Find Out If You Are Growing or Killing Your Practice

Welcome to the Dental Marketing Newsletter. This is Felix from ClinicBoost.

The approximate read time of this edition is 4 minutes

Before you read, be sure to claim your free dental marketing ad templates. Simply reply “Dental Templates” to this email to get them delivered to your inbox.

In today’s newsletter:

• You get a kit! And you get a kit!: Try adding this simple giveaway to your appointment booking process. You probably are already giving them out anyway, so might as well use it to your advantage.

• Do you know your patient LTV?: Knowing your clinic’s patient Lifetime Value (LTV) is foundational to your growth. We will go over three ways to find out what yours is.

• I miss you.. We never talk anymore..: Finding the right balance in you patient communications can make you practice way more profitable.

And much, much more..

Join me this Thursday at 2pm EST live while I find and redesign dental marketing ads

Dental Marketing Strategy Idea of the Week

What if I told you that your could be making money from those patient “gift bags” that you are giving away after every patient visit?

They are actually a form of incentive mechanism that you can leverage to make sure your patients show up to their appointment.

Try this: when confirming your new patient’s appointment, congratulate them on securing their free dental care kit! Add in whatever you feel like adding. Maybe throw in an extra toothpaste in there.

It might not have a lot of face value but the perceived value and the leverage they create will go a long way in incentivizing your new patients to show up for their appointments.

Top Links of the Week

• If you haven’t already, make sure to check our dental buying groups to save on your equipment purchases. Find a comprehensive list here (link)

• Here are 4 conversion rates you need to track for your dental marketing campaigns (link)

Sign Up For My Free Live Workshop on Thursday

Join me live this Thursday at 3pm EST while I test and redesign dental campaign ads. In this week’s workshop we will be specifically looking at Meta (Facebook and Instagram) ads. If you want to learn how to spy on your competition and how to create winning ad creatives for different dental services, make sure not to miss the live workshop.

Do You Communicate Enough With Your Patients?

Making sure your touch base often enough (but not too often) with your patients can have a dramatic effect on your clinic’s success. Most importantly, it will make sure that you are maximizing you sales velocity, reducing your churn rate and increasing your patient lifetime value (LTV).

Luckily these calculations do now require a sophisticated spreadsheet with all your expenses and revenues accounted for. With some simple calculations, you are able to come up with numbers that will more than suffice to get a good idea on where you are and, most importantly, where you are going.

What these value will allow you to do is calculate your patient LTV so you can track your growth and make sure you are headed in the green and not the red.

Let’s break them down.

Sales Velocity

This is how many new patients your a gaining per month and what is your revenue per month. Plain and simple. It does not matter if it it a new Invisalign patient or a all-on-8 patient. The reason we want avoid segmenting your patients at this stage is that we are evaluating your clinic’s patient LTV at this stage. Once you master these concepts, you can dig a little deeper and repeat the same exercise for each type of patient if you want to evaluate which type of patient gives your the most leverage. But that is a topic for another edition.

If, for example, you are gaining an average of 30 new patients per month and generating a stable $300k in revenues, we divide 300k/30 patients and we have the patient LTV of $10k. We know this because if you are gaining 30 new patients per month and your revenue is stable at $300k/month, then it means you are losing 30 patients that you might not even know about.

Churn Rate

Calculating churn rate requires you to identify your total number of active patients at the beginning of year and track how many of those specific patients are still active in your clinic at the end of the year. How many new patients came in and how many left during that period does not matter here. We want to use a set of specific patients and track how many left of became inactive after a 12 month period. If you have 1000 patients in that list at the beginning of the year, look at how many of those specific 1000 patient came in for a visit after 12 months and you will have your churned patients. If that number is 50, then divide 50/1000 and you have a 5% churn rate.

Now you need to calculate your average price. If within those 12 months you have generated an average of $300k per month, then dividing that $300k by 1000 patients gives you $300 per month per patient. Divide that number by your churn of 5% and you get a patient LTV of $6,000.

This allows us to benchmark your performance. If your revenues are stable, then you are likely getting 50 new patients over the year and you are stagnating. If you are getting 200 new patients a year, then you are on your way to $1.2 million per month and you just need to be patient.

Patient Lifetime Value (LTV)

The reason it is so important to know what is your patient LTV is that it will allow you to understand if you are on a growth or shrinkage path with your business.

A clinic generating $1M per month that is getting 10 new patients per month at $1k per patient compared to a clinic that is generating $100k per month and getting 10 new patients per month at $1k per patient are on two different path for the same churn rate, but going to the same goal of $200k per month.

How to Leverage Patient Communication Flows to Grow Your Practice

Communicating with your patients can activate all 3 levers of growth for your practice; New Patient Acquisition, Price and Churn.

Internal Marketing Flow

Promoting your services and treatments to your existing patient database is one of the most efficient way to generate new revenue for your practice. This is often a good way to generate new revenue for your practice and fund paid advertising budgets. A typical service promotion to your internal patient database will generate between 2-10% conversion depending on your patient demographics and the fit with the service you are promoting.

Pre-Appointment Flow

Making sure you are communicating enough with new patient and existing patients before their appointments will allow you to predictably acquire new patients.

Without these pre-appointment flow, patient show rates can drop by as much as 60% with new patient appointments.

Post-Appointment Flow

This is your time to reap the rewards from a job well done. You will be able to make sure you retain your patients with a simple personalized thank you note: “It was a pleasure seeing you in the office today, we hope you enjoy that vacation you have planned. We will see you again on X date.”

It is also a good time to collect some valuable stars. Now you can be somewhat selective here and make sure you send google reviews to the patients that YOU had a great experience with. And while we are at it, why not throw in a promotion for friends and family?

Work With Us

1. I will be posting free video trainings on my YouTube channel (link)

2. If you are looking to grow your practice through dental lead generation, we have worked with over 50 clinics and helped dental clinics make up to 10x their investment in marketing spend. Apply here (link)

Get 3 people to sign-up and get a free 30 minute strategy session with me!