How to Grow Your Dental Practice with Automation
Happy New Year!
Want to save time this year?
Most dental practices are busy treating patients, and don’t have time to manage marketing or advertising campaigns. Between treating patients, maintaining CE credits, and staying informed on latest oral health trends in dental journals, you don’t have the time to ask your patients for reviews or referrals. But, without these, your practice will struggle to grow with new patients.
Many successful dental and orthodontic practices have implemented technology to automate various marketing and administrative tasks in their practices to lower the burden on their staff so their team can focus on delivering the best experience for patients in the clinic.
Here, we’ll review the top 5 strategies you can use to automate your dental practice growth:
1. Automatically collect existing patient reviews
2. Automatically collect new patient referrals
3. Automatically collect new patient web leads
4. Automatically collect all digital marketing leads
5. Automatically collect and analyze patient feedback
Let’s get started!
1. Automatically Collect Existing Patient Reviews
Your reputation determines your success. In a customer service survey by Dimensional Research (2013), 88% of people surveyed said that they were influenced by online reviews when making a buying decision. How many times have you chosen a new service provider based on their online reviews? Your patients are doing the same.
Once a user conducts a search query online for a search term, such as ‘dentist near me’, many users will search Google Maps for a dental clinic that’s geographically close to their work or home, then they’ll click on the dental website with the highest reviews first. So, both the quantity and quality of the reviews matters to attract their attention and encourage them to click on your website first.
Patient reviews are third-party validation or ‘social proof’ that validates your dental services. Potential patients are influenced by online reviews when deciding which dental clinic to visit. But, asking patients to provide a review can be easy to forget for a busy dental practice. Even if your team remembers to ask in-person, your patients will likely forget to write a review when they leave your clinic.
You can solve this problem by using technology, such as Optiimus Reputation and Review Management, which automatically asks your patients for feedback after every visit or purchase. Once your patient completes their visit at your clinic and is checked out at the front desk, our automation tool sends out an email or text message to your patients asking for feedback. Their responses are then posted to any online reputation website, such as Google Maps.
But, where should you post your patient reviews?
The most popular review platforms that your patients already use include Google, Facebook, Yelp, RateMDs, Healthgrades, Vitals, Better Business Bureau (BBB) and others. It’s helpful to encourage patients to post reviews on the platforms your patients use the most. But, once your patients post their reviews, your team needs to respond to each and every review. This helps improve your online reputation, but also your local SEO.
Google determines how to rank your website in Google Maps using various factors, such as your online reputation on Google, your website and third-party review sites. Google evaluates your review quantity, recency, velocity, diversity, authority, format, and sentiment to determine where to rank your website in Google Maps.
But, Google’s ranking factors are not just about collecting, but also responding to each and every review. If you’re getting a lot of reviews, it can be time consuming to monitor and respond to each review, on every single platform. But, not responding to the reviews hurts your search rankings.
Optiimus provides one central hub for you to monitor and respond to your online reviews on over 200 third-party review websites, such as Google, Facebook, Healthgrades, RateMDs, Vitals, Better Business Bureau (BBB), and more. If you’re too busy, our team can manage reviews and respond for you, helping you grow your stellar online reputation.
2. Automatically Collect New Patient Referrals
One of the most powerful strategies to grow your dental practice is through new patient referrals, which is a form of word-of-mouth marketing. The Nielsen Norman Group conducted a global survey (2013), which found that 84% of people surveyed said that word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family are the most trustworthy and influential forms of advertising.
Your patients trust the recommendations of their friends and family more than any form of advertising. But, asking your patients to provide a referral can be easy to forget for a busy dental practice. Even if your team remembers to ask, most of the time your patients can’t think of a referral to provide on the spot.
You can solve this problem using technology, such as Optiimus Patient Referral Program, which
automatically asks your patients for a referral after every visit or purchase. Our referral marketing system can ask every patient, or only the patients most likely to refer, based on their patient experience feedback.
When you ask your patients for a referral, most of the time they can’t think of who to refer to your dental clinic. If you only ask once, patients won’t be able to provide a referral on the spot. If you ask too often, this strains the patient relationship.
Let technology automate the asking for you. But, instead of asking your patients to think of a referral on the spot, we provide your patients with a referral link to share through email, text message, Facebook and Messenger. Referral marketing leverages your patient’s existing social networks to collect new referrals from any channel.
New patient referrals come from multiple channels, such as phone calls, voicemails, text messages, emails, website forms, live chat, social media, and more. This makes it difficult to stay organized and to monitor the source of each new referral. Not having a digital patient referral program can be difficult to manage manually.
Optiimus builds digital referral programs that collect and organize all of your referrals from every channel and notifies you about each new referral. We’ll automatically send a thank-you note to your patient for sending you a referral. You can monitor and reward each patient referral with a gift or incentive, if possible, to thank your patient and encourage more referrals.
3. Automatically Collect New Patient Web Leads
The purpose of most digital marketing and advertising campaigns is to drive traffic to your website. This traffic is potential new patients that may be interested in your dental and orthodontic services.
A well-established dental website attracts a lot of traffic from potential new patients. Some of these visitors may have a quick question, but don’t want to call or email, as it’s too cumbersome or time consuming. Many of your website visitors would prefer to chat using live chat software.
Live chat software connects your website visitors to your front desk team, providing great customer service while increasing appointment bookings. Website visitors can ask questions about your dental clinic, services, practitioners, and more. This new line of communication provides a convenient patient experience, alleviating their concerns before booking an appointment.
But, many website visitors will ask similar questions, which slows down your team’s productivity. They’ll ask questions related to your dental services, hours of operation, insurance coverage, parking availability, and more. These repetitive questions can be a time burden for your already busy team.
You can solve this problem using technology, such as Optiimus AI Chatbot, which provides a dental AI chatbot, engineered to interact with healthcare patients. Our AI chatbot answers your patient’s frequently asked questions and guides visitors to book an appointment. Your team can monitor the chat, jump in, or let the AI chatbot answer questions and book appointments.
AI chatbots are growing in popularity, especially in healthcare settings. According to EIT Health (2020) about 75-90% of all online healthcare queries are handled by AI chatbots.
The main benefit of using AI chatbots is that they provide additional sales and customer service support – 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. They work like an extra employee, but even when your clinic is closed on evenings and weekends.
Your website can automatically capture your website visitors’ information using our live chat software to ensure they stay connected to your practice. Every conversation starts with their name and phone number. This captures a new patient lead so you can follow up when they’re ready to book an appointment.
When your website visitors are chatting with your front desk team, they may leave your website before booking an appointment. Once they leave your website or close their Internet browser, the online conversation ends.
Optiimus keeps your website visitors engaged with your team online on your website, or offline when they leave your website. Using business texting we route messages to their mobile phone so you stay connected, completing their appointment booking.
4. Automatically Collect All Digital Marketing Leads
Your dental marketing activities generate new patient inquiries for your dental services. Each patient inquiry, or lead, is considering booking at your dental clinic, which could result in new business revenue. But, if the patient inquiry is not responded to promptly, or slips through the cracks, the patient may book at another dental clinic.
Well-balanced dental marketing campaigns generate new patient inquiries from many sources, such as phone calls, voicemails, text messages, emails, website forms, live chat, Google, social media, and more. It’s common for any busy dental practice to miss any of these new patient inquiries, to not follow up promptly, or to forget to check these platforms.
You’re not alone; according to Harvard Business Review (2012), about 71% of qualified leads are never followed up with and slip through the cracks, while only 27% of leads ever get contacted. This is a huge waste of marketing and advertising budgets!
You can solve this problem using technology, such as Optiimus Dental CRM, which captures and monitors new patient leads, the marketing source they came from, the date and time of each interaction, which team members they interacted with, the treatment type requested, the outcome of each interaction, and more.
Your existing dental practice management software does have a CRM built-in, but that’s only for your existing patients. In addition to existing patients, you also have a large number (i.e. hundreds or thousands) of potential new patients, or leads, that haven’t been captured in your existing dental CRM and won’t be until they book an appointment. In the meantime, if you don’t organize these leads in a database or CRM, many of these leads may slip through the cracks, which would be an inefficient waste of your marketing budget.
Our HIPAA compliant dental CRM automatically captures all patient inquiries from every channel and organizes them for you without any data entry from your team. Your team can follow up with each new patient promptly, book more appointments and make efficient use of your marketing budget.
In addition to making efficient use of your marketing budget, a CRM for organizing and managing your marketing leads is an effective strategy for improving your marketing results.
For instance, many potential patients will call your dental clinic, but will not book an appointment. What’s the reason the caller didn’t book? It may be related to your treatment services offered, price objections, scheduling conflicts, clinic location, or other reasons. Understanding the caller’s reasons for not booking an appointment is valuable information for your dental practice.
Our dental CRM uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology to listen to each call and monitor the outcome. We provide valuable information for your practice, such as the outcome of each call and the reasons for not booking. This information helps you improve your practice or services to better reflect your patient’s oral health needs.
In addition to phone call analysis, our dental CRM provides AI analytics that captures what you care about the most: new patient appointments, staff performance and your advertising’s ROI. Our CRM captures new patient leads from any digital marketing channel, measures the appointment booking rate of each staff member, and transcribes each call to provide coaching opportunities for your team.
5. Automatically Collect and Analyze Patient Feedback
One of the best ways of growing your practice isn’t just to focus on attracting new patients, but to also focus on retaining your existing ones. Generally, it’s less expensive to retain an existing patient than to find a new one using advertising. Bain & Company found that a 5% increase in customer retention can result in a 20% increase in profits.
But, how do you improve patient retention? What are some of the most common reasons that patients are leaving your dental practice?
There’s always going to be a natural attrition of patients and customers in any business. Some surveys have found that businesses lose an average of 5% of customers each year from natural attrition that’s unavoidable.
But, not all attrition is natural or unavoidable. Some surveys have found that about 1 in 26 customers complain about a problem; the rest just leave without saying anything.
To avoid having patients leave without saying anything, it’s helpful to capture their feedback so you can identify problems to resolve before they escalate and drive further patients away. The easiest way to capture patient feedback is through patient surveys.
One negative interaction with any person on your team can result in your patients not returning, telling others about the experience, or writing a negative review online. Not knowing how your patients feel about you or your team can result in problems escalating, impacting your practice.
You can ask your patients about their feedback in person, but many people are polite in person and will be more candid and honest in surveys. Also, it’s difficult to collect feedback from every patient while also completing their dental treatments, or to get a big picture perspective of your entire practice from verbal feedback.
You can solve this problem using technology, such as Optiimus Patient Surveys, which sends your patients a survey after their visit, either through SMS text or email, for them to complete from the comfort of their phones.
You can manually send out surveys at any frequency you choose, but sending a patient that hasn’t been to your practice in months a survey is less likely to receive a response. Instead, if you automatically send out surveys to each patient as soon as they check out of your clinic, they’re more likely to respond because the experience is fresh on their minds.
Their responses can be saved and stored in a digital database, which we can then analyze using AI technology. Instead of reading each response manually (there could be hundreds or thousands), our AI technology can aggregate responses to provide sentiment analysis and look for trends. We identify positive or negative trends, areas of improvement, and turn negative feedback into opportunities to improve your patient’s experience. Turn your patient feedback into actionable insights with our survey program.
Conclusion
Many successful dental practices are busy treating patients and delivering amazing patient experiences. As a result, they don’t have time to manage the daily aspects of their marketing campaigns.
You can implement technology to automate your marketing tasks to save you and your team time, make efficient use of your marketing budget, and improve your marketing return on investment (ROI).
Optiimus can automate your dental practice marketing growth by automatically collecting existing patient reviews, automatically collecting new patient referrals, automatically collecting new patient web leads, automatically collecting all digital marketing leads, as well as automatically collecting and analyzing patient feedback from surveys.
Focus your time on treating your patients and automate your dental practice growth.
If you have any questions or need any help, feel free to contact me directly. I read and respond to every email. All the best in growing your dental practice!
Sarkis Hakopdjanian
President | Optiimus
(587) 409 5990 | (833) 409 0979
sarkis@optiimius.ca
