You let your patient relationships lapse; financially speaking, “No Bueno”! To save your bottom-line, you need to develop a plan to get them back — you need to reconnect!
If you’ve been in business any amount of time, you have had patients that have simply floated away. That may be bad, or it may be good; especially since every business owner has the right to filter out those patients that create stress and anxiety. However, many excellent and profitable patients just go away in the frenzy of trying to build a successful practice; which is precisely why you must make every to re-connect.
This piece is written with a single purpose in mind, to help you get back those right patients, create long-lasting professional relationships, and increase your profits.
Your current and past patients represent a vibrant and lucrative pool of annual receipts and yield the highest return on investment. Moreover, many major advertising studies indicate that this pool accounts for nearly 95% of all services sold annually.
Plus, these same marketing studies verify: it costs 5-7 times more to acquire a new patient than to retain a current one. Invespcro.com points out that the probability of providing additional services for an existing patient is 60-70%, while the likelihood of selling to a new prospect is only 5-20%. Finally, existing patients are 50% more likely to try new services and spend 31% more, when compared to new patients.
Consider a report published by the Harvard Business School by Amy Gallo. She cites research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company. He demonstrates that by increasing customer retention rates by just 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.
There’s still one critical value that we haven’t yet discussed but demonstrates a dramatic effect on your clinics’ long-term bottom-line, the lifetime value of each patient. The lifetime value is a calculation that takes into account the amount you receive every time a patient visits you for treatment, multiplied by the number of visits per year, multiplied by the number of years you expect to see them.
So, if your patient represents $100 per month (A), you would then multiply that by the number of months (for this example, let’s say 12 times – B). Now multiply that number by the anticipated number of years (C). Therefore: A x B = $1200. $1200 x C = $6000 for your clinic (per patient).
Your next thought may be “What am I going to say to my patients?” “How am I going to approach them?”
The bottom line is that you have to connect with these former patients. You need to touch the specific pressure points that lead them to recall all the positive experiences they had while you were taking care of their medical needs.
Further, your message must be laser focused and presented from the patient’s perspective (which we will cover below). Mostly, you must convey that your most significant interest is solving their greatest need.
Since patient attraction is EVERYTHING in business, you’re going to learn how to transform your clinic into a patient magnet. You will achieve this via improved, persuasive, and compelling messaging (aka content). Continue reading Reconnect With Lost Patients