With future residents and customers at a premium, it is crucial that the first impression these people get is top notch and engaging.  As an executive director, marketing director or business owner, I encourage you to review all of your first impression points and make sure they are positively portraying your community or business:

Phone Impression:  Make sure calls are answered in a timely manner by a cheerful, knowledgeable individual who can answer those important initial questions and transfer the person to the correct contact, if needed.   When transferring, do everything possible to get the person on the line and if not, make sure you have established procedures to ensure that the person seeking information hears back from you in a timely manner, same day if at all possible or when requested.  How do you handle after hours calls?  Make sure this is covered.

Drive-up appeal:  When a potential resident and their family approach your community, what do they see?  Is your landscaping up to date and appealing?   Is your signage clear and well-maintained?   Is the exterior paint faded or cracking?  Make sure there is drive-up appeal.  Every couple weeks, look at the front of your community from a potential residents’ eye.

Lobby/Reception area:  Are the important aspects of the community/business represented?   Is a warm knowledgeable greeting given to each visitor.  Are signs of community portrayed?  Activity calendars?  There should be a plan for greeting all potential residents/customers and the initial feeling should be one of hospitality and importance, making them feel special.

Print ads:  What is the core of your community or business?  Make sure it is represented in all advertising.  Observe others’ advertising and themes.   Correlate your materials with what people are telling you is important to them.  Don’t overdo it, convey your  2-3 central points and leave them fresh on the person’s mind.

Online Presence:  Are the colors clean, warm and inviting.  Is it easy to navigate your site.  Are the images that greet the user sending your message, the first and main thing you want the person to know about you?  Is all the information contained in an organized, logical manner.  Are all questions answered or do you need a frequently asked questions page?  Images should compliment text, without big, long paragraphs of copy.  Information request forms should be thorough, but not overwhelming.  Make sure you can be found on search engines!  (If you would like a complimentary web site analysis, please contact New LifeStyles)

There are many points of entry for the potential resident or customer.  Make sure you review these on a regular basis and are confident that they are giving the right first impression.  If not, you may not get a 2^nd chance!  

Cheers, df

New LifeStyles has partnered with FastTrackLeads.com to offer a lead tracking system to it’s advertisers.

We at New LifeStyles feel it’s important that our clients track the results of their advertising. What are they getting from each ad? Are the leads turning into clients/residents? We found that many clients were not tracking their ROI, so we found a system specifically built for this industry and are now offering it to our clients at a discount.

To view the product and request a demo, click here

March 18th, 2010-Press Release New LifeStyles and LTCAdmissionsCoach.com form an alliance to promote FastTracLeads.com an industry leader for referral system management software.

 LTCAdmissionsCoach.com and New LifeStyles an online senior care resource guide and advertising company have formed an alliance to promote effective advertising and to capture an ROI on advertising efforts by tracking marketing results and outcomes for senior care companies.

FastTracLeads.com is a subsidiary of LTCAdmissionsCoach.com a online census development training corporation in the USA and now being offered in Canada for senior care companies.

Andrea Zabinski, President of LTCAdmissionsCoach.com and FastTracLeads.com says “We are very excited to join New LIfeStyles with our newly formed alliance agreement by promoting the importance of tracking and capturing a ROI with our web-based Referral Management System called FastTracLeads.com.  FastTracLeads.com is the fastest growing RMS in the country and holds several alliance agreements with companies that understand the need for tracking and maintaining data on referrals, contacts, referral sources and marketing activities and is the leading provider of customized RMS software needs in senior care to include skilled nursing, assisted living, home health, home care and hospice.”  

If you are looking for a RMS or want to investigate further, find us at www.LTCAdmissionsCoach.com or NewLifeStyles.com on their banner ad in the Clients area for more information!

Optimizing census in all long term care settings these days is not easy—it’s a highly competitive market that requires efficient management of referral sources and lead generation. That is why some marketing professionals are turning to a referral management system (RMS) to collect, automate, and streamline these processes.  While the technology is relatively new to long term care, the concept is not: manage and support the sales and marketing efforts in the most efficient manner in order to optimize census. In essence, an RMS can track a facility’s full marketing process by collecting and managing all manner of data necessary for targeted marketing efforts and census optimization. In addition to eliminating the need for Excel spreadsheets, an RMS enables information about referral sources and contact interaction to be entered, stored, and accessed by employees no matter what department they work in. The features of an RMS can include the generation of trending reports; a calendar for marketing events, such as meetings, in-services, and follow-up calls to referral sources and contacts; and the measurement of productivity, close ratios, conversion rates, and return on investment.

Customization Key

American Senior Communities (ASC), an Indianapolis-based skilled nursing provider with 46 facilities, is in the process of moving to a full RMS system this year. According to Sherri Davies, ASC marketing manager, an RMS system was necessary for her business because “business intelligence comes from getting into the details, and we can only do this by tracking a wide variety of information.”  Davies notes that a key feature of the system they selected was the ability to customize fields as the company grows. “Some of the information we track isn’t typical, and, thus, the system we have chosen caters to additions and changes to fit our company’s needs,” she says.  Another selling point for Davies was the system’s ability to customize reports. “The RMS report feature allows us to slice and dice the data in the way we need it. In an Excel program, we can only roll up the data with prewritten formulas,” she says.

Sales, Marketing Management

With an RMS, sales performance is more easily measured because it tracks movement through the pipeline—including closing referral sources and potential clients or patients. For example, all referral activities and sources, reasons for declines, acceptance rates, and other admissions and intake data can be input and tracked by an RMS. The system is also designed to evaluate the quality of referral sources and contacts, including payer types such as Medicare, Medicaid, and private pay. An RMS can also measure a company’s stance in the marketplace by producing data on the number of referrals lost to competitors and the number of referrals that are clinically qualified to match the services of the facility.  It should also give users a way to determine where a company’s marketing efforts stand in comparison to competitors.  For example, if the facility is losing referrals to a competitor, the information can be used to adjust a marketing plan and strategies.

Lead Tracking

Having the ability to track the leads and referral source histories of previous staff was a major factor in Mesquite, Texas-based Christian Care Centers’ decision to convert to an RMS. “I implemented an RMS because, at the time, I had no pathway for new marketing staff to follow up on leads and referral sources and we had limited ability to track and trend marketing activity, referral sources, contacts, and referrals,” says Leo Sanders, vice president of ancillary services at Christian Care Centers. “Having an RMS has allowed me to review marketing activity and referrals in lead management so that I can, in return, target my conversations with each marketer for target-marketing efforts.”  Instead of spending time checking whether data are correct, Davies can now focus her time on what the data are telling her, “which will result in more effective marketing planning,” she says. An RMS offers providers the opportunity to do away with paper reports and crunching census figures because of the many features it can offer, including up-to-the-second census information, dashboard reporting, and build-a-report capabilities.  Streamlining critical marketing data is essential in a competitive market for tracking, reporting, and capturing a full return on investment in marketing efforts. “As we look to the future, we expect our RMS to provide us with trending data that impact our marketing efforts, which can lead to recommendations, support, and capabilities to react to them,” says Davies.

By ANDREA ZABINSKI is president of www.LTCAdmissionsCoach.com, a provider of online marketing and sales training and census development and Referral Management Software tools for skilled nursing, assisted living, CCRC, hospice, home care and home health.

877-582-7483

If you are an email client of New LifeStyles, or you use a web-based email program, the following is information to help your email activity run smoothly.

• Our server is a POP3 mail server. Our recommendation is to use a POP mail program to access your mail more quickly and have more options such as creating custom signatures, saving your mail, etc… Some programs to consider are Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, Thunderbird, etc.
• Our basic mailbox storage limit is set to 30MB on the server, therefore using the mail program is a better option to store and keep all the mail you need. If you need more space, please let us know.
• We, and most free mail programs do not backup your mail, it is your responsibility to backup your mail, which a POP mail program will do for you.
• As a safety net, if you would like to have your mail accessible on the web for a set period of time, as well as within your mail program, set the advanced settings in your mail program to delete from server after a certain amount of days. This will ensure that your mail is available at http://webmail.newlifestyles.com, or your web portal for the selected period of time.
• You can always change your password and/or set an auto responder by logging in at http://webmail.newlifestyles.com or your web portal, and using the settings.

By Stacee Howse, New LifeStyles IT Director

New LifeStyles goes green for St. Patrick's Day

From left: Luke Jansen, Cynthia Daniels, Fancy Tanner, Jennifer Campbell, Megan Blaser, Kariamu Kamau, Pam Fusella, Doug Fusella, Nikki Huml, Andrea Cokes, Cara Sivert, Richard Ruth, April Smith, Jason Gentry & Pat Sullivan

1. Email is convenient, but it shouldn’t completely replace phone calls or meetings. For important or complicated matters, pick up the phone
2. Use a great subject line – straight and to the point to let the recipient know the value of the email.
3. In your email, be short and direct  – if too repetitive and redundant the recipient will stop reading and skim it.
4. You may think using a colored or unusual font, or formatted background design in your emails makes them stand out, but don’t use them with official emails.  They are not professional and they make your message hard to read.
5. Double check your email before pushing the send button for spelling errors, and the correct recipient – as most of the time there is no “take-back” button. Also, remember that spell check doesn’t correct misspelled words that a actually other correct words.
6. The shorter the better – these days many are reading emails on handheld devices, and what may be short to you on the computer screen, will be a novel on their handheld.
7. If the email is of a very important or volatile nature, don’t respond immediately – give it some time and your emotion or urgency of the email will lessen with time and therefore be a more valid response.

Stacee Howse, New LifeStyles IT director

For starters, if you don’t have a site, or it’s time for a re-design, we can build a site to your specifications. We custom code all websites, no templates, so you get the look, feel and functionality that you want.

If you have a site, but you’re not getting what you want from it (traffic, leads, etc…), we offer free site analysis. We will analyze your site and give you a report on what we find. Do you have the copy you need to be found on the search engines? Do you have tags in place to help with search engine placement? Is the site easy to use & informative? Do you offer multiple means of contact? Are you showing up on the search engines? From this report, you can decide on what you need to do.

New LifeStyles also offers online marketing services including search engine marketing & pay per click campaign management. Our search engine marketing program includes a monthly report showing where your site is coming up on the search engines and a quarterly analysis on how to better your search engine placement. If we host your site, we will make the changes not affecting the front of your site and verify the rest with you before proceeding. Our Pay-per-click service sets you up as an advertiser on sites like Google, Bing, MSN, Yahoo, Facebook, etc… so your link appears under the sponsored link sections under the keywords you deem appropriate. We suggest you start either of these processes by creating a list of keyword phrases under which you want to be found in the search engines (examples: Assisted Living in Dallas, Atlanta retirement community, home care Boston, etc…).

Finally, we offer email accounts to match your domain. In other words, you don’t have to use an aol or gmail email address when your site is www.mydomain.com. We can host your email accounts to you have yourname@yourdomain.com, info@yourdomain.com, etc…

Contact us for more information on any of these offerings. Let New LifeStyles help you get the most from your web site!