Pharmacy Marketing: How to Get More Customers

The usual approach to getting more customers is a campaign. A letterbox drop, a discount on vitamins, a push on social media. It generates some activity, the numbers move a little, and three months later the baseline is roughly where it started. The reason is rarely the campaign. It is that the pharmacy was losing customers faster out the back than the campaign could bring in the front.

In short: community pharmacy has almost no awareness problem and a significant capture problem. Australians already visit a pharmacy 18 times a year and nearly everyone lives near one. Fix the leaks before you spend on acquisition, because closing them is cheaper and the effect compounds. Good pharmacy marketing starts with the customers you are already losing.

You are not competing for attention

Start with the market as it actually is.

There are 5,935 community pharmacies in Australia serving more than 443.6 million patient visits each year. The average Australian walks into one 18 times annually, a figure from the NAB Pharmacy Survey 2021 that holds across metropolitan, rural and remote areas alike.

Access is close to saturated. In capital cities, 97 percent of residents have a pharmacy within 2.5 kilometres. Across the rest of Australia, 74 percent of the population is within the same distance.

Nobody in your catchment is unaware that pharmacies exist. They are not choosing you over an absence of options. They are choosing between you and three others, mostly on habit. Habit breaks on friction, not persuasion.

You also start with an advantage worth protecting. In Roy Morgan’s 2021 Image of Professions survey, 76 percent of Australians rated pharmacists high or very high for ethics and honesty. That put the profession third, behind nurses and doctors. That was down 8 points on 2017 and the lowest reading for pharmacists since 1991, so it is an asset to protect rather than assume. Trust is the asset. Convenience is usually the leak.

The four places pharmacies lose customers

Before adding anything, find what you are already losing. These are the four leaks that show up most often, starting with the one we can measure.

The phone

This is the largest and least visible. In a 30 day audit of one Australian community pharmacy, 74.9 percent of calls went unanswered across 3,988 calls. Some 99.1 percent of all inbound calls arrived during opening hours.

Callers waited an average of 19.2 seconds before hanging up. That is not a customer who will try again later. That is a customer ringing the next pharmacy on the list.

An unanswered phone is a marketing problem disguised as an operations problem. Every call is a person who had already chosen you, right up until nobody picked up.

The service you do not offer

When a customer asks for something you cannot do, they do not just miss out on that service. They discover that a competitor can do it.

Delivery is the clearest example. In beta call data from the same pharmacy, delivery requests were the single largest category of captured requests at 40.2 percent. That demand arrives whether or not the service exists. We worked through the economics in should your pharmacy offer delivery.

The script that was not ready

A repeat that was promised for Tuesday and was not filled costs you two things: the trip, and the confidence that the next one will be handled. Proactive contact when a script is ready, or when it is running late, prevents most of this.

The hours nobody told them about

If your Saturday hours changed and your online listing did not, you are turning people away at the door. You are also paying to advertise to them. Check every listing you appear in, quarterly.

Pharmacy marketing that works once capture holds

Once capture holds, acquisition starts to compound rather than leak away.

Move	Why it works here	Effort
Accurate online listings and hours	Captures the “pharmacy near me open now” search that is already happening	Low
Professional services	Gives a reason to choose you specifically, not just the nearest door	Medium
Prescriber relationships	Local GPs and clinics refer continuously once they trust the handover	Medium
Delivery and online ordering	Wins the patients who cannot easily get in, who are also the highest value	Medium to high
Genuine review requests	Trust already sits high, reviews make it visible to people deciding	Low

Two notes on this list. Professional services and prescriber relationships are the two that competitors cannot copy quickly, so they are where sustained advantage lives. Discounting is absent deliberately. It buys visits, not customers, and trains people to wait for the next promotion.

How to tell whether it is working

Pick measures that reflect retention, not activity.

Script volume alone hides the problem, since it can hold steady while your customer base churns underneath. Better signals are:

• The proportion of inbound calls answered.
• The number of patients on repeat management or delivery.
• Funded services delivered per month.
• How many patients you dispensed for this quarter who also appeared last quarter.

The last one matters most, and it is the one almost nobody tracks.

Where Krepko fits

We built Emily because the phone was the leak we could actually measure. Emily is our AI voice agent for Australian pharmacies. She answers routine calls using your pharmacy’s real data, and passes anything clinical or complex to a pharmacist.

In the beta at the audited pharmacy, every call routed to Emily during active periods was answered, and she picked up in under 5 seconds. That is inside the window in which 83.9 percent of the audit’s abandoned callers were still holding. The point is not the technology. It is that a customer who rang once and got through is a customer you did not have to win back.

The full call audit sets out the methodology and its limits, since it covers one pharmacy rather than a national sample. For the growth side of the equation, see alternative revenue streams for independent pharmacy, and for what the phone is doing to your staff, reducing phone interruptions. You can see how Emily works at krepko.com.au.