Practice Treatment Plan Dental Marketing presents: Five FREE things you can do to increase NEW PATIENTS in 2015
Introduction As we head into a new year, the Dental Success Team here at Practice Treatment Plan wanted to give a special, free gift. We have five years of experience in helping dentists increase their new patient numbers through effective and proven dental marketing strategies. As a service to you, we are giving you five tips below on how you can grow your new patient numbers at no expense. New Patients are the Life- Blood of any Dental Practice. It does not matter what stage you are in with your practice whether you are a start- up, a thriving practice, a struggling practice, or a practice that is soon going on the market - maintaining a steady stream of new patients is critical. Every dental patient base experiences patient attrition (patients who expire, actively leave you, or just never come back). If you are not investing resources into replacing those patients to keep a healthy, active patient base, you may wake up one day and find that your practice is in a lot of trouble. You should always be focused on new patient acquisition. I hope you find these tips useful, and know that they will help you increase your new patient numbers if you integrate them into your marketing strategy. If you find that you need more assistance in improving your marketing strategy, give us a call. We are always here to help. Continued Success, Benjamin Suggs Chief Marketing Strategist Connecting Great Doctors with Great Patients (888) 412-8820 www.practicetreatmentplan.com info@practicetreatmentplan.com Practice Treatment Plan provides Dentists with Dental Marketing Strategy, Branding, Websites, Social Media, Community Relationship Marketing, Patient Experience Enhancement & Call Tracking services. How can we help YOU? 2015 Practice Treatment Plan, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 2
How you can Grow New Patients for FREE in 2015. Here are Five Tips. #1. Increase your online search profile by creating FREE online directory listings There are many places out there online where you can create a free listing for your dental practice. These listings will not only help more potential patients find you, they will also improve the Search Engine Optimization of your own website. Two of the criteria that Google the largest and most used search engine, by far uses to rank websites are for quality backlinks (links from other websites to your website) and what they call Citations (how many times your practice name, address and phone number are listed online). You can create free listings with online directories to increase both backlinks and citations. Here is a sample of some websites where you create these free listings: Social Media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, & LinkedIn. Search Engine Map listings such as Google My Business (also known as Google+), Bing Places for Business & Yahoo Local. Online review sites such as Angie's List, Kudzu & Insider Pages. Online Directories such as Manta, YP.com, YellowBot, elocal, Find Us Local, SuperPages & Citysearch. Expert Tip!: One of the keys to make the most out of citations is to make sure that the information about your practice is consistent across the board. For example, you would not want to have your practice listed as John Doe DDS in one place and Doe Dental Associates in another. #2. Ask Your Favorite Patients to Review You Reviews are more important than ever. Google provides our marketing firm with data on what the trending internet search terms are. Dentist Reviews is becoming a more and more popular search term that people are using when looking for a dentist. When looking for a dentist online, potential patients may be more likely to pick another dentist over you if they have better reviews. If you already have bad reviews out there, the only effective way to minimize their negative impact is to drown them out with more positive reviews. There are many sites where patients can review you (we listed several above), but by far the most important is Google+. The more positive 2015 Practice Treatment Plan, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 3
reviews you have on Google+, the more prominently you will be listed in Google s local map listings directory. Expert Tip!: Don t forget video reviews! These days you can pull out just about any type of smart phone and take a nice, high- resolution video. Ask your favorite patients to give you a video testimonial while they are in the office, and post those videos to your own FREE YouTube channel account. Label the videos as Dentist Reviews Anytown USA. #3. Send a Welcome Email to New Patients With every dental practice that we work with, one of the biggest frustrations that doctors have is last minute cancellations or no- shows from new patients. You can do the math if your No- Show/Cancellation rate is 20%, and you average 30 New Patients per Month, that means that you are missing out on 6 New Patients per Month, or 72 New Patients per Year! One of the most effective and simple ways that we have found to reduce No- Shows is to send a Welcome Email. Think about it for a minute if you called and set an appointment, and right after you set this appointment, you got a nice, friendly, warm and helpful email from the business, wouldn t you feel more inclined to keep that appointment? A well- scripted welcome email can increase the new patient s perceived value of the appointment, and increase the likelihood that they will feel obligated to keep the appointment. Don t believe me? We have seen this work! We had a client who had a 60% no- show rate for new patients. We found out that the problem was a very cold, intimidating welcome email that they were sending. We changed the welcome email, and their no- show rate dropped to less than 10%. What should your welcome email communicate? Thank you: express a great appreciation that the potential patient has chosen your practice for their dental needs. Confirm: Remind them of the date and time of their appointment. Build Credibility: Share a link to positive reviews from other patients. Outline the experience: Direct them to a page on your website that outlines exactly what will happen during their first appointment. Establish Reciprocity: Explain that you have reserved this time just for them so that you can help them achieve better dental health. This will make them feel more obligated to keep the appointment. Forms: Include your dental forms in one PDF attachment not a number of separate documents. Expert Tip!: You do not need a fancy patient recall system to send a welcome email. You can script an email using your basic email program, save it as a draft, and then use it each time a new patient sets an appointment. If you would like a sample of a welcome email that you can use, please email me at ben@practicetreatmentplan.com and I will share one with you. 2015 Practice Treatment Plan, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 4
#4. Drive More Internal Referrals by Creating a Better Patient Experience Even before a prospective patient picks up the phone to call your practice, a positive patient experience can affect them. How you communicate the experience of visiting your practice in your marketing will increase the likelihood of a patient calling for an appointment. People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel. ~ Maya Angelou It is important to remember that people make buying decisions based on Emotion, and justify those decisions with Rationale. In other words, it is very important to factor in how you make people feel. Optimizing Patient Experience not only drives increased Revenue/Patients, it also creates advocates for your practice. Engaged patients become emotionally invested in your practice, take an active role in seeing it succeed, are more likely stick with you in the bad times and refer your products and services to prospects like themselves. Conversely, patients who become disengaged will likely become detractors for your practice. How can you create a better patient experience in your office? The easiest exercise would be to sit down with your team and ask yourselves one simple question How would I like to be treated if I were a patient? Think about every facet your marketing, the first phone call, the new patient s arrival, their time in the reception area, their hygiene session, their exam, and of course their trip to the payment desk. How can these experiences be improved? Expert Tip!: Want to know what your patients think of their experience at your practice? Create a simple paper survey for your office that patients can fill out (anonymously) before they leave. This can be as simple as one question, a concept referred to in marketing as NetPromoter Score. Example below: ABC$DENTAL$ Patient Experience Survey At ABC Dental Care, we believe that all of our patients should feel special. We are committed to creating an exceptional patient experience. Please help us by taking one minute to answer the question below. Your comments will help us improve our services and will remain anonymous and confidential. How likely is it that you would recommend this practice to a friend, family member or colleague. 1$ 2$ 3$ 4$ 5$ 6$ 7$ 8$ 9$ 10$ not$likely$at$all$ neutral$ extremely$likely$ Please take a moment to give us any feedback that will help us improve our services. Keep track of both the scores and comments. The comments will often be very direct and give you an idea of what needs to be fixed. Your average score will tell you how well you and your team are treating patients, and what types of referrals your patients will give you. Promoters (score 9-10) are loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and refer others, fueling growth. Passives (score 7-8) are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who are vulnerable to competitive offerings. Detractors (score 0-6) are unhappy customers who can damage your brand and impede growth through negative word- of- mouth. 2015 Practice Treatment Plan, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 5
#5. Track Your Success on the Phones Practice Treatment Plan offers a phone call tracking service called Opportunity Track (www.opportunitytrack.com). With this service we provide doctors daily feedback on New Patient Missed Calls, Non- Appointed Calls and even Appointed Calls that we feel may not show up. We listen to literally thousands of dental new patient phone calls every month! Some of the numbers that we see would shock you as a practice owner Dental practices miss an average of 40 calls from potential new patients PER MONTH! Less than half of those callers will leave a message. 80% of those calls ARE MISSED DURING OFFICE HOURS! Less than 50% of new patient calls actually end up appointing! Most doctors only keep track of how many new patients end up in their chairs each month. They have no idea how many new patient calls are coming into the office that never set an appointment, and even more importantly, they have no idea WHY those patients are not appointing! When you ask your front desk team, they are most likely going to tell you the most recent reasons, not the most common reasons. Ask your team to create a system to track each phone call that comes in. Each call should be catalogued as a Missed Call, an Existing Patient, an Appointed New Patient, or a Non- Appointed New Patient with the specific reason why they did not appoint. Review these reports either daily or weekly, and give specific feedback to your team on how to improve the conversion of new patient calls to actual new patients. Most likely, there are POTENTIAL new patients calling your practice TODAY that may never set an appointment. Find out why and fix it! Expert Tip!: The fact is that most front desk teams struggle to create and maintain a system as described above. You may want to get outside help, and we can help you! Our Opportunity Track system records your incoming calls, sends you a text alert with caller information within a few minutes when a call is missed (not answered by a live person), provides daily feedback reports with call summaries and recommendations on how to improve phone skills and win back missed opportunities, and monthly analytical summary reports on how each of your team members is doing on the phones! Need More Help With Your Marketing Strategy? Call us at (888) 412-8820, or Email us at info@practicetreatmentplan.com, and get a COMPLIMENTARY one-hour Marketing Consultation (normally $200) 2015 Practice Treatment Plan, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 6