This week’s post comes from our friend and Passive Income Expert, Dr. Mark Hower, CEO and Founder of Passive Income Dentist. As a dentist, Dr. Hower grew an 8-figure dental practice, using core philosophies he studied at various DSOs. The Passive Income Dentist Mastermind focuses on implementing efficient systems that yield tangible results in revenue within 60 days.
In this post he shares all his tips and tricks to increase your new patient flow without having to increase your marketing budget.
New patient flow is the lifeblood of your practice – growing your new patient flow is easier than it seems.
Today I am sharing four core principles you can implement in your practice starting today to increase your patient flow – before spending another dollar on paid advertising.
In addition, I filmed a video where I go deeper on each of these topics. You can view the full video training here.
4 principles for growing your new patient flow:
#1 Understand where every new patient comes from.
As a practice owner, it is essential you know where your new patients are coming from.
Are they a referral from another patient? Did they book an appointment using a QR code on a mailer? Did they find you on google business or yelp?
Many of the dentists I work with don’t understand where their new patient flow is coming from, or they don’t have it compiled in a way that’s easy to reference.
If you are relying on your practice management software, most don’t automatically compile different categories together in a way that’s useful – for example, patients that were referred from other patients or patients that were internal referrals.
You need an easy and effective way to pull this data. Pulling this data should take you no longer than 30 seconds.
Once you know where your new patients are coming from, you will know what activities to focus on to drive more patients to your practice.
And – You will also know what to invest in when it comes to your marketing.
#2 Understand the cost of a new patient.
This cost of a new patient is an absolutely critical number to know and you’re leaving opportunity on the table if you don’t have this data as a practice owner.
Now that you know where your new patients are coming from (see principle #1), you use your practice software and your marketing analytics software (Google Adwords) to identify the exact cost of NP Acquisition.
This is how you know what to focus on with your marketing efforts – you can use this data to choose how to spend your marketing budget.
I’ll break this down further: If most new patients are responding to a mailer that costs you $20.00 per new patient but your Meta ads are booking patients at $2.00 per new patient, you can use this data to begin to identify how much to spend and where when it comes to your marketing.
It is important for you to also evaluate the lifetime value of a new patient. New patients might be less expensive on Facebook Ads, but what if the $20 new client from the mailer is spending 10 times more inside of your practice?
Pro Tip: The advanced placement metric no one talks about that will really grow your business fast: cost of NP Acquisition Cost divided by Lifetime Gross Profit
Inside the Passive Income Dentist Mastermind, I show you how to set up an effective marketing dashboard, measure and track this data. I also show you how to make informed growth decisions based on your numbers.
#3 Focus on non-paid forms of new patient flow.
One of the biggest ways that you can bring in new patients is through internal referrals.
You need a systematic process to create an amazing experience, so that your team can effectively and consistently deliver this experience to your patients.
This doesn’t have to be complicated, but it needs to be systemized so that your team can do it repeatedly (without you micromanaging them).
There are two main ways of focusing on driving internal referrals in your practice:
- Create an amazing experience that makes patients want to tell other patients about you. I call this the Perfect Patient Experience. You should have a minimum of 5 marketable attributes in your practice that make patients want to tell friends.
- Ask patients for internal referrals in a systemized way that encourages them to give your practice internal referrals.
The majority of your new patient flow should be coming from referrals – if your new patient flow is less than 50% referrals, reach out to me directly so my team can help you to figure out why.
Some of these things are not necessarily brand new to you, but being able to systematically train your team on them so that they happen every single time with every single patient is what really sets us apart.
By doing these things, you’re creating raving fans that have reasons for wanting to refer all their patients.
#4 Train your team to increase new patient flow.
Your team becomes an important part of new patient flow and referrals.
The number one way to train your team to increase new patient flow is to train every team member on phone call conversion.
This ensures when a patient calls in, the team has the best answers to basic questions such as “Do you take my insurance? How much is the cost of a crown?” and other questions that normally stump a team member and ultimately prevent a patient from being scheduled.
A word from Holli: This point is key! And I highly recommend you have your team train with a consultant on how to handle these questions. I also have a blog post about this which you can read here: Are you Unknowing Losing New Patients?
By training your team to increase the Conversion Rate, you should be able to increase our new patient flow by a minimum of 20%.
BONUS HACK:
Google reviews are a huge driver of new patients for most of the doctors that I work with. You need to have a consistent way to be able to drive new patient flow from these sources, to be able to compete with those in your market.
Dr. Mark loves supporting Practice Owners with growing their practice in a sustainable way that allows them time away from the chair. To see an overview of how every business system fits together to create a profitable practice, grab his Perfect Patient Experience Training.
We hope you enjoyed this guest blog post!
Smiles,
Holli Perez
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