There are moments when you know you need to do something to increase your productivity or to increase new patients, but the idea of investing in such efforts seems so overwhelming. I believe many of you have a marketing opportunity available to you that is already in place in your practice. You just need to maximize it. That opportunity is through your existing patient family and is twofold: patient communication and patient referrals.
Patient Communication
By creating specific campaigns for your patient base that communicate opportunities for care, ask for referrals, build the relationship and educate them on your services, you can bring your practice more patients, increased case acceptance and increases in services provided.
- Decide as a team on an internal email campaign for every quarter.
- Create an email through your patient communication system, whichever one your practice uses. Make sure the look of the email reflects your brand and looks clean and sharp.
- Schedule these emails to reach out to your patients, and back them up with excellent verbal skills and information that would be available to your patients when they visit your practice.
- Track the open rate, the response and the level of success you get in terms of scheduled appointments, dentistry scheduled, etc. The more successful campaigns = the type of campaigns you want to do more often!
- Follow up and follow through. One email won’t do anything, but a succinct campaign that you focus on for an entire quarter can gain great results! Perhaps a whitening campaign in the summer, referral campaign in the fall, educational campaigns about implants, restorative care or a specific dental service you want to provide more of – you’ll be amazed at the number of patients who will say “I didn’t know you did that!” It’s happened to many of our clients, to their surprise.
Patient Referrals
It would be safe to say that you have more dentistry diagnosed and sitting in your patient records than you have ever provided. I am also confident in saying that the most effective marketing tool you have is your existing patient base and word of mouth referrals. If you do not have systems in place to nurture and build upon those opportunities, you are missing out on one of the best marketing goldmines your business has to offer.
Every team member needs to have business cards with their name and title on them. And every patient should walk out the door with at least two cards from your practice. Utilize time in your morning huddle to determine who will ask each patient for referrals and make sure that opportunity to connect has been made – especially to the patients you love the most! You want more of them, right? Then say so! Many of our clients have found that the most successful campaign/system they have ever put into place has been a referral system. They practice effective verbal skills, they create supportive collateral for it, and they treat it like every other established system in their practice. It’s not an every-once-in-a-while kind of thing; it’s an everyday, all-the-time system that grows their practice with more ideal patients, day in and day out.
Start today putting stronger internal marketing efforts into place and watch your practice grow! For more information on internal marketing campaigns, visit www.jamesonmanagement.com.
