7 Stats Proving Texting Should Be Your #1 Communication Tool

For some, texting may still conjure up the image of a teenage girl sending emojis to her circle of friends, rather than a patient communicating with a healthcare provider or an executive communicating a new idea to his colleagues. Almost everyone uses text messaging as a means of communication these days, whether socially or for business. However, texting has an awesome power that, if harnessed, can be used to profit and grow a practice because healthcare and texting go together like biscuits and gravy.

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If Your Business is Not Communicating Via Text, You are Missing Out

It’s in the numbers; have a look:

18 – Only 18% of people listen to their voicemail

If a voicemail is left by a known contact, the number grows slightly to 33%, but when the number shows up as a number not in one’s list of contacts, only a few stalwarts are holding out and listening. So why waste your and your staff’s time, and therefore money, on a dying medium?

14 – Of all calls made to businesses, only 14% avoid being placed on hold.

I don’t know about you, but 86% of calls being put on hold makes me never want to use a phone to contact a business via a phone call. Who wants to waste their time calling when nearly 9 out of 10 times you are put on hold? That’s opposed to more than 90% of text messages being read and responded to within minutes.

56 – A customer sits on hold an average of 56 seconds each time they call a business.

At first glance, anything with “seconds” as the unit of time automatically seems like nothing to sweat about, but then we get antsy and impatient when our frozen burrito has 50 secs left or a website takes more than five seconds to load. A hold or wait time of nearly a minute can seem like an eternity, and this is just the average.

32 – One-third of callers placed on hold hang up immediately

Of course they do. Can you blame them?. Wouldn’t you after learning that 86% of calls are put on hold for 56 seconds?

98 – 98% of text messages are opened, as opposed to only 22% of emails

When it comes to email campaigns sent by businesses, companies would be over the moon to get two out of five people to open the email, but when trying to communicate with patients, one, even two, out of five just won’t cut it. With texting messaging, you can expect that nearly everyone you send to will read your reminder (and 95% of those people will do so within the 3 minutes).

47 – 47% of homes in the US are wireless-only (up 74% since 2010 and continuing to climb)

You have a 50/50 chance of catching someone on a landline. But, even with the 53% with landlines, most of those have cell phones as well. Simply put: nearly all your patients will be able to text.

5 – 5x more texts are sent than calls made.

The average American spends 13 hours/month texting (26 mins/day) and sends/receives 960 texts/month (32 per day). That’s opposed to only making/receiving six phone calls/day.

Because we, as Americans, are using texting as our preferred mode of communication, it makes it the easiest and most efficient way to get the confirmations and information your practice seeks.

Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway)—if you’re not using two-way texting to communicate with your patients, you should be. If you are interested in trying this method of practice-to-patient communication for free, visit GetWeave.com and click on our blinking Weave mark to sign up for a free trial today. We know you won’t regret it. It’s in the numbers.

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