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In this week's Monday Morning Marketing episode, join us as we sit down with Karen Galley, a marketing expert from Patient News, a company that has played a pivotal role in guiding over 7,500 healthcare professionals through more than 75,000 successful marketing campaigns. Today, we delve into the world of Membership Plans and explore their remarkable impact on patient value. Karen shares a fascinating statistic: Membership plan patients are 73% more valuable than their non-member counterparts. We also dissect the critical issue of patient retention, pinpointing the feeling of indifference towards them as the number one reason patients leave practices. Furthermore, Karen emphasizes the significance of answering every call by revealing that missing more than even 5% of incoming calls could cost you dearly. Lastly, we delve deep into psychographics, unraveling the intricacies of understanding your potential patients' psychological profiles and crafting marketing strategies that resonate with them.
For an insightful discussion that could revolutionize your membership plan marketing game, don't miss this episode!
You can reach out to Karen Galley here:
Website: https://patientnews.com/
Other Mentions and Links:
If you want your questions answered on Monday Morning Marketing, ask me on these platforms:
My Newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/
The Dental Marketer Society Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2031814726927041
Michael: Hey Karen, so talk to us about membership plans. How can we utilize this or what advice, suggestions, or methods can you give us that will help actually attract new
Karen: patients with our membership plans? All right. Membership plans. That's a big topic and it works differently for every different practice.
You know, it all starts with the data and it starts with your practice location and your geography. Every single practice is different. So patient news. We've been in 30 years. We're actually celebrating our 30th anniversary. And we specialize in direct mail marketing. We also have, the whole web and little bit of the social side as well.
But the cornerstone, the backbone of our operation is practice zebra. And this is where the data is pulled from. So we've worked with 7500 on. More than 75, 000 campaigns, but this is where the data speaks to your marketing programs. I know we want to focus in on dental membership plans, so I did pull some interesting data for us. each practice is different, but on the whole, dental membership plan patients are more valuable. than your uninsured patients.
So just looking at the overarching data, it can be quite significant. You know, one practice, for example, their uninsured patients have an annual value of 985. Their dental membership plan patients are 3, 528. So if you can convert more uninsured patients To your dental membership plan patients, 73 percent of the time, not 100 percent of the time, but 73 percent of the time you will generate more practice.
revenue practice production. And those are the stats too. So it doesn't work that way for every practice. In some instances, the uninsured patients are actually more valuable. So the whole conversation about whether you want to push and promote the plan is really specific to your data, your metrics, your market area.
And unless you have that data, You might be pushing something that is actually not helping you to achieve higher productivity, higher production. So you really have to, you know, sort of understand those metrics. Once you know that your dental membership plan patients are more valuable, then you look at ways to attract them.
And that's where marketing comes in. Advertising, marketing, educating your community about your dental membership plan program is the first step in attracting those higher value new patients to your practice. So that can include direct mail marketing. It can include paid media strategies.
Obviously, your website is the. Core cornerstone of your marketing operation. A lot of patients, end up on line doing further research. So it's obviously critical to have an excellent presence with your online marketing as well. But certainly with your direct mail efforts. When we talk about offer strategy, promotion of that dental membership plan is really important.
Incidentally, dental membership plan patients are also on the whole more valuable than your average patient. you have Delta, whatever other networks that you're involved with. Your average patient value for patient news, it's about 1, 000 an average patient value annually, and your average patient value tends to be less than your dental membership plan patients too.
There's uninsured, there's dental membership plan, and there's other plans and 73 percent of the time, the dental membership plan patients are actually. You're most valuable. It's very interesting. So very important to promote those patients if that's the way your numbers and your metrics work.
Michael: Gotcha. So then from the experience you have, where do you see like, okay, they're converting insurance patients really well because they're doing this besides like educating, what are they saying to their patients to convert opposed to someone who's like, Oh, we're not really getting these numbers anymore.
Remember your plan is here if you want to sign up.
Karen: what happens in the practice is less our area of focus. Our area of focus is getting those dental membership plan patients in the door and actually talking to your uninsured patients in between appointments to interest them in coming to your dental membership plan.
So it's really important to be communicating with your active patient base on a regular basis, patient newsletters. Talking to your patients in between appointments. The number one reason patients attrite, by the way, or leave a practice is they perceive that the practice is indifferent to them.
So they're attracted away by other offers and, other opportunities. So showing your patients that you care in between appointments, not just with a transactional message. Or bill pay or whatever, but an actual communication of value to those patients and maybe even about your plan, especially those uninsured patients.
So a physical patient newsletter in the mail delivers tremendous value as well as your automated patient communication. Practice Zebra, which is our data platform, has a module specific to dental membership plan patients. It only speaks to those uninsured patients on a cadence in between appointments to remind them about this great opportunity that you have.
So you want to have some automated communications. You want to deliver value in between those patient appointments. those are the best ways to reach your existing patients. And as far as the outreach to community, again, it comes back to every practice is different. I hear people come on these programs and say, this is what I did.
This worked. This is amazing. This is what you need to do. And that might be the case, but every single market area is different, every practice is different, the mix of services is different, so you really have to dig in deep into those demographics and those purchasing behaviors, what is the ideal target within your community, do those patients live in your community?
And then look at all of this data, including the value of your dental membership plan patients, if you already have a plan, and then decide what makes sense to be promoting in community. Should I be promoting a second opinion opportunity? Should I be promoting a special offer opportunity? And again, what's happening competitively in your market area?
So I would love to just give broad strokes on what you should do. What I can tell you, you should do is know the metrics have a deep understanding of your market area. And, look to that expertise and experience to help you then craft the plan. That's going to work the best for your practice in your location.
Does that make sense?
Michael: A hundred percent, because I feel like a lot of the times we ask other ones like, what's your promotion? What are you doing? And then they're like, Oh, this works the best for us. And then they try it. And then it kind of does it. it goes a different way. And so Karen, how do we even go about doing step one?
If we're listening right now and we're like, we want to do step one, know the metrics or the demographics. So we know what promotion to tailor to our, community. How would we go about doing that?
Karen: you know, I certainly don't want to deliver shameless self promotion, but we are offering a complimentary deep demographic analysis, so any of your listeners can contact Patient News.
We will take a deep dive on the community in terms of age, income, homeowners versus renters, demographics, psychographics, purchasing. We even look at drive times. We look at barriers. Does somebody have to do a U turn on the highway to get to your location? We... Do the connection to zebra. We look at how valuable are your dental membership plan patients compared to your uninsured compared to your average patient value.
Should you be aggressively promoting that plan or institute a plan at your location? If you don't already have 1, we actually do a patient plotting geographically. So we take all of your active patients and you may know who your high value patients are. You may be able to pull a list like these are my high value patients.
But can you pinpoint where they live within your community? you want more patients like your most valuable patients. And there could be like audiences in the community that you're not even aware of. So we do that connection to Zebra. We look at your patient data and your metrics. And then we do that deep demographic analysis.
And with all this information, hopefully you can improve upon your existing marketing plans. Of course, for patient news, we would love to be helpful in executing the actual marketing program, whether it's direct mail outreach to the community or to your existing patients of record to increase the value within the practice.
The last thing I want to touch on, it does relate to Dental Membership Plan but effectiveness of marketing, and I know everyone's heard it before, is call handling. And how you manage those incoming calls to the practice. So Zebra does have call tracking, call scoring, and a team training component.
I pulled our latest metrics. The average practice answers 73 percent of the calls live. So they're missing more than 25 percent of all incoming calls. Top performing practices answer 95 percent or more. So just answering those calls live, patients don't wait around, especially if they're uninsured or they're in pain and they're looking, for an immediate solution, whatever the case, they don't wait, they'll move on to the next opportunity.
In terms of conversion, when they do call in, 56 percent is the average conversion rate from a call in to an appointment. Top performing practices are at 83 percent conversion. So there's a massive delta in phone performance, in call performance, which I can't, understate the value to the practice in terms of production.
we've seen it in the hundreds of thousands. of dollars in variants for live call answer and conversion rates. So even when you're talking dental membership plan patients or any others, focusing on that call handling is critical and utilizing, tools and artificial intelligence the way we do in Zebra to help you identify those opportunities and missed calls is really critical in this day and age.
You can't be behind the times when it comes to technology in your. practice.
Michael: Yeah. No, that's fantastic. In the deep dive that you guys do, real quick, I just want to ask, you mentioned something called
Karen: yeah, that has to do with, who is your patient?
for example, what are they, buying? Are they purchasing healthcare? What are their purchasing habits? What activities, are they involved in? Are we talking soccer moms? Do they have busy schedules? It's more than just the demographics. It's more than just their age, their income, ethnicity.
It dives deeper into behaviors. And purchasing, patterns. It's really interesting. And of course, the female head of household at the end of the day does make, the lion's share of healthcare decisions for the family. I don't want to discount the guys and they do more, you know, a little bit more activity online.
But when it comes to traditional family environment, that female head of household is really, in charge of those health care decisions. So we talk about the marriage between the demographic and the practice services. You also have to make sure that your profile of services within practice are going to marry who is in your community and what their interest levels are.
So again, when it circles back to content and offer strategy, those things need to be in sync. in order to be the most effective new patient draw. I should talk too about format. When we talk about direct mail, again, we've delivered more than 75, the 30 years, 75, 000 distinct campaigns, and we have the data.
There's various formats. There's postcards. There's three panel formats. There's newsletter formats. They all have a place in market. If you're talking advertising, versus education and promotion and awareness building, but In all of our analysis, newsletters outperform postcards.
Not in every single market, but in most markets. And we've mailed millions and millions of pieces. Obviously, A B testing is very important. and if a of our clients use it for a quick... Promotion, you've got an open house, or you have a discounted offer. God forbid, nobody likes discount.
But if you're looking to very quickly build volume, maybe it's a little lesser value patient than postcards have a place. The newsletter, which has much more real estate. Is the educational piece that helps to elevate you within your community as an expert and gives you the platform to share your expertise and it gives that female head of household the confidence level she needs information to make an informed decision and when you send something regularly in community like that, it's just a very effective.
Program for our clients.
Michael: awesome Karen, I appreciate your time and if anyone has further questions, you can definitely find her in the Dental Marketer Society Facebook group or where can they reach out to you directly?
Karen: They can definitely reach out to patientnews. com. And I'm happy to speak with anyone directly as well, who would want to reach out to me. They can message me through the group. And anyway, Michael, it's been great and nice to meet you. I'll look forward to being on again sometime. Awesome.
Michael: So Karen, thank you for being with me on this Monday morning marketing episode.
Thank you, Michael.