At our recent Business Partner Summit in St. Paul, Minnesota, ReSound marketing leaders spoke about how to engage your past patients to drive future sales for your practice.
First, here is the simple dollars and sense reason why keeping past patients engaged is so important to your practice. Compare the average cost of gaining a sale from a new patient versus a past patient:
- New Patient – $800 cost
- Past Patient – $37 cost
Which would you choose? So as you can see, purely as a cost decision, sustaining patient engagement with your practice is crucial to your bottom line.
Start at a high level and build a practice engagement strategy:
- How can you maintain meaningful contact?
- How can you build on the trust you established?
- How can you continue to engage?
- How can you ask for their help to grow the practice (referrals)?
As you know, how patients engage with your practice has changed. No longer do they just look you up in the phone book or see a newspaper ad. Patients are finding your practice in a number of new ways such as through a website, Facebook, a blog or a Google search. Here are some useful tactics to keep the conversation about your practice in front of your past customers:
- Survey: Allow patients the chance to share what they valued most and provide feedback. This gives you an opportunity to follow up if needed and shows the patients you are committed to a positive customer experience.
- Newsletter/Email Program: A great vehicle to deliver practice news, events, product information while keeping your brand in the patients’ mind.
- Upgrade Letters: Think of yourself and your practice as the patient’s trusted advisor.
- Celebrate Life Events: Don’t forget about birthdays and other life events as an opportunity to reengage and connect with the patient.
- Promote Charitable Events: A unique way to stay in front of your patient and connect on another level.