Effective
promotion is a team sport
Most of you know, we (NPI) don't
do ANYTHING with client marketing dollars until we test it, tweak it, retest
it, and it proves to be worthwhile (good return) and perform consistently well,
market to market.
We (New Patients, Inc.) are
launching a new service soon. Conception of the new service came from three
sources.
1.
A large
statistical variance between client office call conversion rates. We have
clients getting 200+ phone calls in a campaign year, converting over 50% of
those phone calls. These clients are ridiculously happy. We have clients
getting over 200+ phone calls in a campaign year, complaining they aren't
getting enough new patients. Same number of inquiries - two different offices -
two different outcomes.
2.
An enormous
statistical variance in client calculated ROI values after the first year. Same
number of phone calls. One office tracks sources and understands ROI well.
Another office believes they are tracking well, but are not. Same volume. Two
different outcomes.
3.
Our clients.
We received request after request from both the dentist/owner and team members.
We let them know we would test everything and get back in touch with them.
The objective is to bridge the
gap from incoming phone call to good patient in the chair. In other words,
increase conversion, increase compliance, & improve ROI outcomes.
While the data and some more
subjective materials/findings/trends poured in during testing, it became fairly
obvious (to us anyway), the starting point of the operational side of the
business of dentistry - has quite a few challenges. Here are the highlights. We
hope the following result data opens your eyes to take action and ultimately
helps you.
·
Practice
owners ignore the process of conversion
·
100% of
practice owners refused to quantify or listen to incoming calls from
advertising themselves, until a detrimental issue was identified and
communicated.
·
30% of
practice owners still refused to listen to incoming calls from advertising even
AFTER a detrimental issue was identified and communicated.
·
10% of
practice owners disengaged with the service after a detrimental issue was
identified and communicated. They blamed
the service personnel who uncovered the problem.
·
Nearly one
fifth of your potential return is being wasted
·
19% of calls
from incoming advertising did not get answered by a representative from the
office
·
About 80% of
these missed calls were due to the office being closed on the day the call came
in
·
About 20% of
these missed calls were due to being closed at lunch time and not having the
phones covered
·
Less than
50% of owners were willing to make changes to have the phones covered on their
day off and during lunch
·
4% of the
uncovered potential new patient calls left a message. The rest (96%) just vanished. 0% of the teams took the initiative
(initially) to look up the caller ID in their call tracking software to
re-engage the potential new patient.
·
Almost 30%
of the test practices had capacity issues.
They were booked too far
ahead and had too few openings for new patients, leading to poor
conversion.
·
Virtually
all of these practice owners understood the problem after it was presented to
them
·
Slightly
less than half were willing to do something concrete about it
·
0% of the
offices (at the start) correlated the advertising source information collected
from listening to the calls, to update their pm software properly
o
0% of the
offices had a clue what their first level ROI was
Summary: If you
want more bang for your buck from your advertising dollars (no matter what
company does your marketing for you), start paying attention to
conversion.
The job of your advertising is to
get a human being interested enough in your dental practice to pick up their phone
and hit 7 numbers on the keypad. Good marketing doesn't stop when the phone is
connected.
I hope this helps some of you
take a MUCH closer look at how things actually are working (or not) in your
dental practices.
Do you have a topic you would like covered in an upcoming
newsletter? Ask here.
Just email either Howie Horrocks
(whh@newpatientsinc.com) or Mark Dilatush (markd@newpatientsinc.com) with your
topic. We will get them into the newsletter.
If any of you need us, just call
866.336.8237. We will be here for you.
Got questions? Want to learn more?
You can reach Mark & Howie
at:
Mark: markd@newpatientsinc.com
No comments:
Post a Comment