It’s amazing how much of their hard-earned marketing dollars dentists are wasting.
You might not believe that applies to you if you’re fortunate enough to be getting all the new dental patients you can handle. It’s still true, though.
Research shows that dental patients are very bad at recalling where they heard of your practice. In particular, they’re very unreliable when remembering the one ad or piece of your marketing that influenced them to call for an appointment.
You can get around this to some extent if you offer a discounted first appointment if your new patient mentions a promo code. If your experience is like that of most dentists, a significant number of patients don’t mention the code and/or don’t recall it accurately when prompted.
The bottom line is that you don’t know with any accuracy what parts of your marketing are working to make the phone ring. You’re throwing away money on the parts that don’t put more patient butts in chairs.
Once the Phone Rings
Another way that you could be throwing away money is through your staff failing to appoint new patients when they call. Practically every dentist swears that their phone answering staff does a great job keeping up with calls and appointing new patients.
SmartBox has data to show that’s not the case.
Now, every practice is different, and yours may be the exception in this regard. But through our Zetetics® phone tracking system, we learned that practices tend to miss an astonishing number of calls during business hours.
That’s right – the phone call goes unanswered and that prospect is very likely to become someone else’s new patient.
You’re busy in your operatory and you certainly don’t have time to monitor each phone call. You likely won’t even notice if a call goes unanswered.
If your practice is busy, it’s all too common for new patients to be put on hold for an extended length of time. Quite a few of those patients decide that the hold time isn’t worth the effort and call someone else.
So, you don’t know what parts of your marketing are performing well and you don’t know how many of the prospects your marketing attracts aren’t being appointed.
One Simple Solution
SmartBox provides our dentists with an elegant solution to the problems of knowing which parts of their marketing are attracting new patients, and how many of those patients are actually being appointed.
Zetetics assigns unique phone numbers to each element of your marketing. Calls to those numbers are automatically forwarded to your practice phones. Zetetics records the source of each call, and the call itself. The information is stored in an easy-access database.
SmartBox’s Call Quality Analysts listen to every phone coming into a practice every month. We analyze each call to determine how many are new patient calls, how many are appointed, and the skill of the phone answerers in dealing with patient questions and objections.
Then, we provide our dentists with a monthly report and schedule a call to discuss our findings.
SmartBox dentists know what parts of their marketing are bringing in new patients and how many of those prospects are being appointed. Our dentists are maximizing every one of their hard-earned marketing dollars. And our dentists are reaping the rewards.