SMS marketing for pharmacies: 5 ways pharmacies can use SMS

More and more pharmacies are becoming aware of the benefits of implementing a multi channel communication strategy to have better conversations with patients. In an era where digital communication is king, it becomes natural to add in their strategy SMS marketing for pharmacies. But how can pharmacies take advantage of the numerous benefits of SMS marketing?

What are the benefits of SMS marketing for pharmacies

SMS, with an astonishing 98% open rate, represents a great and inexpensive way to talk to patients. Moreover, 90% of consumers say personalised messages encourage them to take action. This is particularly important for pharmacies when they aim to encourage patients to follow a specific therapy.

Other advantages of SMS are:

• Being simple, with no distractions, limited characters, which results in short and direct messages
• Personalised to make patients feel unique
• SMS automation to send SMS at the right time to the right people
• Effective and inexpensive compared to emails, letters and phone calls.

How to implement a SMS marketing strategy for pharmacies

Before going into the ways that pharmacies can make use of SMS, it’s important to choose the right SMS service provider. Choosing a partner that knows the healthcare sector and has numerous customers in that industry, means partnering with someone that understands the challenges pharmacies are currently facing and their unique requirements.

How to boost patients engagement with SMS

Being able to reach patients with the right channel means saving time and money and also building a strong, long-lasting relationship with them. Let’s deep dive into some of the most common use cases of SMS for pharmacies.

1. Supplying repeat prescriptions

A massive amount of the prescriptions given by doctors are repeats, which can present a problem for pharmacists when backlogs of uncollected drugs build up. More boxes and bottles in storage means it is often difficult to locate the items patients require. Uncollected prescriptions can also often go to waste meaning more expense for healthcare providers.

Therefore, a better way of reminding patients to come and collect their prescriptions is needed and that’s where SMS can help.

SMS provides an automated, cost-effective, and highly engaging way to remind patients that their prescriptions are ready to collect. In theory, using this reminder method can also help promote a more careful approach to medication programme adherence, which in turn could benefit patients’ health.

Sending repeat prescriptions through automated SMS also means that:

• Patients can save time at the pharmacy by only picking up medications when they’re ready
• Patients will receive advanced notice of when they’re about to run out of medication

2. Vaccination reminders

As the strain on local practices continues to soar, it’s no longer uncommon to find yourself waiting days before getting an appointment to see a doctor. A recent NHS report stated that 71% of patients are unhappy because they could not get an appointment, while a further 14% complains some services are not available on the NHS. For 54% of patients, one of their biggest frustrations is being aware the NHS is understaffed and cannot cope with the patients’ requests (source).

As a result of this, powers to carry out simple procedures like administering vaccinations are being given to pharmacies to alleviate some of this pressure on doctors. SMS has proven effective in helping pharmacies to manage these vaccinations.

If pharmacies set up automatically triggered vaccination reminders, it removes the requirement for patients to make contact with their doctor, by using integrated links within the SMS to either book an appointment online or make an appointment over the phone with their local pharmacist. This also helps out local doctors’ practices, by freeing up more time to focus on more complex patient issues.

3. Pharmacy appointment reminders

A recent report by the NHS stated that the cost of NHS missed appointments has now reached £4.1 billions. This equated to more than 25 million appointments missed over the last 5 years.

As more and more services are being passed over to pharmacies (e.g. vaccination administration, and advice on treating minor health concerns and healthy living), it’s important that systems are being put into place now to stop pharmacies suffering the same problems as GPs. Again this is where SMS can help.

The way it works is simple. Pharmacies can either use an SMS provider’s online portal to manage their patients’ contact details, and subsequently send scheduled appointment reminder text, or employ an SMS provider’s API and integrate SMS functionality into their existing systems.

Where adopted, GPs sending SMS texts to remind patients of their appointment has been known to reduce missed appointments.

SMS can be used for:

• Send last minute changes to the appointment
• Send an initial booking confirmation with date and time of the appointment
• Send an SMS reminder to let patients enough time to cancel or reschedule if needed

4. Health education and promotional campaigns

SMS can be used by pharmacies to send important health information and promote a healthy lifestyle. For example they could provide:

• Recommendations on how to manage chronic conditions
• Tips on how to follow a more sustainable and healthy diet
• Updates on new medications or treatments
• Reminders about preventive screenings or vaccinations
• Support to new parents with specific tips on newborns

5. SMS marketing for pharmacies to promote products, discounts or events

On top of prescriptions, pharmacies sell numerous products such as supplements, beauty products, baby products, lotions and so on. For this type of products, pharmacies can send SMS marketing campaigns to promote any new product, send promotional messages with discounts and promote events.

More than SMS for pharmacies’ patient communications

RCS and SMS landing pages

The key to future engagement for pharmacies is providing the tools required for patients to self-serve. Actions which have traditionally required a physical interaction with an actual pharmacist (e.g. a manual call to make an appointment) can all be automated by using next-generation communication technologies.

Tools like RCS and SMS Landing Pages are able to do this in a secure, visual and convenient way, by targeting patients’ mobile devices.

RCS and SMS Landing Pages will allow pharmacies to perform the following actions:

• Booking and rearranging appointments automatically
• Add appointments to calendar
• Sending smart appointment reminders (i.e include images of healthcare professionals and practices)
• Inoculation reminders (i.e. link to existing appointment management systems)
• Send prescriptions
• Supply test results.

WhatsApp Business Platform for pharmacies

WhatsApp Business Platform can help pharmacies provide even better support to patients. With 2 billion active users worldwide and the app being opened 25 times a day, WhatsApp is quickly becoming one of the best channels for healthcare professionals to reach patients.

Being able to carry normal conversations with healthcare practices, like they were friends, makes WhatsApp Business the perfect channel to build strong and long-lasting relationships with patients. In fact, pharmacies can use this channel to send highly personalised messages and provide constant support. 

Moreover, patients are the centre of those conversations can their voice is finally heard loud and clear.

Interested to know more about how SMS can help pharmacies?

We’ve worked with a variety of different pharmacies and healthcare providers to provide more engaging ways to communicate with their patients.

To find out how SMS and our next generation communication channels can help your pharmacy contact our team on 0345 356 5758 / [email protected] for more information.