How To Get Your Existing Dental Patients Coming Back For More
Feb 19, 2018
10 min read
Table of contents
In our previous blog , we talked about how maintaining an online presence is vital for a dental practitioner to grow his practice exponentially leveraging the power of the web. But what to do when your online marketing efforts bring a few patients in? How to keep them coming back for more?
They are in your clinic because they got impressed with your brand online and found a value proposition in it, to keep them coming back for more, I think it goes without saying that you have to impress them with the way you run your actual practice as well.
Apart from giving an exceptional dental treatment, there are many things you can do to woo them over and develop a healthy relationship with them. After all, its strong relationships in business that bring in repeat sales rather than anything else.
So in this blog, we will be talking about some ways to provide a great in-clinic patient experience to keep them coming back for more -
Make use of online appointments
After finding your clinic online, a convinced potential patient will most probably give your clinic a call to set an appointment. Mind you, your front desk team can make or break your dental practice as they will always be your clinic’s first point of contact with your patients. So it becomes all the more important to make sure that they are proficient in whatever they do and to adequately train them if they are falling short.
You can make use of some online dental marketing services that’ll help your front desk team better manage clinic appointments and stay at the top of their game. Use online appointment management services of Setmore or Appointy to keep a track of all your clinic appointments for a marginal cost.
Remember, your front desk team’s attitude, professionalism and behavior can leave a lasting impression on patients - it’s your job to ascertain that it’s a good or bad one.
Engage with them through emails
Like you engaged with them online to bring them in, it’s important to engage with them in some way or the other when they actually come to your office to deliver a great customer experience. Your patients already know that you are great in your practice, that’s why they are there in the first place, all they are looking for is to form a relationship.
Share a story, teach them about some common dental problems and how to avoid getting them, get a little personal and try to know a bit about their life.
Small things like these can go a long way in forming forever lasting relationships with your patients that’ll bring in repeat sales and potentially can make your patients the advocates of your clinic, promoting word of mouth and in turn bringing in more patients, creating a circle that’ll never end.
For that, you always have to be on top of the mind of your patients when they think about getting a dental treatment. A nice way to do that is by sending them gifts or exclusive offers, newsletters or by calling them in regular intervals to simply ask if they need an appointment.
One of the best ways though to keep in touch with your patients is by sending emails. Start collecting email addresses of all your patients that walk through your door and run promotional email campaigns with the help of those collected emails to stay at the top of your game and in their mind. You can use an email marketing software such as Mailchimp or Constant Contact to run your marketing campaigns.
Or if you can’t take the time out of your practice to send emails, we can help you out!
Create an office culture
Your office culture is essentially the way you run your office. It’s in your leadership style, your values, your behavior, your personality, your system, the way your employees communicate with each other and with your patients, your clinic decor, physical environment and basically everything that is linked to your clinic in some way or the other. The way you run your dental clinic actually holds the power to attract or repel patients, depends on how well organized and managed your dental practice is.
Your unique way of doing things in the most optimized way and striking a perfect balance between all the elements mentioned above holds the power to boost productivity, attract quality staff, bring in patients and keep them coming back for more.
Send greeting cards using online services
Doing something extra for your patients will only bring a smile to their face and strengthen your relationship with them. Going up and beyond your regular practice to do something special for your patients will make them feel special and cared for, enhancing their customer experience marginally.
Send thank you cards, get well cards, birthday cards, Happy New Year cards, bouquets on their birthday or marriage anniversary, gift baskets or anything you can think of to develop a special bond with them. Use an online service like Send Out Cards to send custom designed cards or some gifts to your patients, adding that personal touch which will make them feel special and cared for.
Ask for feedback
After you are done with the necessary treatments, doing something as simple as asking for an honest opinion about the quality of services provided to your patients can make them feel important and their opinions valued.
While there are many ways to collect valuable feedback, the most convenient way to do it is through your dental website. Make a separate dedicated section in your website where your existing patients can do just that or you can go the traditional way and ask all the patients that come in your clinic to give feedback using a paper and pen.
Doesn’t matter how you do it, the fact that you are giving your patients an opportunity to voice their opinions about your dental practice can go a long way in forming a healthy relationship with them.
In today’s tough competitive environment, you can not possibly be a thousand times better than your competitors, but you can be better than them in a thousand small ways. Make your practice stand out by doing the above-mentioned things for your patients and watch them visit your clinic more often with a gleaming smile on their face!
How to maintain your brand reputation across multiple digital platforms?
Why Online “Buzz” Influences Purchases Decisions? Online Reputation management has become essential for modern-day businesses. As much as customers care about the quality of your product and services, they equally care about your online activities, reviews, and brand presence. What is your brand posting on Instagram? What are you tweeting? Did you reply to their online queries? Actions like these matter a lot! You never know; your existing customers might be posting pictures of your product or sharing their experiences with your brand, and you simply can't afford to lose out on this engagement. As per Statista's survey of 2020, 36% of Instagram users follow brands that they use on the social media platform. Apart from Instagram, 35% of the respondents said that they follow their favorite brands on Twitter. Another study says that almost 90% of the users purchase from online brands they follow on social media networks. Hence, for the years to come, we can say that investing in online brand reputation can help businesses drive ROIs like never before! Myth: Your Online Reputation Is Not In Your Control! There exists a psychological factor behind consumer reviews, comments, or ratings. For a new customer, they act as a testimony. Hence, it is a huge misconception that online presence or reputation is something that doesn't influence purchase decisions. Here, we are talking about the control or "management" of your brand's online reputation. You can always gain a competitive edge as a brand by eliminating fake or negative reviews, establishing your presence over influential platforms, etc. If you want to garner great reviews that speak positively about your work, you must adopt a reputation management strategy. You can learn how we ran a well-structured referral and review campaign on Amazon that lifted the sales of a Coffee Brand by 230%! Check out our case study to know more. A well-designed online reputation management strategy shall portray your brand in a positive light. By investing your efforts in nurturing your online reputation, you can witness skyrocketing growth in sales. If you can maintain a positive brand reputation, you will attract potential customers by gaining their trust! For instance, we generated + 279% Organic Traffic for a doctor booking platform based out of Philadelphia via fifteen Social media campaigns which brought tons of users to their website. It helped them to boost their customer acquisition. Check out our case study to learn more. So How Can You Maintain Your Online Reputation Across Multiple Digital Platforms? You can follow these four steps for your brand’s online reputation management. These are some simple steps through which you can improve the online presence that’ll benefit you in the following ways: ORM can expand your customer base and help you maintain a consistent outreach. Online reviews can help customers to engage with your brand. When you stay in touch with your audiences, you improve internal practices. You have a better chance of boosting your customer retention. Better online reviews and presence can help you in SEO. The elements of ORM include responsiveness to online reviews, reputation monitoring, search protection, constant outreach to encourage customers to share their reviews online, social media branding, damage control, and review audit. These elements are usually implemented via paid, earned, owned, and shared media channels. Let’s begin! #1 Perform Sentiment Analysis! As a business leader, you need to analyze how your customers feel about your brand. Are they happy with your services? Are they satisfied with the results? You must dig deep into the data to understand your brand’s current reputation standard. Check your social media posts, comments, mentions, take a glance at your competitor’s social handles, look at how their customers talk to them, and then define a path for yourself. You must also evaluate your online reviews on platforms like Yelp, Yahoo, and Google. There are various online tools or experts who can quantify this data into comparable metrics so that you can analyze how things are going for your brand. #2. Track Social Media Tags Mentions. Brand reputation management is a continuous process; you have to stay proactive! Once you recognize your online reputation status, you need to set up your social media channels to respond to customer queries or complaints. Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, etc., are popular platforms where brands reply to their customers. Social media channels make it very convenient for a user to ask a question or appreciate your work. Pro Tip: Ensure you respond to your customers as fast as possible! #3. Make Your Business Appear Positive. As discussed in the previous section, negative reviews can hamper your client acquisition efforts. The best way to deal with them is by resolving them and encouraging positive reviews. Of course, you can’t force your customers to post positive reviews about your brand, but you can always share testimonials of happy clients. You can highlight the kind of positive experience they had on your social media platforms. You should never hold yourself from reposting your clients’ tweets or feedback. In this way, you can leverage user-generated content that can enhance your online marketing. Apart from customer reviews or comments, you must encourage your employees to post positive sentiments about their work culture. #4 Work With Reviews, Comments, And Analytics. Your customers should feel or recognize that your brand is putting additional efforts into fixing certain shortcomings that they comment about. They should feel that they are being listened to. For instance, they might complain about the delivery process or the recent rise in the price. Listen to them and make changes accordingly. Your brand’s reputation matters! Yes! Your online brand reputation is within your control. But first, you must realize the key areas where you can improve upon. You must listen, process, and react to online conversations that are related to your brand. If you are looking for more effective ORM solutions and efficient tactics, we at Saffron Edge can help you develop a robust strategy! ...
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How To Get Your Existing Dental Patients Coming Back For More
In our previous blog , we talked about how maintaining an online presence is vital for a dental practitioner to grow his practice exponentially leveraging the power of the web. But what to do when your online marketing efforts bring a few patients in? How to keep them coming back for more? They are in your clinic because they got impressed with your brand online and found a value proposition in it, to keep them coming back for more, I think it goes without saying that you have to impress them with the way you run your actual practice as well. Apart from giving an exceptional dental treatment, there are many things you can do to woo them over and develop a healthy relationship with them. After all, its strong relationships in business that bring in repeat sales rather than anything else. So in this blog, we will be talking about some ways to provide a great in-clinic patient experience to keep them coming back for more - Make use of online appointments After finding your clinic online, a convinced potential patient will most probably give your clinic a call to set an appointment. Mind you, your front desk team can make or break your dental practice as they will always be your clinic’s first point of contact with your patients. So it becomes all the more important to make sure that they are proficient in whatever they do and to adequately train them if they are falling short. You can make use of some online dental marketing services that’ll help your front desk team better manage clinic appointments and stay at the top of their game. Use online appointment management services of Setmore or Appointy to keep a track of all your clinic appointments for a marginal cost. Remember, your front desk team’s attitude, professionalism and behavior can leave a lasting impression on patients - it’s your job to ascertain that it’s a good or bad one. Engage with them through emails Like you engaged with them online to bring them in, it’s important to engage with them in some way or the other when they actually come to your office to deliver a great customer experience. Your patients already know that you are great in your practice, that’s why they are there in the first place, all they are looking for is to form a relationship. Share a story, teach them about some common dental problems and how to avoid getting them, get a little personal and try to know a bit about their life. Small things like these can go a long way in forming forever lasting relationships with your patients that’ll bring in repeat sales and potentially can make your patients the advocates of your clinic, promoting word of mouth and in turn bringing in more patients, creating a circle that’ll never end. For that, you always have to be on top of the mind of your patients when they think about getting a dental treatment. A nice way to do that is by sending them gifts or exclusive offers, newsletters or by calling them in regular intervals to simply ask if they need an appointment. One of the best ways though to keep in touch with your patients is by sending emails. Start collecting email addresses of all your patients that walk through your door and run promotional email campaigns with the help of those collected emails to stay at the top of your game and in their mind. You can use an email marketing software such as Mailchimp or Constant Contact to run your marketing campaigns. Or if you can’t take the time out of your practice to send emails, we can help you out! Create an office culture Your office culture is essentially the way you run your office. It’s in your leadership style, your values, your behavior, your personality, your system, the way your employees communicate with each other and with your patients, your clinic decor, physical environment and basically everything that is linked to your clinic in some way or the other. The way you run your dental clinic actually holds the power to attract or repel patients, depends on how well organized and managed your dental practice is. Your unique way of doing things in the most optimized way and striking a perfect balance between all the elements mentioned above holds the power to boost productivity, attract quality staff, bring in patients and keep them coming back for more. Send greeting cards using online services Doing something extra for your patients will only bring a smile to their face and strengthen your relationship with them. Going up and beyond your regular practice to do something special for your patients will make them feel special and cared for, enhancing their customer experience marginally. Send thank you cards, get well cards, birthday cards, Happy New Year cards, bouquets on their birthday or marriage anniversary, gift baskets or anything you can think of to develop a special bond with them. Use an online service like Send Out Cards to send custom designed cards or some gifts to your patients, adding that personal touch which will make them feel special and cared for. Ask for feedback After you are done with the necessary treatments, doing something as simple as asking for an honest opinion about the quality of services provided to your patients can make them feel important and their opinions valued. While there are many ways to collect valuable feedback, the most convenient way to do it is through your dental website. Make a separate dedicated section in your website where your existing patients can do just that or you can go the traditional way and ask all the patients that come in your clinic to give feedback using a paper and pen. Doesn’t matter how you do it, the fact that you are giving your patients an opportunity to voice their opinions about your dental practice can go a long way in forming a healthy relationship with them. In today’s tough competitive environment, you can not possibly be a thousand times better than your competitors, but you can be better than them in a thousand small ways. Make your practice stand out by doing the above-mentioned things for your patients and watch them visit your clinic more often with a gleaming smile on their face! ...
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5 Ways to Engage with your Patient database to increase acquisition
In this digitizing era, traditional marketing is not substantial for dental practices life family dentists, cosmetic dentists, and so on. While the classic way works to a certain extent, it cannot compare digital marketing. With the Internet by your side, your dental practice will be capable of reaching an audience you thought was not possible. According to Live Internet Stats, Google processes more than 5 billion searches per day. There is no doubt that these numbers include people searching for a dentist in your local area. Relying solely on traditional marketing methods is keeping you from reaching current and prospective patients. Read on for reasons why digital marketing is essential for your practice. Best ways to engage with Potential Patients Social Media Marketing Source Social media marketing is the ultimate way to build relationships with your audience. Proving that you can provide your customers with a pain-free experience is essential and important. It's important to keep in mind that you're selling comfort, good health, confidence, trust and above all, a pleasant experience. The social media platform connects you with your patients. Remind them that you're all about people, not just teeth. Benefits of using Social Media Increased Brand Awareness: Social media cost-efficient and is used to syndicate content and grow your business' visibility. Designing a well-planned social media strategy will significantly increase your brand recognition, considering you will be engaging with a broad audience of consumers. Increases Traffic: Your social media profiles are a gateway to your website, and every post is another opportunity to acquire a new customer. Utilizing social media will help you reach potential customers outside your loyal circle. Higher Conversion Rates: Your conversion rate increases as your visibility increases. Every brand promoting post will lead users to your website and in-return increase traffic. The humanization factor of social media marketing gives your business a positive impression. By sharing content, commenting, and posting on social media, your brand becomes interactive and personified. People believe in doing business with other people than companies. Pay-Per-Click Advertising Source According to WordStream,“PPC stands for pay-per-click, a model of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Essentially, it’s a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to “earn” those visits organically.” Benefits of using PPC Advertising Targeted Advertising: PPC advertising allows you to choose specific terms or interests for you to target your perfect audience. Use Google AdWords, to select keywords people are searching for, and send them to a relevant page on your site, to get the best chance of a conversion. Selecting these keywords takes research, but can often reap results if you can target the right audience. PPC advertising does not depend on SEO or Google Algorithm changes: PPC advertising is not as risky if you are using organic listings. Your success is not primarily dependent on Google algorithmic changes or your website’s optimization. PPC advertising is more of a numbers game. The amount of money you are spending and the amount of return you are receiving are the only factors you should look out for. Measurable ROI: PPC advertising gives you quantifiable ROI, which precisely shows you what your getting out of your investment in the ads. You can measure the users' actions and other related stats such as the interaction your ad is getting with your viewers. This will help you get an estimate of your returns from the ads posted. Estimating your ROI couldn't be more straightforward. Email Marketing Source According to wikipedia, simply put, Email marketing is the procedure of sending commercial messages, to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. Benefits of Email Marketing Distribution at Scale: Subscribers that share your deals and offers with others are marketing your services for free. In this way your business is automatically creating links without you investing a whole lot of resources. Users sharing your content act as brand promoters. This way you increase reach and credibility. Low costs: Email marketing is very cost-effective compared to mainstream marketing channels. Unlike advertising on billboards, magazines or television channels, there are no fees paid in exchange for exposure on emails. Email marketers invest in software to automate, track and evaluate the emails. Sending thousands of emails at a time seems like a challenging task, but the costs are far lower than other marketing channels. You can reach people on any device: The number of users checking their email from their mobile devices is enormous. It means you can use email marketing to reach people on any device at any place, improving visibility and reach over time. It is vital to make sure that your emails are easy to open and read from mobile devices, paying close attention to image sizes and the amount of text on the page. Displaying Testimonials Source If you're selling a product on your website, customer testimonials can be a crucial content element because they are unbiased comments that prompt visitors to buy. By using testimonials in text, audio or video formats on your site, you introduce content that will promote your product in convincing fashion. Benefits of using Testimonials Build Trust & Credibility: Testimonials allow your satisfied customers to fill the minds of your prospective buyers for you. Then their anxious thoughts are put at ease, knowing that other customers have been happy and satisfied after doing business with you. “Social Proof” is a powerful tool, well understood by marketer’s. When users see others trying/buying/enjoying something, they are most likely to do the same. Affordable: Getting testimonials is free. Given that they are positive, all you have to do is to get customer feedback and then get permission to publish it on your website. There is no need to spend a penny! Offering Discounts and Promos Source While you’re concerned about staying ahead in terms of your technical craft, customer service, and managerial practices, don’t forget marketing and promotions. Special offers enhance your business and empower you to control the variables. Providing exclusive offers are critical in the competitive world of dentistry, orthodontics, and prosthodontics. Discount Ideas Free Consultation: A free consultation is a simple but valid offer. Offering free consultations is one of the best ways to get new patients. New patient discount: This can be a costly yet nearly universally effective promotion. Some clinics offer free or discounted first appointments. The ROI can be low until and unless a high percentage of these people become long-term patients. Back To School Discounts: February and July present a great deal of opportunity to attract families with kids to your dental practice by offering a back to school offer like free check-up and discounted cleaning. These offers will give your clinic a nice boost at least twice a year. If your dental marketing strategy isn't primarily digital, it's time for an overhaul. Contact us. ...
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