Marketing case study: Daily deals site

In our last post, we ruminated on some of the issues involved with using daily deals sites to promote dental and orthodontic procedures.  At the top of that post, we promised to discuss some results that we’ve had with using them so this post is dedicated to that subject.

Before diving in, note that as believers in quality advertising, we are willing to try a number of new avenues to keep marketing diversified and in front of as many people as possible.  You may have found the formula that works for your practice and do not want to change things.  That makes perfect sense.  But if you ever want to experiment with something without having to affect your delicate balance, we might be willing to try it (if the cost and setup are reasonable) in one or more of our offices for you and then provide full feedback on how things went.  This gives you a “live fire” test without deleteriously impacting your results if things don’t go according to plan.

With that, on to the case study:

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Marketing strategy: Daily deals sites

One media channel that some practices, including some of ours, have experimented with over the past few years are the daily deals services that have sprung up throughout the world.  You know some of the bigger names: Groupon, Living Social, Sweet Jack.  We know that they can be effective for restaurants, kids’ play areas and the like, but what about the dental and orthodontic practice?  

Generally, the process is the following: you contract with one or more of the services to advertise a price or other promotion to their “fan” base.  The ads are usually limited to a period of time and/or a certain number of people.  Once someone utilizes your services with one of the coupons from the site, you split the proceeds with the daily deals company.  Typically, you’ll split the proceeds 50/50, although Groupon has been cutting its take down to 35% in some cases to beat on the competition.  So, let’s say that you offer a deal for a $20 cleaning through Groupon.  When you get the $20 from that patient, $10 of it goes to Groupon and you keep the other $10.

In this post, we give you some of our thoughts and results that we’ve seen.  As you might expect, when the conversation with a doctor ventures into the realm of something like Groupon, we get a response along the lines of “No way.  That may work for other businesses, but not mine.”  Here are the main objections we get:

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Process simplified: generating important numbers

Over the last couple of months, we’ve thrown several computations and numbers at you.  Taking the time to compute things like the batting average, conversion rate, show up rate, etc. can benefit your practice and help you make effective, efficient decisions.  But a savvy practitioner may ask, “Those numbers are all well and good, but do you expect me to spend all of my time summarizing results and making computations?  Not only is that boring, but it also takes away time from analysis and focusing on my practice.”

And this, savvy practitioner, is an excellent point.  There are quite a number of ways to get to these numbers without burdening you with a green visor and a bunch of 7 column paper.  Here are some of your options:

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3 ways to improve your new patient show up rate

In our last post, we discussed the useful number known as the conversion rate.  One component of that conversion rate relates to patients who have made an appointment, but do not show up for that appointment.  In our scheme, the percentage of the patients that show up for their new patient consultation is known as the show up rate.  Like the conversion rate, the computation is very simple: take the number of patients that showed up for a new patient appointment divided by the number that made a new patient appointment for that period.

Like the conversion rate, this number will result in a percentage between 0 and 100 (if the number is greater than 100%, you probably have an issue with the process that computes this number).  Also like the conversion rate, we’re concerned with the trend and performance over time.  If your show up rate is 80% for 6 months straight, drops to 40% in one month and then goes right back to 80%, we’ll look at that one aberrant month, but not spend too much time stressing about it.

In a lot of ways, getting a patient to show up for that first appointment represents the last major hurdle in getting a patient into your system.  

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Key metric: conversion rate

On a regular basis, we here at My Practice Engine like to equip your dental or orthodontic practice with simple, meaningful statistics to track.  When you look at the number, that number is telling you something very powerful about your practice.  In the past, we’ve discussed things like benchmark expenses as a percentage of revenue and batting averages.  

Here’s a key marketing barometer to add to your quiver.  We refer to it as the conversion rate and it is very easy to compute.  For any given month, take your number of new contracts or total of new patients who have agreed to start treatment and divide that total by the number of consultation appointments made.  That bit of mathematics will yield a percentage somewhere between 0 and 100%. 

More important than the number itself is what does this number tell us?

As you can probably tell from the numerator and denominator, we are answering the following vital question: At what rate did potential new patients get converted into actual new patients?  If I want to sign x patients, how many consultations should be on the books for a given month.  For example, say that your conversion rate is normally 30%.  If you want to sign 10 new contracts in a month, you need to have 34 consultations booked (actually 33.333 if we take 10 divided by 30%).  

When we have a consultation on the books, there are 4 things that can cause this potential patient not to become an ongoing, paying patient.

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Avoid these information errors

If you’ve read this site before, you know that we preach the importance of information.  But what seems to be lost in the discussion is the fact that the information needs to be pointed, simple and useful.  Practice management software companies and other services are perfectly capable of generating reams of data.  But who has the time to look through all of that stuff?  And does all of that information have meaning?  

Today, we’ll discuss those and other fallacies that come with the generation of information and the usage of those data.  You don’t want to be presented with information that consumes excessive amounts of your time to understand or that lead you in the wrong direction.

Here are the potential mistakes you want to avoid:

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