How to do a new financial year marketing makeover for your dental practice – Part two
What is the conversion rate from phone calls to appointments at your practice? Did you know that on average, each patient in Australia spends between 500 to 1000 dollars a year? So how much revenue are you missing out?
Transcript:
Hi everyone, Angus Pryor here, creator of the Dental Profit System and co-author of the Kindle smashing book, The Better Business Book, bringing you this week’s Marketing Monday, the weekly show designed to boost the marketing at your dental practice.
Now we’re in a series at the moment, looking at how to give your practice a new financial year marketing makeover, if you’re outside Australia, just be aware that in Australia, our new financial year starts on the first of July. And so last week we looked at capturing two really important metrics, having a look at where you’re receiving your patients from, your referral sources, and secondly, working out what is the median spend that your patients spend with you in a twelve month period.
So this week, now that we know if you’ve gone and done your homework, now that you know what the median spend from your patients is from you in a twelve month period, and you know the referral sources, now we’ve got something else we need to set up to get this makeover really working. And for that, I’ve brought a prop. I have my nice bucket here. And I want you to imagine this bucket is the capacity of your business, it’s the capacity of your dental practice. And every time the phone rings, here we are, that’s the phone ringing, and one of two things is going to happen isn’t it? If you’re successful at converting that inquiry into an appointment, then they become part of your capacity and that gets filled up and that’s fantastic. And hopefully you get to a point where it’s right up to the top, and either you grow a bit or you go home every night busy and happy.
But sometimes, this is what happens. The phone rings, there’s someone who’s making inquiry and because of the way that your teams answer the phone or whatever the case may be, oops. The client goes away. Well, I want to tell you, that’s a really bad scenario. Here’s the reality. You already do a certain amount of marketing, and by marketing, I mean how you look after your clients, the signage, whether you do any external stuff, the uniforms, your website, your Google reviews, etc, etc. Well, if the phone rings, and you’ve got someone ready there to add to your capacity and you don’t convert them, then what you’re doing is you’re wasting your marketing efforts.
Now to give you an idea of the numbers there, I can tell you that in Australia, among the clients that I’ve done this with, the median spend per patient in one year is between $500 and $1000 dollars. So that’s on average, each time the phone rings and someone becomes a client, they’re going to spend with you in the next 12 months between 500 and a thousand dollars. Now let’s look at some numbers, let’s imagine that your phone rings ten times a week, that’s not outrageous, twice a day, and if let’s say, that’s 500 calls a year, approximately, let’s imagine your off on leave for a couple of weeks. So 500 calls a year, and just for simple numbers, let’s imagine that at your practice, it’s $1000, that’s your average patient spend. Well, there’s half a million dollars in revenue that could come to your practice if you successfully convert those calls into appointments.
Now, we did an audit of our clients earlier this year and I can tell you that the variation from getting those calls converted was between 50% and 90%. Now I don’t expect anyone to be at a 100%, but in that example, where your phone’s ring ten times a week, and if your average patient value’s a $1000, so that’s 500 calls a year, 500,000. We’ll if your conversion rates had 50% as was the case for someone that we did this with, that’s $250,000 that you’ve left on the table, because you didn’t convert those inquiries into appointments.
So, the take home message is, set up a system where you’re capturing the calls that are coming in. Most practices in my experience, they’ll record what their referral source was when someone’s made an appointment. But what about all of those cases where they don’t make an appointment? That could be costing you a fortune without having to do any extra marketing at all, you could be bringing a bunch of clients in. And even if you can take your conversion rate from 60% to 65% or to 70%, you can see it can be some really big numbers across the course of a year. So to give you an idea at Dental Profit System, the system that we have running is people will measure their calls, they’ll talk about time of day, what their referral source was, whether the conversion was made, that data comes back to us and then once a month it goes out to the client again with some benchmark data, so you get a sense of how your numbers compare to a whole bunch of clients that are doing this together. So that’s how we operate.
So to give you an idea at Dental Profit System, the system that we have running is people will measure their calls, they’ll talk about time of day, what their referral source was, whether the conversion was made, that data comes back to us and then once a month it goes out to the client again with some benchmark data, so you get a sense of how your numbers compare to a whole bunch of clients that are doing this together. So that’s how we operate.
Now look, the final thing for this week and we’re going to continue with the series in the coming weeks, is we’ve just re-launched our website, dentalprofitsystem.com, and one of the things we’re offering is a free 60 minute session, you’ll see if you go to the website, dentalprofitsystem.com, where we will give you free feedback, it’s usually valued at $497. We can walk through the marketing with you, find out where your opportunities were and we want to get you as much value as possible in that one hour.
So that’s dentalprofitsystem.com, otherwise, we will see you next week when we’ve got some more examples of how to bring in more clients as part of your new financial year makeover. Otherwise, for this week, that’s Angus Pryor signing off. See you next week.