Get Better New Patients By Knowing This
It’s cool if you’re a cool cat, but be a smart cat too.
In the business of dentistry, smart cats want to know where their best patients come from and what channels impacted the patient decision to choose the practice so that activities that attracted quality patients can be replicated to get more like them.
This business intelligence (BI) information is critically important for decision-making, for marketing success, and practice growth. That’s why we do such deep analysis around the current practice metrics, patient values, existing practice market share, and the demographics of the areas, and work hard to precisely target on and offline campaigns, and then to accurately attribute results. It’s an ongoing process that doesn’t stop.
In a recent Adweek article, Stephen Yu, President and Chief Consultant at a data strategy firm stated that transactional data is the most powerful, definitely stronger indicator than clicks, views, calls, and visits when predicting future customer behavior. We’ve often joked that clicks aren’t calls – but guess what, calls aren’t appointments either – and that’s where good tracking and financial attribution comes into play.
Today, sophisticated tracking and artificial intelligence is applied to help understand dental consumer behavior and to match calls, clicks, and addresses to various marketing campaigns. This allows for good decision-making, much better targeting, and significantly better long-term results.
At Patient NEWS, we are smart cats, but we’ve earned our stripes with Practice ZEBRA. ZEBRA gives solo dentists and group managers the breadth of technology that dental marketing managers need to get clearer visibility of the patient journey and the financial impact and effectiveness of their dental marketing campaigns and team training.
Marketing attribution is one of the toughest things we, as marketing managers and business owners, deal with. I’m often jealous of the clear visibility that local marketers, like our dental clients, can get with tools like Practice ZEBRA. For me, it’s a manual process of checking the call tracking number, listening to the call, assigning the referral source and monitoring campaign results using a myriad of platforms, spreadsheets, and reports. Ugh. If you know my pain, and you’re running a dental office – you have a great solution with Practice ZEBRA. I suggest you call for a free demo now to find out more. I promise you it will be your “aha” moment of the week when you see what it can do for you.
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Direct Mail & Attribution Of Dental Patient Activity
Do you know where all of your active patients live, i.e. have you seen their households plotted on an area map
Do you know where your top-value patients live in comparison?
Would you like to see this information?
Using Practice ZEBRA, not only can you see where your patients live, but for your marketing, you can select pockets by value. In addition to this information, we also review competitor locations and demographics.
See how valuable being able to understand patient value and demographics is to target the best new patients? If you had access to maps like these for your dental location, where would you target your direct mail? What type of buyers live in those households and what type of messaging would best attract them to you?
Yu says, without a doubt, monetary transactions are stronger – whenever available – than other behaviors. So, in addition to this analysis, the AI in ZEBRA tracks and matches patients by form fill, phone, and address for the most accurate attribution possible – down to the penny patients spend with your office. It also tells you how many phone calls your practice received, how many were answered, and how many patients converted to appointment … and then how much production each patient spends with the practice.
So, you might be doing a ton of marketing and getting a good flow of new patients, but are they the best patients you could have? Or maybe you’re not generating the activity and new patients you want.
What would you say are your top challenges?
Getting enough quality new patients
Proving results to stakeholders
Training call handlers to convert more new patients
Confidently investing budget to certain marketing campaigns
Choosing which households to invest in?
You’re not alone. These are consistent challenges for solo dentists and group marketing managers. Which campaigns to prioritize, which to optimize and how, and what to eliminate.
Without clear visibility of key metrics like these, even if you have been successful, it may be hard to maintain growth momentum if you don’t know where to focus.
The answer. Good analytics for each marketing campaign – these will be slightly different for digital versus direct mail campaigns. Practice ZEBRA can help you focus and measure the effectiveness of every marketing campaign. ZEBRA is truly at the core of the patient journey. It’s the only dental software that tracks, measures, and facilitates every phase of the journey from awareness through practice growth and advocacy.
With ZEBRA you can spend more time moving forward and reaping rewards than guessing. You want to give credit to the campaigns that are driving overall practice growth. Different types of marketers will give different types of attribution, first click, last click, this click, that click, but at the end of the day, it’s all about patient value and production. That’s why you’re searching for new patients in the first place.
Here’s an example of a practice that implemented no new marketing campaigns – except direct mail – through the pandemic.
You can see in this actual graph from Practice ZEBRA (which integrates seamlessly with any pms) that this location was established and had been averaging 40 new patients per month pre-mailing. This office has an average new-patient
value over $2700, so with exceptional targeting they were able to boost new patients by 40+ per month which has added over $1.4 million in annualized revenue to the practice. Through the pandemic.
The key is clear visibility of their metrics. Valuable information to increase practice production and profit.
Another big issue I’ve blogged about many times is call conversion. Clicks aren’t calls, and calls aren’t appointments. Too many calls are missed across the board at every dental office and Practice ZEBRA can significantly help your practice with clear visibility on this metric – calls, answer rate, conversion rate, by practice, by call handler, right down to each section of the call and where it went wrong – plus, again, the artificial intelligence in ZEBRA gives your team instant alerts on new-patient calls so you can capture patients while they’re hot and before they move to a competitor.
And we’re back to transactional data … when you know that a new patient is worth $1600 to your office (you’ll know this metric in Practice ZEBRA, along with industry-average comparables and what the top 10% of dentists pull in) … then you’ll be able to elevate the importance of call handling and conversion. One missed new patient per week might be costing you $100,000 in lost revenue. Just one new patient.
What is your new-patient value?
What percentage of calls does your practice answer on average?
These are additional attribution metrics per marketing campaign that are critical to know, optimize, and improve. Yes, they’re available in Practice ZEBRA. Have I mentioned it enough – it’s the most amazing dental software for dental offices, DSO managers, and dental consultants to use.
Practice ZEBRA dental software maximizes practice production and profit. It’s seamless. It’s easy to implement. It connects to any practice management system and brings key metrics to the forefront. Leading consultants say it blows everything else like it out of the water. It’s a small investment that will drive BIG GAINS to your dental office.
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I guarantee, 100%, that you will have an “aha” moment when you see your practice in ZEBRA. Schedule the demo. You’ll see:
Patient & new-patient values – compared to industry average and top 10% – see what other dentists are billing
Patients & new-patient mapping – by production value
Patients & new-patients schedule percentages
Patient demographics & value by insurance provider
Percentage of missing & incorrect contact data, cell, email, & address.
And you can implement tracking on any marketing campaign and start seeing attribution data now so that you can make good decisions through the year. This will help you get more and better new patients. Practice ZEBRA will give you the transactional data you need to make good decisions for your practice. With so many choices, so many channels, and so many different demographic pockets around your practice, getting clear visibility will help you know where and how to focus your efforts.
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P.S. Practice ZEBRA includes all practice and marketing intelligence noted in this blog, plus call tracking, scoring, and telephone training, and all key automated patient communication modules, appointment reminders, reactivations, monthly newsletters, promotional emails, reviews, and more. It’s available with Enterprise views too. Be a smart cat. CHECK IT OUT.
