Dental marketing near the end of the year slows down for most dentists. This gives many of you time to look back on the year and evaluate your practice as well as prepare for 2013. As you get ready to close down your practice for the holidays and the year take time to evaluate these top business metrics. These key dental metrics are critical measures of not just the amount of money coming in, but the sustainability and longevity of your practice.
Dental Marketing Checklist for 2012
#1 Patient Loyalty
– A great indicator of patient loyalty is not only repeat visit, but a recommendation or referral. Go through your list of “new” patients this past year and track their source, all those that you would considered a referral break them into “from a colleague” or a “from a patient”. Did you happen to reward those patients for their referral? Rewarding patients is critical for building a culture of referrals. Likewise, the holiday season is a great time to thank them again with a simple card or phone call. If a referral is the true sign of excellent customer service then the lack therefore is a warning sign that your practice might be suffering long-term.
Action Plan:
Plan a survey for next year’s Q1 to evaluate your patients response to your service. Opening the door to patient doctor communication will be a critical step for growth in 2013.
# 2 Recall –
Go through your recall data for 2012 and 2011 and evaluate the # of patients that either you failed to contact in 2012 or those that failed to make an appointment. Business from your current patients is 10x cheaper than getting new patients therefore make an actionable and measurable plan to contact and reactivate these patients in 2013 and your business will grow.
Action Plan:
Here I have to give a call out to PracticeMojo. Recall often a time consuming proposition for dental offices, yet the benefits and cost of recall compared to acquisition make it the best choice to grow your practice this next year. PracticeMojo automated recall is backed with over 40 years experience. They’ll use email, text and postcards to recall your patients. PracticeMojo is the only software that reads, evaluates and plans around your recall data.
# 3 Communication
– Determine how you are currently contacting your patients. Are you using emails, texts, or phone calls? Once you do this compare these numbers against how many cell phone numbers and email addresses you have on file. What are you doing to contact the people you don’t have cell phones or emails for? Are you planning to accommodate all your patients?
Action Plan:
Contacting all of your patients is a two step process, #1 plan to use postcards for recall to contact those past due and really past die patients that either don’t have a cell phone number or email address. #2 Flag accounts that are information missing and make sure you ask for their information next time they come in.
# 4 Online Reviews
– Evaluating your online reputation (although not the best way to get new patients) is a necessary step. Many of your new patients will use search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing to search for reviews on your practice. In the event of a negative review on a traditional review site there is nothing you can do but dispute it. However PracticeMojo reviews not only allow you to add reviews to Google, Yelp, Yellowpages and more, but they also allow you to control which reviews are visible on your website and or Facebook page. Giving you more autonomy when it comes to reviews, allows you to better manage and control your online reputation.
Action Plan:
Sign up for PracticeMojo in 2013
#5 Campaigns
– As a last step layout your 2013 dental marketing campaign plan. Knowing what campaigns you will launch and when will help you in determining the proper dental marketing budget for the coming year. For reference PracticeMojo is only $179/month and includes unlimited emails, texts and 100 free postcards every month. PracticeMojo is backed by over 40 years of dental marketing experience. They are developed campaigns for all the most effective dental marketing strategies including recall, reactivation, referrals, welcome, benefit reminders, holidays and more.
Action Plan:
Build out a 2013 calendar and make each dental marketing event with the estimated cost and plan on how you’ll reach the maximum number of patients for each campaign or call PracticeMojo to learn more 800.556.2580.
When you’re done with this list go to PracticeMojo.com or call 800.556.2580 to learn more about PracticeMojo, despite your best efforts (even if you had a great year) PracticeMojo does all this and more, more effectively, cheaper and faster. Starting at only $179/ month PracticeMojo will take care of all your patient loyalty, recall, reactivation, online reputation, as well as effective campaigns to attract new and current patients. Plus till the end of the year PracticeMojo is offering everyone who signs up before 12/31/12 1200 FREE printed and mailed postcard with every PracticeMojo subscription. that’s 100 FREE printed and mailed postcards every month all year long. That’s a straight forward great deal. Plus there are no contracts, no setup fees, no hassles – just the way it should be.
Definitely encourage patients to provide reviews. Obviously, you don’t want to be too pushy with reviews but you want information out on the internet. When people search for your practice they want to read reviews, so make it a point of your marketing scheme.