When you begin purposefully marketing your surgical practice, there’s nothing quite like that magical moment when a new patient lead fills out a form, indicating interest in undergoing a procedure with you. It’s working!
Conversely, when that lead vanishes into the ether, it can take the wind out of your sails, leaving you lower than you would be had they never even bothered.
What happened? Why did they change their mind? Why don’t they return our calls?
This is the million dollar question: "How can we turn more leads into cases?"
Stay on their mind.
You need overcommunication and automation implemented into your practice, immediately.
Understanding the Stages:
There are, of course, multiple steps in between getting a new lead and converting them into a patient. We need to define them, and ideally measure them, so we can improve them. For simplicity, let’s define 5 stages from New Lead to New Patient: New Lead, Conversation, Scheduled, Showed, and New Case.
Our job in regard to patient acquisition is to move them through all of the stages as efficiently and effectively as possible, so we can take them from a stranger on the internet to a happy patient.
You may be surprised just how much a few small tweaks in how we approach patient acquisition can massively impact the bottom line of your practice. New processes can help improve any of these stages, but our goal right now is to eliminate dead leads .
Dead Leads: Private Practice Poison
Picture this: a lead fills out a form on your website, expressing interest, only to transform into a ghost, never to be heard from again.
These dead leads - the ones that ask for information and then disappear - are not just frustrating momentum killers; they’re costing you money. Lots of it...but if we are going to fix it, let's first understand why they happen.
Why do leads vanish?
Often, it's as simple as human forgetfulness. A potential patient might be fully intent on following through but gets sidetracked by the whirlwind of daily life. Your practice, once a beacon of solution, fades into the background of their cluttered mind.
Compounding this issue is a hesitancy in many practices to follow up sufficiently. In almost every practice we’ve worked with, there's a fear of being perceived as intrusive or 'too pushy,' leading to a premature halt in communication efforts.
This cautious approach, while well-intentioned, inadvertently results in missed opportunities.
So how do we follow up sufficiently, without being pushy, to get them from a lead to on the schedule?
Engaging Overcommunication.
If a lead doesn’t schedule relatively quickly, they will become a dead lead without our intervention, and we will fade into obscurity in their mind.
People are busy. They can’t always schedule right when you’re contacting them. They remind themselves they need to schedule later, but then forget. Our problem then, is not that they changed their mind and no longer want help…our problem is they forgot about us and we stopped reminding them.
They came to you looking for answers. The art of Engaging Overcommunication centers around giving them those answers methodically and purposefully. This allows us to creatively "remind them" of their issues, stay on their mind, and nudge them to take action, while simultaneously helping them before they've even come in to your office.
We do this through what's called a "drip campaign" - giving them drops of information that teach them, help them, and encourage them to schedule their visit. The best part is, you can build and automate this, and it will do all the work itself.
If implemented well, you can expect at least a 20% decrease in your dead leads. Even if all else remains the same, you can see below, improving your contact rate 20% can have a huge impact on your business.
Think that's impressive? Wait till you see the results when improve the next stage.
Stay tuned for part 2.
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