3 Ways To Engage Pharmacy Customers Without Irritating Them

With 2 little munchkins running around my house, hours can go by without me looking at my cellphone. And when I finally get a break and decide to re-engage with the more adult world, I don’t usually find text messages or missed calls. What I do find is a whole lot of junk email and a ton of social media notifications. Now I’m sure I’m not the only one who finds this irritating. In fact, as this article discusses, the notifications from Facebook alone are striking a nerve. 

Of course I get why some companies think that more communication is better. If people don’t seem to be hearing you, the obvious solution is to talk louder right? Wrong. That doesn’t even work with 3 year olds. Why would it work on anyone else? But if these traditional tactics aren’t going to get your customers to engage, what will? And how do you avoid crossing that line from engagement to irritation? 

The answer you’re looking for doesn’t have a quantity component. Not really.  It’s really about what you put out there, and how you do it.  Here are three tips to engage your customers without annoying them.  

Value – Don’t send something just to send something. It needs to mean something to the viewer and have value. Sending an email telling customers that supplements are on sale this week is probably low impact. Sending an email with some information about why supplements are an important part of health and wellness along with the fact that they are on sale is much more meaningful.  

Frequency – Sending massive amounts of information doesn’t work, but sending nothing doesn’t work either. You need to find a rhythm and frequency that works for you, (meaning you can maintain it), and your customer base.  It’s much more effective for a customer to look forward to a weekly email with great information than to be spammed on a daily basis. 

Diversity – Your customers won’t all engage with you in the same way. This means that email communication has to be tied in with posts on social media and your website also needs to be well curated. (And yes, I know that I just said that I get irritated by social media notifications, but remember that not everyone feels the same.) Check out this past article on using social media to your advantage. 

Now that you understand these three components and how to engage your customers in a more productive way, it’s time to bring it all together. Here’s where your pharmacy point-of-sale systems starts to play a big role. An integrated customer loyalty program is the first major step that any pharmacy looking to better engage their customer base should take. It gives you an avenue to know which customers want to engage and provides easy ways to offer promotions and rewards to your loyalty program members.  You can also use POS integrations to programs like SnapRx to help you maintain a schedule for posting to social media, sending email promotions and more.  If you’d like to learn more about these opportunities for your pharmacy, we’d love to chat with you.