Tech Tips for Retaining Dental Patients

Tim Sawyer, president of Crystal Clear Digital Marketing, discusses how you can use technological solutions to retain dental patients.

Interview Transcript (slightly modified for readability)

“How can dentists use tech to attract and retain more patients? Philosophically, the way that we look at the world in Crystal Clear is really in three phases. And every modern dental practice needs to do these three things. The need to find, which is to attract a higher quality and quantity of traffic to their site. They have to convert — sell, serve – those people into patients. And they need to retain them.

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A lot of times, the retention piece gets ignored. What we’ve discovered is … the key to success in retention is connectivity, part of which is social media — establishing a social presence and encouraging those patients to follow you on those mediums. But probably the most effective strategy is two fronts: One is email marketing and the other is texting.

Obviously, the modern dental practice does not have the personnel or the resources to type 100,000 emails a day reminding their patients that they’re doing a great job on multiple fronts. What we recommend is some type of CRM or opportunity-management tool that can actually put a dentist’s patient base into groups. For example, one group would be cosmetic dentistry. One group could be, if it’s an orthodontist, InvisAlign. Or general dentistry, and then have marketing messages associated with each one of those groups.

So, the practice isn’t doing the work, but they’re using technology to stay in touch with them on a regular basis. And they key to success in retention, whether it’s through email marketing, text-based marketing, or social media is consistency and frequency.

A lot of times, what happens is the practitioner will listen to a webinar or go to an event and get all excited about marketing, get the office wound up, and for one month, they’ll go back and they’ll send two emails, and they’ll do some social media posting, and then it kind of loses its steam. The problem with that in digital is when you stop, when you’re not consistent and frequent, you don’t go back to where you left off. You go back to where you started.

There are absolutely great tools on the marketplace, and they are relatively inexpensive. But the key is, you’ve got to commit to it. It’s got to be consistent and frequent, and you have to update your database.”

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