I want to describe something that happened to me directly, as a patient, because it illustrates a pattern I now see constantly on the business side of my work.
Several months ago, in search of a South American psychologist who aligned with my psychotherapy needs, I typed a search in Spanish, looking for a private psychology clinic. This is worth pausing on for a moment because Spanish-language search terms in this space tend to be far less competitive than the equivalent English terms. Fewer clinicians are optimizing for Spanish-language keywords, fewer businesses are bidding on them, and the field of results is thinner. That should be an advantage for the clinicians who do show up. In practice, it often isn't, because what tends to show up first isn't a website at all. It's an Instagram profile.
I clicked through to one profile. There was no website for this private Colombian psychology practice, no booking page, no email address. Just a profile, some posts, and a direct-message option. So I messaged them on Instagram, using my own personal account.
I want to be honest about how uncomfortable that felt. As an American, reaching out to a business through my personal Instagram, the same account where I post about my own life, felt like an odd blurring of two things that are usually kept separate. A business inquiry, in my experience, goes through email or a website contact form. Instagram is where I follow friends and family. Using it to ask a clinic about their services felt like showing up to a job interview through a mutual friend's group chat. It works, technically. It just isn't how I expected to have to do it.
It took two days for anyone to respond. Two days is a long time when you're a patient trying to solve a real problem. By the time they did respond, they didn't answer my question. The clinic finally responded and gave me a WhatsApp number and asked me to message them there instead, explaining my needs again from the beginning.
I did not do that. I gave up on this clinic.
In marketing terms, what happened to me has names: drop-off and friction.
Friction is anything that makes it harder for someone to take the next step toward becoming a customer or patient: an extra form to fill out, an unfamiliar channel to use, a delay in response, a request to repeat information you already provided. Every one of those things adds a small cost, in effort or discomfort, to continuing forward.
Drop-off is what happens when that cost gets high enough, or accumulates across enough steps, that the person simply stops. They don't complain. They don't explain why. They just don't come back. From the business's side, this is often invisible. There's no error message, no support ticket. There's only a silence that looks identical to someone who was never interested in the first place.
That distinction matters enormously, because those two people, the one who was never interested and the one who gave up after two days of friction, are not the same person, and they represent two completely different business problems. One is a marketing reach issue. The other is an infrastructure issue. In my case, it was entirely the second one. I was ready to become a paying patient. The clinic simply made it too costly, in time and discomfort, for me to get there.
Disclosure: I am an affiliate partner with ManyChat, which means I may earn a commission if you sign up through a link I provide. I only recommend tools I've genuinely seen work for clients in this space, and this article would say the same thing about ManyChat's capabilities with or without that arrangement.
I want to contrast this with something I've seen work well. A Portuguese psychologist I coach in marketing strategy, who offers educational services virtually, uses a tool called ManyChat as she cannot manually keep up with all the people who comment on her social media posts.
ManyChat is a chat automation platform, and it's genuinely widespread in the U.S. now. I've seen it advertised directly in U.S. commercials, often with educators and small business owners describing how it lets them answer messages instantly instead of leaving people waiting. That detail matters more than it might seem. In American business culture, leaving someone hanging without a response is often experienced as something close to an offense, a sign that a business isn't paying attention or doesn't take the inquiry seriously. A two-day silence, the kind I experienced, reads very differently to an American consumer than it might in a culture where response times are understood more flexibly.
ManyChat's actual capabilities are worth being specific about, because they directly solve the exact failure point I ran into:
None of this requires advanced technical skill to set up. That's part of the point. It replaces a system that depends entirely on a person remembering to check a platform and remembering what a specific message was about, with a system that responds the moment someone reaches out, whether or not anyone is watching the account at that exact second.
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Automated response is only the first piece. What I'd actually recommend is a small stack of connected tools, each doing a specific job:
For people who are ready to buy right now: a direct link to a paid booking option, something like Calendly, where a purchase-ready person can book and pay for a session immediately, without any back-and-forth. This matters because, as we discussed with the Colombian clinics, some prospective clients are already at the point of purchase readiness. Making them wait, or re-explain themselves, risks losing exactly the people who were easiest to convert.
For people who aren't ready yet: a lower-commitment, informational offer, sometimes called a loss leader, something free or very low-cost that gives real value up front (a short guide, a free class, a recorded session) in exchange for an email address. This captures someone who isn't ready to pay today but is genuinely interested, so they aren't simply lost.
For managing all of it: an email list, built and maintained through a tool like HubSpot, where every person who opts in gets logged automatically. This is the piece that actually solves the problem I ran into. Instead of relying on memory, or on WhatsApp threads that can disappear entirely once a message's view timer expires, every lead has a permanent, searchable record, and follow-up can happen on a schedule, automatically, rather than depending on someone remembering who asked for what three weeks ago.
There's a genuine advantage to staying within wellness and education services, rather than formal clinical or diagnostic care, when it comes to what information you can safely and simply collect from a prospective client.
In the U.S., HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) governs how certain health information must be protected, but it applies specifically to what the law calls "covered entities," generally healthcare providers who bill insurance, health plans, and healthcare clearinghouses, along with their business associates. Wellness and educational coaching services delivered outside of that formal insurance-based clinical structure generally fall outside HIPAA's direct requirements. That said, this is a genuine legal question with real consequences, and it's worth having an actual attorney confirm how it applies to your specific service model and state, rather than treating this as a substitute for that advice.
Beyond the legal question, there's also a practical, common-sense reason to avoid asking for sensitive clinical information, like diagnoses or symptoms, through an automated intake form or chat tool in the first place: doing so risks implying that you are offering formal clinical diagnosis or treatment, which can raise separate questions about licensure and scope of practice depending on where your prospective client is located, even if that was never your intention.
The practical solution is simply to ask goal-oriented, non-clinical questions instead. Rather than asking someone to describe a diagnosis or symptoms, you can ask something like what they'd like to focus on, for example, "feeling more confident in setting boundaries," or "developing a clearer sense of direction in my career." This captures exactly the information you need to have a meaningful first conversation, without collecting the kind of sensitive health data that carries legal and professional risk to gather through an automated system.
The Colombian clinic I tried to reach almost certainly does good clinical work. Nothing about my experience tells me otherwise. What it tells me is that the interface between "interested person" and "paying consumer" had gaps wide enough for someone genuinely motivated to fall straight through. Search intent (the fact that I was actively looking in Spanish for exactly this kind of service) is one of the strongest purchase-readiness signals a business can receive. Research on buyer behavior consistently shows that someone actively searching is significantly further along in their decision than someone passively scrolling social media content. I was, in marketing terms, about as warm a lead as a business could hope for.
And I still walked away. In fact, I walked away to another Spanish-language site that was not a database of clinicians but rather a South American virtual psychotherapy business that offered people from any country a streamlined way to select a psychologist, select a date that worked for me, select the services I wanted, and to purchase these with a coupon to reduce risk on my first meeting with a psychologist to see if we aligned.
As a side note here, Doctoralia does not allow people to book with a clinician if their contact information does not indicate residence in the same country as the clinician. So when Colombian clinicians tell me that they’ve always had a dream of working with patients living abroad and don’t know how to attract international clients but only have a Doctoralia profile, this is the type of work we do in marketing to explore the funnel and look at gaps. Firstly, for legal reasons, a Colombian clinician would need to be offering services that are permitted to be delivered across borders, such as educational and wellness services. Secondly, interested consumers need a way to find clinicians that aligns with their search habits. And thirdly, communication, booking, and payment processes need to be set up in a streamlined way.
If you're a clinician hoping to grow an international client base, and you suspect interested people may be reaching out and quietly disappearing the same way I did, that's not necessarily a reflection of your clinical skill. It's a gap in the path between "interested" and "client," and it's fixable.
👉 Contact us to talk through what your current intake process looks like, where people may be dropping off, and how to build a funnel that doesn't lose the people who were already ready to say yes.