Your practice needs to grow. Every year your practice loses roughly around 10%-20% in an existing dental patients. This happens in every practice. Patients move away, pass away, lose employment, lose dental insurance, and encounter financial challenges, to name a few. All are beyond your control. Knowing your specific attrition rate, however, is key. 

Insurance companies also dictate your profit margins which make it difficult to reinvest profit back into your practice which is necessary to compete and to stay in business. Your practice needs to reduce dependence on PPOs and attract the uninsured. 

Approximately 180 million Americans lack dental insurance. That is means 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! You need to understand how to market to your patients. The best way I know how your practice can do this is by simply setting up and growing a dental membership program.

What is a dental membership program?

A dental membership program is just like Amazon prime or a Costco membership but built specifically for your dental practice. Patients pay your office a monthly or yearly subscription fee to get access to certain benefits and savings that your office creates and not some 3rd party entity that doesn’t care about your bottom line. Here is a quick example:

Monthly: $30/mo | Yearly: $300/yr

Benefits:

• 2 cleanings
• 2 exams
• X-rays as needed
• Emergency exams
• Cancer screenings
• 15% off any additional treatment (crowns, bridges, dentures, etc.)
• $300 off teeth whitening
• $500 off Invisalign 

How to Grow your Membership Program with a Value Ladder

The image above will help you visually understand how you should be growing your dental membership program. Let’s go into the details.

The Value ladder:

The value ladder is a marketing and business strategy concept that helps you see the value of each patient as well as a path that creates more revenue from each patient. When you look at the image above you will see that there are steps and each step adds more revenue to the practice.

The middle step is extremely important because it adds a predictable recurring revenue stream to your practice. This is the holy grail of business revenue and your practice should put a lot of effort to grow and increase this in your practice. Let’s talk about the path and how you can use this simple strategy to grow your membership program.

Free: Everybody loves free things, especially if it brings real value. The purpose of the stage is to attract new patients to your office. I recommend you offer a free Opalescence go whitening kit (one kit, upper and lower) to all your new uninsured patients. you can say something like this:

I recommend offering the free & valuable offer to something that isn’t tied to the doctor’s time. Once you have created a free & valuable offer it is time to spread the word and share it with potential new patients. You can do this by creating facebook ads, direct mail marketing or approaching local businesses.

Membership Plan: Next on the value ladder is signing up the new uninsured patient to your membership. Once the new patient arrives in your office to receive the free whitening kit, you should introduce your team, show them a tour of the office and then educate them on your dental membership program and why they don’t need insurance to see you. Focus on the benefits that the patients will receive when joining. I would advise you to try and sign the patient up while they are in the office because they are more likely to complete the signup process in-office versus sending them home to sign up online (If you use BoomCloud your patients can sign up online via our patient enrollment form and the patient portal). 

Additional Treatment: The last step on the value ladder is a restorative and cosmetic treatment. This is where the majority of the revenue is made from your patients. Once a patient becomes a loyal member they will spend between 2X to 3.5X more with your practice than non-members. Savings and discounts act as a motivator to say yes to your treatment plans. I recommend educating the patient when they need treatment by saying the following: “Typically our normal fee is $1,000 for a crown but because you are a member, it will only be $800 today, would you like to schedule your next appointment?”

Conclusion

Membership programs are a powerful tool for your practice. Predictable recurring revenue, patient loyalty, increased case acceptance, reduced dependency on PPOs and a strategy to attract the uninsured are all benefits of a membership program. I hope this article has inspired you to create and grow a dental membership program for your office. I highly recommend downloading all of our resources on this subject as this is what we do every day in dentistry and have helped so many practices set up and grow a dental membership program. I also recommend that you schedule a quick call with my team to see a demo of BoomCloud and how it can help your practice. BoomCloud may not be a fit for your office but thousands of practice across the nation that use BoomCloud can’t be wrong 🙂