postal service. Those adult children who make the decisions about their aging parents grew up on printed media, and often trust it more. When it comes in the mail, it’s something tangible. Unlike email, it can sit on the kitchen table, and can be easily passed along to other family members.
If you like to see an example of such a newsletter, take a peek at our own TreeFrogClick newsletter, Marketing Mission. You’ll see that it has several personal stories of mine.
If you’d like to improve your home care client retention program, let’s talk about setting up such a newsletter. Call me at the number at the top of this page, or contact me.
If you liked this article, why not read the related article, “What’s the best marketing method for home care agencies?”
