Platinum Jubilation – Celebrating your long-standing patients with CRM
Up and down the country the bunting is being taken down, the leftover jam sandwiches are being wrapped in cling film and people can freely drive around housing estates without being caught in a labyrinth of closed roads full of makeshift marquees. The Jubilee Weekend was a rousing success (despite some patchy weather) and it left me thinking about the need to be thankful for those people who’ve been with us for the long haul.
To me, these people are our clients. Here at Dental Design, we have had clients stay with us for over 20 years and we’ve seen and helped their practices grow into the successful businesses they are today. For dentists, the people we need to be thankful for are the patients who’ve been on the books for years. The ones that are happy to have found someone they can trust their oral health to, who they respect and who they are comfortable with. So where does ‘CRM’ come into this, and, for that matter, what is CRM?
CRM stands for Customer Retention Marketing and involves ‘selling’ to people who’ve already bought from you. The principle of course is that people who have purchased from you once are much more likely to purchase from you again, if the initial experience was a good one. However, just like how we can get stuck in the same old routine when it comes to our digital marketing, a state that we often need to be shaken out of, so can a long-standing patient go through the motions of a regular check-up year in, year out.
These patients can potentially be your most lucrative though. They already trust the practice, they trust their dentist and often they just need to be told about the other services that the practice offers. There’s frequently no need for a hard sell, just a simple ‘oh, did you know we do this treatment now?’. This is especially important post-pandemic as many patients are still not quite back into their old routine and more open to change.
Consider walking them through the services you offer on your website. Maybe try an internal email campaign to your patients. A special offer on a treatment for existing patients only can go a long way to making them feel valued. Don’t forget that just as important as growing your practice with new patients, it is also important to retain those you have already established a relationship with, and in any marketing strategy retention is just as vital as recruitment.
So often the chase in dental marketing is focused on new patients. Yet your existing patient base can be an incredibly lucrative resource in order to maximise return on investment. Marketers will often harp on about the ‘lifetime value’ of a patient, but that value will seldom be realised unless you properly engage with the people who already know and trust you. It’s up to you to make them feel like royalty.
More posts from our team
Five Star
Reviewed Marketing
"Would definitely recommend to a friend"
"I cannot recommend Dental Design highly enough"
"Really great company to deal with"
"Very professional, efficient & adaptive to new situations"
"I cannot recommend them highly enough"
"Has been invaluable and gone out of her way to help us"
"We love the look of our practice website. Very professional!"
"Dental Design stood out both in their knowledge of the industry and their professionalism"
"The team and package offered at dental design was unrivalled"
"absolutely fantastic and are always on hand to help"
"Dental Design are fantastic to work with"
"always met with a swift and professional response"
