The Fertility Website Rip Off: 6 Tips to Protect Doctors

By Shaina Vojtko and Griffin Jones

Let’s just hope fertility doctors aren’t paying attention

Most fertility practice owners redesigned or built a new website in the last decade, and they might be getting hosed.

The website development-marketing problem isn’t unique to fertility doctors. If you’re the executive of a fertility company or any business for that matter, these tips are equally relevant to you. There’s just an established category of marketing companies that takes advantage of physicians and some of them have concentrations of fertility doctors.

The problem: paying for website maintenance with a big marketing markup

Your new website project is finally complete and search engines are starting to reap the fruits of your labor.

Now, regular updates and maintenance are crucial to keeping your site running at full capacity. In most cases, the first touchpoint a prospective fertility patient has with their provider is their website.

Security is the primary reason that website maintenance is so important. When you don’t make website maintenance a priority, it’s easy for hackers to find vulnerabilities. With a few clicks, they can easily target an outdated site.

As a marketing tool, your website was designed to provide information and turn visitors into new fertility patient inquiries. An up-to-date site and content management system (CMS) demonstrates credibility and communicates that it is safe for visitors to submit their information to you.

And because security and maintenance are such a need, some marketing companies take advantage. They bundle in low return marketing services and mark up what should be a low cost expense.

We’re not talking about small firms with good hearts that struggle with keeping the mission (scope) from drifting, while not being so rigid that they fail to help the client when they could meaningfully do so. That’s a natural tension that all client services firms face.

No, we’re talking about large medical marketing agencies whose business model is undeserving doctors by scaling their overpriced packages, including arbitrary blog and social posts, or ambiguous ongoing Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Make investments, pay expenses, and know which is which.

Remember a $10,000 expense that generates nothing is more expensive than a $2 million investment that generates $5 million. Return is more important than cost, though the higher cost the bigger the problem if there’s no return.

The best way to keep your fertility company’s website updated and protected from hackers, while not overpaying for it, is to have a website maintenance package that is separate from hosting and from your marketing investment.

Here are six tips to help you:

1. Your marketing agency can hire a developer, but don’t hire a development agency to do your marketing

Digital marketing agencies and website development agencies were usually one in the same in the early days of the internet. Because each has become so specialized, it’s far more effective for them to partner than to try to do it all.

Fertility Bridge, for example, has done, and will do, plenty of website builds and redesigns…but we are not a dev firm.

For the convenience of our clients and for the continuity of branding and messaging, we have preferred developers on our contract team with whom we’ve partnered on many successful fertility websites. We can use them and include the cost of development in a one time project. Or we can use the client’s developer while we provide project management and design.

2. Quote maintenance separate from build

Ask for the cost of ongoing website maintenance, including security and routine updates to be quoted separately from the site build.

You may need continuous improvement in marketing and business development but keep those separate from the maintenance of a new site. Again using Fertility Bridge as an example, after we redesign or build a new website, the minimal maintenance agreement is between the developer and the client, completely untethered from the client’s engagement with us.

3. Budget for both website hosting and website maintenance

While both have associated costs, web hosting and web maintenance are two separate functions. Both are necessary for the health and existence of your website. The main purpose of web hosting is to get your website live on the internet so people can access it.

4. Keep the hosting cost the smallest

When budgeting annually for maintenance fees, don’t forget to budget for hosting costs, too. You can expect to pay anywhere from $25-75 per month for hosting with an annual contract from WP Engine.

In order to keep your website online, you’ll need a reliable web host. While there are plenty of options for hosting providers, make sure to pick one that is designed for speed. A fast loading website is key to a strong user experience and good Google rankings. We recommend WP Engine or DreamHost but strongly encourage you to take the advice of your developer as they are well versed in the specific needs of your website.

5. Use this checklist to select a good maintenance plan

A good maintenance plan covers security but should also take into consideration routine content updates and changes to website pages.

• WordPress Core Updates

• Theme and Plugin Updates

• Security, Uptime Monitoring, and Hack Clean-up

• Regular Back-ups

• Access to Support Resources

• Content Management*

• Performance Optimizations

While package costs can vary significantly based on the level of customization and care needed to handle your individual site, it is reasonable and typical to see costs that range from $500 annually for lean updates to $5,000 or more annually for robust updates.

6. *Have someone on your team that can update content

Minor content updates are a tension point between fertility companies and their agencies. Minor updates are those like

• Adding office hours for satellite office on location page

• Removing staff member from about us page

• Changing PGD to PGT-M on old blog post

• Deleting Zika pregnancy warning from home page

Sporadic requests like these are not a good use of the developer’s time to receive, nor yours to send.

You don’t need an employee to create major pieces of content, a marketing agency can do that. You need someone inside your organization who can make content updates to your website. If you’re a giant fertility company you may have a whole team, but even a small REI practice needs at least one person who can access your website’s CMS.

*Being able to make content updates is not the same as having the relevant skills to properly maintain a website. If your team member causes an error while updating a page, you need to have someone retained that can fix it.

INVEST FOR RETURN, KEEP FEES SEPARATE

Sometimes fertility companies have to invest a lot in marketing, but it should be for the return of future value. Don’t buy services you don’t need because they’re bundled with something you do need. Keep website maintenance separate from build, hosting, and marketing. Train someone in your organization to make minor updates to your website. Follow these six tips instead.

If you think your fertility website is preventing you from reaching your business goals, consider Fertility Bridge’s strategic guidance to determine how it plays into a greater market or brand strategy.

Start your business assessment with our Goal and Competitive Diagnostic for just $597 here.

Good and Bad First Impressions: 6 Pillars of a New Fertility Patient Concierge Team

By Kathy Houser and Griffin Jones

“You only get one chance to make a first impression”

Think about how important it is to a fertility practice. You can invest everything you want in branding, advertising, and a nice building. But if your prospective patient's first interaction with your team betrays that first impression, the result may be even worse.

First impressions not only get people in the door, they set the expectations for the process in which fertility patients need to trust you all but implicitly. In order for the first points of contact with your clinic to be the gold standard of concierge service, their goals must be aligned with those of the practice and the patient.

That’s why we’re using the broad term of New Fertility Patient Concierge Team instead of separate terms like call center, digital chat team, or new patient navigators.

In other resources, we’ll talk about the structures of those roles, but in this article, we’re giving you the six pillars for aligning this team with the measured growth and improvement of your IVF center.

They are

1. Practice Goals

2. Team Outcomes

3. Team Profile

4. Education/Coaching

5. Recognition/Evaluation

6. Incentives

1. PRACTICE GOALS:

New patient concierges aren’t just people that answer your phone. They positively or negatively impact at least four major business goals of any fertility center.

1. Patient satisfaction

2. New patient visits

3. Specific provider volume increase

4. Targeted region/office volume increase
   

When the roles aren’t aligned with specific practice business goals, the systems for how they are evaluated, incentivized, and hired become expensive and counterproductive.

2. TEAM OUTCOMES

The New Patient Concierge Team doesn’t have total control over the business goals, but you can measure their impact by these key performance indicators (KPI):

1. New patient appointments scheduled

   • Total

   • By team member

   • Relative to goal

   • Year over year

   • Month over month

2. Conversion to appointment

3. Cancellations rescheduled

3. TEAM PROFILE

To put the right person in a concierge seat, we are looking for someone who is lower (but not too low) in competitive drive and high in empathy and compassion. They take pride in being a resource.

To find the right candidate who does not mind repetitive actions and thrives on helping others

1. Use a personality assessment

Such as The Caliper Profile. For empathy, this test screens for “a combination of traits that can help you see how well a person reads a room” and “Are they flexible or rigid?” That’s extremely insightful when hiring someone who has to be responsive to customers or in our case, patients. Once an applicant or employee takes the Caliper Profile their results are measured against one or more validated job models. For this role, the candidate needs to score high in critical competencies such as “relationship building” and “composure and resilience”.

In Meyer Briggs for example, the perfect fit might be a Discoverer Advocate. The obligatory disclaimer on personality tests: They are a useful tool for seeing how likely someone is to be a good fit for their seat. One’s tested personality type does not universally qualify or disqualify them from a role.

2. Promote the mission

Promote the sense of pride of providing people struggling with infertility with hope.The life changing and highly personal service they provide is a motivator, for the right people in these seats.

3. Pay above customer service industry average

The cost of living index varies across markets, but the range for a concierge customer service person is between $20-$27 per hour.

If the range seems higher than what you would pay for someone who isn’t exceptionally money-motivated, consider two things. The first is the rate of inflation and the increase of resignations and wage expectations in 2022. The Great Resignation is occurring amid rising inflation, and as employers face the tightest labor market in recent history. The latest inflation reading from the Consumer Price Index (published 12/10/21) came in at 6.8%, the highest year-over-year increase since 1982.

The second is the outcomes for which these personnel are responsible for achieving. When their alignment with growth in business goals is measured by the aforementioned KPIs, they’re clearly worth the investment. We will further detail how to outline their incentives with the goals of the fertility practice.

4. EDUCATION/COACHING:

Your call center and new patient navigators must be experts in particular topics about the clinic and infertility. There can be no concierge level service without mastery of the material.

There are at least twelve elements in the syllabus that every call center and new patient concierge must know cold. If you’d like Fertility Bridge’s curriculum for new patient concierges, we provide full guidance for this in our Lead Conversion System.

Lastly, in the bucket of education and coaching, if you find that a particular team member is not performing to the level of the others, it is necessary to “coach up” or move them out of that role, as a negative attitude or lack of skill set frustrates and demotivates the rest.

5. RECOGNITION:

Methods of recognition create an atmosphere of team and individual accomplishment. They reinforce that all team members are striving for the same goals and success.

It is important to systemize recognition above other incentives to support the natural personality motivators of the concierge team.

Here are four ways of motivating your concierge team using their own internal drivers:

1. Tally Board

2. Practice-wide email

3. Thank You Board

   • In which anyone can post a thank you to anyone else in the office.

   • Where staff and potentially patients can see it. Keeping it in staff only areas such as the kitchen won’t allow patients to appreciate your amazing culture of internal support.

4. Patient Compliment Repository

   From social media, online reviews, patient satisfaction surveys

6. INCENTIVES:

You’ve intentionally selected people who are motivated by helping others and you’ve established a system of recognition to ensure they perceive that benefit of the job.

Because the tasks of an ongoing new patient welcome team are on-going, every day, endeavors, we have to be careful about additional incentives. We don’t want to book new patient visits at all costs. Hiring someone who is too high on competitive drive and gearing their compensation plan too much toward booked appointments is a recipe for pressuring new patients. We don’t want that.

We do want to help people who are struggling to build their family to be able to get expertise from a fertility specialist.

Using incentives for reaching goals should be limited and attainable, otherwise, you will do more harm than good.The incentives should:

1. Connect to one of the desired outcomes whether it’s for the team or an individual

2. Review and recognize weekly

3. Reward monthly or quarterly

4. Reference core values

Rewards for Achieving Goals

• Gift cards

• Customized gift baskets

• Event tickets

• Team lunch

• Use of desirable parking spot for a week if employees are on site

Align Your New Patient Concierges’ Goals with Those of Practice and Patients

The folks you hire to answer your phones are so much more than just that. They are the first point of contact for potential patients, they set the tone and convey confidence and knowledge from the first interaction. Employ the six pillars to set your concierge team up for success. Use personality assessment tools, hire well, train and invest in the people who greet and attend to callers into your practice and you will see the benefits over and over again.

Fertility Bridge has a proven system and dedicated staff for improving and empowering new fertility patient concierge teams. If you’d like our help, enroll in the Goal Diagnostic here and we will be happy to discuss the framework with you.

Brand vs Reputation: 4 Competitive Disadvantages for Fertility Business Owners

By Griffin Jones

“Our reputation speaks for itself,”

Does it?

Young, massively funded companies are entering the reproductive health space and developing widely recognizable brands to a population that had been generally unfamiliar with the field.

Established fertility companies often attempt to counter these branding advantages with their reputation. 

Reputation is extremely valuable for all of us business owners in the reproductive health space, but especially for fertility specialists. Even when process complaints and negative outcomes make an REI’s rating less than five stars, you still have a proud reputation. You’ve dedicated your career--one which very few other people can do--to help people have families. Your reputation deserves respect.

Still, reproductive health companies that make little distinction between brand and reputation are at a competitive disadvantage.

Brand and reputation overlap. They can work with or against each other. But they are not the same.

In the absence of the intentional formula ‘reputation plus brand’, a fertility business suffers from the default equations of ‘reputation minus brand’ or ‘brand minus reputation’.

“Brand is about relevance and differentiation. Reputation is about legitimacy” 

“A strong brand helps communicate that the company and its offerings are relevant and uniquely able to meet customer needs. A solid reputation is desirable because all businesses ultimately depend (either directly or indirectly) on the goodwill of the governments and communities in which they operate”. From 'Don’t Confuse Reputation With Brand' by Richard Ettenson and Jonathan Knowles

In the case of your fertility practice or reproductive health company, your reputation amounts to what is said about you by these five groups

1. Patients/clients

2. Peers

3. Employees

4. People you do business with

5. Media
   

Patients

On social media, on online review sites like Google and FertilityIQ, in patient support groups like RESOLVE and Fertility Matters. Through patient satisfaction feedback platforms like Press Gainey or Net Promoter Score.

Peers

If you are a physician this includes colleagues in the field, but also includes aspiring providers, referring providers, and competitors. At ASRM and other conferences. In private conversation

Employees: 

On LinkedIn and sites like Glassdoor. At networking events and your own office.

People you do business with: Your vendors, expert advisors. How you treat them and pay them gets around, too.

Media: 

The coverage that you do or don’t have from reporting outlets.

Reputation isn’t always fair. It is what it is. It doesn’t matter if one negative story in the press is a stain on your search results. It doesn’t matter if competitors drag your name through the mud, if a few former employees have an ax to grind, or if some former IVF patients take a negative outcome out on you. A sterling reputation is hard to come by.

A strong reputation is not necessarily equatable to a strong brand, either. And vise versa.

BRAND IS WHAT YOU SHOW OF YOURSELF

While reputation is what your five constituencies perceive and say about you, brand is what you give them to recognize you and associate with you (or not). Reputation is sometimes reactive. Brand is meant to be proactive.

Brand does at least four things that reputation does not do. It 

1. Multiplies 

2. Differentiates

3. Expresses, and

4. Promises
   

1. Multiplies
   The simplest definition of brand is simply, a mark. No; logos, slogans, taglines, and ambassadors are not in and of themselves, a brand. Nowhere close. Still, these symbols allow companies to scale their message and perception to a magnitude and readiness that reputation cannot.
   “Brand functions as a multiplier” -Mark Di Somma, Brand Strategy Insider.
   

2. Differentiates
   The purest form of differentiation is recognition. A successful brand allows each of the aforementioned groups  to recognize an organization’s position and differentiate it from its competitors instantly. An artisan coffee shop may have a wonderful reputation, but you recall Starbucks’ mocha lattes, the way they name the sizes of their drinks, and how they write your name on the cup just by seeing their logo.
   

3. Expresses
   We’ve chosen to split the concept of brand identification into the two concepts of differentiation and expression because differentiation allows consumers to identify you out of a crowd, while expression allows them to use you as part of how they identify themselves.
   
   There is an abundance of research, including this study from Elsevier, that shows how “consumers seek new ways in which they can express their personal identity through brands”. The more our field serves and works with newer generations, the more they use brands to express themselves. 
   
   “The core of Gen Z is the idea of manifesting individual identity. Consumption therefore becomes a means of self-expression.” - (From McKinsey & Company,  ‘True Gen’: Generation Z and its implications for companies’  byTracy Francis and Fernanda Hoefel
   

4. Promises
   Reputation is the judgment of your promise. Brand is the promise. Patients and clients set their own expectations in the absence, and sometimes in spite, of a clear promise. The more strongly your brand reinforces your promise, the more you are able to impact the measure by which you are judged.

REPUTATION PLUS BRAND

When fertility companies fail to distinguish the difference between brand and reputation, they are at a competitive disadvantage because of how reputation and brand bolster or undermine one another. 

Reputation and brand overlap because they are both born of positioning and culture, but they are not equally synonymous.

In the absence of the intentional formula ‘reputation plus brand’, fertility business owners are left with the results of ‘reputation minus brand’ or ‘brand minus reputation’.

Consider the four advantages that a robust brand is meant to secure for your company. The last two, expression and promise, are particular vulnerabilities for reproductive health companies.

If you would like to further explore the brand and reputation potential of your fertility business, we address that in our Goal and Competitive Diagnostic.

Don't Lose New Fertility Patients Before the First Visit: 9 Steps of IVF Center Lead Conversion

By Griffin Jones and Stephanie Linder

“Marketing throws the ball, but the practice has to catch it,”--Rita Gruber.

Digital marketing and physician referrals lead prospective fertility patients to contact you. Then what?

They move into the second phase of the Fertility Patient Marketing Journey, Leads (New Patient Inquiries) to Initial Consult. And just because prospective patients have submitted a web form or called the clinic, doesn’t mean they actually book. Let’s look at how to fix that.

You may use the term new patient inquiry instead of lead. They are the same thing. A lead is any phone call, web form, fax or chat requesting a new appointment or seeking information prior to scheduling. 

The way in which your staff responds to the first prospective patient interaction, determines the conversion to initial consultation.  If you don’t have the right processes and properly trained people, you lose new patients before they even schedule. 

And the point isn’t just to get them in the door, either.

Positive and negative patient experiences start at the first point of contact - often a phone call or the response to a web form/chat.  Expectations and rapport are built and broken from the very beginning. 

Fertility Bridge estimates that as many as 20% of negative fertility center reviews come from people who haven't yet had a consult. Patient dissatisfaction is often a result of unmet expectations that weren’t set early in the process.

MEASURING CONVERSION % FROM FERTILITY PATIENT INQUIRY TO INITIAL CONSULTATION

Two key performance indicators (KPI) measure how well your fertility center converts leads.

1)  Total # New Patient Appointment

2). Lead conversion % 

Lead Conversion % = New Patient Appointment / Total Leads 

One individual must be accountable for these KPIs.

The Lead Conversion System 

At least 50% of your leads should be converted to appointments.  If it’s less than 50%, you must analyze and revise your system immediately.  This is the system to increase that percentage. 

1. Dedicate a new patient line

2. Have a specialized new patient scheduling team

3. Unify scheduling across offices and providers

4. Answer the Phone

5. Offer the appointment 

6. Book shortest wait list 

7. Respond to voicemails and web forms within specified time 

8. Record Lead Interaction

9. Clearly identify next steps 

1) Dedicate New Patient Line and Form

Current fertility patients and prospective fertility patients have different needs. Having a phone line and an online request appointment form that separates new patient inquiries from current patient call backs allows your staff to better manage both patient types. 

2) Specialized New Patient Scheduling Team

Multi-tasking is detrimental to both lead conversion and patient satisfaction. It can cause frustration when a front desk person has to schedule a new patient call, fetch a medical record, and check in a consult simultaneously.

A dedicated role or team also decreases voicemails, unanswered phone calls and hangups. It reduces the time required for your staff to play phone tag and increases new appointments booked.

3) Unify Scheduling across offices and providers

When prospective patients have to be transferred from (or worse, hang up and call) one office to another, they often do call…another fertility center.  Your new patient call center is responsible for booking every office equally based on availability without preference to an assigned office or doctor.   

4) Answer The Phone

Missed calls are a great source of new patient appointments...for another fertility center. They are also as good for your patient’s experience as your cable company’s phone tree is for you.  Make a plan to hire the adequate number of staff and use data to ensure coverage during the busiest days/hours. 

5) Offer the appointment 

When prospective patients call with questions, most staff members answer the question at face value and go no further.  In order to increase conversion, mandate your staff “ask for the appointment” at least once with every prospective patient, regardless of the question being asked. Consistently offering and asking for the appointment makes an immediate impact on your KPIs, costs $0, and is a process that can be implemented today.  

6) Book Shortest Waitlist 

The longer the wait, the higher the risk of lost appointments, cancellations, and no-shows.

In a multi-physician group, when your waitlist is longer than 4 weeks it is the role of the call center to suggest a doctor with a shorter waitlist. 

Your call center won’t offer earlier slots with a different physician than requested without your blessing. Some docs cringe at this idea. Make sure your staff knows it’s OK and that the most important part is that the patient stay in your clinic ecosystem.  Do you want to be a single provider or do you want to be a practice owner? 

7) Respond to all voicemails and digital inquiries

Avoid being nailed by a negative review that comes from people who’ve never even seen you for a consultation.  Set specific expectations of call back time on your online contact forms’ thank you pages and voicemail. The sooner you respond the better, but you must be able to exceed the expectation. It’s far better for their perception of you to say “you will hear back from us in 72 hours” and get back to them in 48 than to say “you will hear back from us in 24 hours” and get back to them in 36.

You should always follow up more than once, but the cadence of lead nurturing is a topic for another article.

8) Record Lead Interaction

Document your interactions in a customer relationship management software (CRM). Using this data will help you identify drop off, automate follow up, and nurture prospective patients with helpful information.

9) Clearly Identify Next Steps

Before ending the interaction, your new patient team should set three clear expectations about what happens between now and the appointment:

• Welcome Sequence Correspondence

• Medical records and patient portal

• Appt time, correct patient info and acknowledgment of next steps 

CONVERT MORE INQUIRIES TO NEW PATIENTS

We’ve given you an actionable process for converting new fertility patient inquiries to new consultations, but we didn’t talk much about what your team needs to deliver concierge service. How your team responds to these patients is likely even more important than when they do it. 

If you would like Fertility Bridge’s help in improving your fertility center’s lead to new appointment percentage, or how to implement the steps listed above - book a Goal and Competitive Diagnostic meeting below.