Approximately 180 million Americans lack dental insurance. That is approximately more than half of all Americans lack coverage. If over half of Americans lack dental insurance, the potential of growing your dental practice and making additional revenue is quite high.
Why do so many dental offices choose to contract with too many PPOs when the uninsured market is plentiful and more lucrative for a dental office? I believe it boils down to one thing. Marketing!
Most dentists depend too much on PPOs to drive “leads” to their practices. If you look at all the write offs you are giving away when contracted with a PPO and compare it to attracting the right type of patient you are overpaying for the PPO patients. Your practices writes off hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to attract and maintain the PPO patient base. Did you know that it can cost your practice far less when you focus on marketing and promoting your practice the right way? In this article we are going to talk about ways you can drop the PPO and start attracting the uninsured market because this market is more profitable, easier to work with and you cut out the middle man!
1. Everyone Likes FREE!
Attracting uninsured patients with free gifts in my opinion, is one of the best ways to attract new patients to your office.
An example of using this strategy:
- Purchase Opalescence Go whitening kits. You can get these for $6 per kit.
- Create an ad on Facebook or a direct mail ad. Whatever works best.
- Use the messaging: “Don’t have dental insurance? Free whitening kits on us!” Or something like this. You may want to experiment with other phrases that have the similar meaning.
- Make the leads fill out a form to receive the coupon for the free whitening kit and require the patient to come into your office to pick up the kit.
- When the patient comes into the office, make it a big deal, give them a tour of your office, introduce yourself and the team and then give them their whitening kit.
- After you give them their free kit, Talk to them about your dental membership program, give them brochures and educate them that they DON’T need dental insurance to get quality dental care.
Here is an example of a practice doing this type of strategy to attract uninsured and grow their membership program:
If you look at this image, you will see that this practice is generating over $30K/mo in predictable recurring revenue from their uninsured patients! This is incredible! and will be a game changer for your practice!
This practice also is helping approximately 1,500 uninsured patients get quality dental care and they have cut out the middle man! How would this benefit your practice? Would you feel free from the red tape and regulations of PPOs? Would you have a stable cash flow coming in each month to help you run your practice? Did you know that when a patient becomes a member they end up spending 2X to 3.5X more than non-members with your practice! Amazing right?
2. Attracting the Uninsured with Education
Another way to attract uninsured patients is by education or content marketing also called educational marketing. This is a fantastic strategy that you can use to attract the uninsured. Here is an example:
Every local news station in every state has a website with articles posted daily, sometimes hourly. These news websites are constantly looking for newsworthy content to share! You can submit an article about why patients don’t need dental insurance to visit the dentist and then educate the readers about dental membership programs and how beneficial they can be for the patient. Make sure you have a specific membership page on your website that allows patients to sign up for your own membership program and share that link to your website so readers can learn about your specific membership plan.
3. Attracting the Uninsured with Partnerships
Partnerships can be great if you like to network with other local business owners. Here are some examples on what you can do to grow with partnerships:
Join a networking group: There are local meet ups called BNI that allows you to meet with local business leaders each week and collaborate on ways you can refer to each-other, this can be a fantastic way to educate other business owners about your dental membership program and even influence them to sign up their employees to your practice’s membership program.
Partner with Direct Primary Care Physicians: In every state there are medical doctors that offer a monthly membership program to their patients. These practices are attracting patients that have the right mindset because they have joined the medical doctors membership program, simply network with these types of medical practices and ask if you can put your dental membership program information in their office as well to help their patients
Join forces with local gyms: People who visit the gym everyday care about their appearance. We know how important our smiles are when it comes to our appearance, that is why this image above is going viral on the internet. Set up a booth at the gym or ask them to put flyers and brochures about free whitening for uninsured patients.
Hopefully, these strategies motivate and inspire you to grow your own dental membership program. I would recommend that you do a combination of these strategies as they will collectively help you grow your dental membership program. If you are serious about growing a dental membership program you can read my free book called “Dental Membership Secrets” and take my video course that will educate you and your team on the right mindset, verbal skills to enroll more patients to your program and the importance of recurring revenue for your dental practice. You can download this course here.
