Let us start with the line that makes most practice owners wince. We charge £20 for an emergency assessment, X-rays included. On its own, that visit barely covers the chair time, the nurse, the film and the clinician's attention. Run the unit economics in isolation and it looks like a charity ward. So why on earth do we keep doing it?
Well, because the £20 toothache is the cheapest top-of-funnel acquisition we have ever found. The panicking patient who books at 9pm with a swollen face is the front door, and a measurable share of them walk through it and never really leave. We want to show you the actual funnel we track, where people leak out of it, and the two follow-up touches that moved the needle most, so you can model whether a loss-leader emergency price would pay you back too.
The Funnel Stages We Actually Track (And Where the Leaks Are)
Here is the shape of it. Roughly a third of our emergency patients arrive needing something the same visit that goes well beyond the £20: an extraction, a temporary, the start of a root canal. So the first stage already lifts a chunk of these visits above break-even on day one. That surprised us when we first measured it honestly, because the instinct is to assume an emergency patient takes the cheap fix and bolts.
The bigger prize sits downstream. Of every hundred emergency patients we see, a meaningful slice book a second appointment within twelve months that has nothing to do with the original pain. The extraction patient comes back about an implant. The person we treated for a cracked front tooth remembers us when they finally want it to look right, and that is composite bonding at £199 a tooth or veneers at £695. The anxious patient we sedated gently for a quick procedure becomes the patient who will only ever see us, because we treated them kindly. Curious, isn't it, how the £20 visit keeps paying out long after the invoice closed.
Now, the leaks. The biggest one is purely about momentum: the gap between the emergency visit and any next contact. A patient in acute pain is in no state to plan their dental future; they want the throbbing to stop and to go home. If you let that visit be the whole relationship, you have rented a patient for one night. The second leak is geography and access. A patient who had to drive across a city in agony will think twice about coming back for routine work, which is one reason we map our clinics tightly to where the demand actually sits, the way we did when we opened our emergency dentist in Manchester in Newton Heath, right beside the people who needed it.
The Two Follow-Up Touches That Moved Conversion Most
So, the part you actually came for. We tested a fair few follow-up sequences, and two of them did the real work.
The first is embarrassingly simple: a same-week phone call from a real human who can see the patient's notes and say, "How is that tooth settling? When you are ready, here is what the full fix looks like and what it costs." No pressure, no script that reeks of a call centre. The honesty about price up front is doing a lot of quiet work here, because the patient has already learned we play straight with money, and that trust is exactly what carries a £20 visit into a £1,999 implant conversation.
The second touch is the treatment plan in writing while the memory of the pain is still warm. We hand the patient a clear, costed plan for the definitive work before they leave, even when the emergency itself is resolved. The window where someone is most motivated to sort their teeth for good is the week they were in agony. Wait three months and that motivation has cooled to room temperature. Strike while the nerve, so to speak, is still tender.
How to Model Whether This Would Pay You Back
Here is the candid bit, the maths you can take to your own spreadsheet. Take your true cost of an emergency visit. Subtract the £20. That gap is your acquisition cost per patient, and you should weigh it against the lifetime value of the patients who convert, well beyond that single visit. If even a modest fraction go on to implants, aligners from £999, or simply become recall patients who come twice a year for a decade, the blended return makes most paid-marketing channels look expensive and slow by comparison. We would gently say this: let the twelve-month cohort be the verdict on that £20 line, not the day-one invoice.
The thing we keep coming back to, and the reason we built a 24/7 emergency model rather than bolting it onto a 9-to-5 practice, is that pain is the most honest lead source there is. Nobody books an emergency appointment for fun. They book because they need you right now, and "right now" is when trust gets made. Get the follow-up right and that £20 becomes the best money a patient ever spent finding their dentist. You can see how we frame the whole proposition to patients on our main site, but the engine underneath it is this funnel, run patiently, measured honestly. Does that sound familiar to anyone running an emergency book? We suspect it might.