My team and I have been talking to a lot of dental practices and we have found that most practices need or want to grow their membership program. Most practices don’t know where to start so the purpose of this article is to help you get started and to form the right habits to help you grow your dental membership program. Here are a few quotes that I believe are very true in any circumstance.
Success is the sum of small efforts repeated day in and day out.
-Robert Collier
The mindset of doing small things each day to help grow your membership program is where your success starts. If you don’t take small steps each day or small efforts to grow your membership program you probably will never see it grow from 0 to 500 or 1,000 patients. We will discuss later in this article how to take small and simple steps to grow your program.
Successful people are simply those with successful habits.
Brian Tracy
Growing a dental membership program is simple. It is not rocket science and most practices can reach around the 500 member count mark within a year if you focus on small, daily actions that help you achieve success. We have seen practices reach the 1,000 member count mark in a year, those practices already have a solid marketing and new patient attraction model working for them.
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All you need to grow your dental membership program is to sign up 2 patients each day. The average practice has around 10 to 15 patient visits each day. This is only 13% to 20% of your daily schedule. If you sign up 2 patients to your membership program each day by the end of the week you will have 10 new sign-ups for your membership program and by the end of the month, you will have 40 membership patients. At the end of 12 months, you will have around 480 patients signed up to your dental membership program. Success is simple.
If you can do this simple goal of signing up 2 patients per day by the end of the year your membership program will have generated approximately $14,400/mo ($30/mo each). You will start the year with a guaranteed $172,800/yr. Pretty powerful huh? This all from small daily efforts. Let’s talk about some habits that help you have a successful membership program.
Team Meeting: When you start a membership program, you need your team to help you succeed. If you do not communicate the importance of your dental membership program they will not put in the effort. It’s important to set up a dedicated time to educate your front office and clinical team about the benefits for the practice and the patient.
Place marketing material in every room: Practices that make it very clear that they have a program for the uninsured sign up the most patients. Place posters, brochures, and small signs throughout your practice and have each team member ask the patient if they have heard about their dental membership program.
Talk to both the uninsured and the insured: It is important that you not only educate the uninsured but include the insured patients as you never know if they have family or friends that don’t have dental insurance. Most patients think they need dental insurance to see your office so if you start educating everyone word of mouth will start to grow.
Uninsured report: When you launch your membership program with BoomCloud, it is wise to pull a report of all your uninsured existing patients. You can now send them educational information about your dental membership program.
Text and email uninsured patients: If you use RevenueWell or any other software to help automate patient communication, I recommend that you send out text and email announcements to educate your entire patient base about your dental membership program.
Incentivize team to grow your program: I think it is important to incentive your team to help you grow your dental membership program. You can do this by adding an enrollment fee to you program ($25 – $99) and either rewarding each sign up with a $25 gift card or putting it in a fund/savings account and pay for a group activity for the team.
Patient announcement letter: When you sign up for BoomCloud, we give you a patient announcement letter about your dental membership program. Your practice should send this via email and mail it out in statements and letters to your patients. This will help you spread the word and get people asking about it when they visit your office.
Encourage patients to refer their friends and family: When a patient signs up for your dental membership program ask them to post it on social media or give them a referral card to give to their family and friends.
Daily Report: This tip will help you achieve the small daily efforts to have a successful membership program. Each day pull a report and see which patients don’t have dental insurance. When that patient comes in for their appointment. educate them on the benefits of joining your membership program.
Conclusion
I hope this article has helped you realize that growing a successful membership program requires little daily effort. Success is simple but you need to turn the daily actions into a habit. If you want to keep learning how to create and grow a dental membership program I recommend that you download my Ultimate Starter Guide for free or schedule a demo of BoomCloud and learn how our software can benefit your practice and help you organize and automate your dental membership program.
