Routine procedures like exams and cleanings are the bread and butter of any general dental practice. Anyone who has spent any length of time at the front desk of a dental office knows that getting your patients to schedule their recalls is vitally important to make your practice successful. But what if they don’t schedule their recall appointments before leaving your office? An unfortunate fact is that many dentists don’t exactly know how to market these procedures. Practice-Web has tools that can help.
February 8th starts National Children’s Dental Health Month. Do you take advantage of these different dental campaigns throughout the year to help you market your practice? You should, because that is what these campaigns are developed for. They are developed so you can educate your patients on the importance of their dental health but most of the marketing leg work is done for you. Check out the information on the ADA website.
Now all you need to do is find the patients in your Practice-Web database to start marketing to.
You can easily pull up information on existing pedo patients using your recall list. If these kids have not scheduled their recall yet, February is the best time to “target” market to them. Another great part of this is that most school districts just require a dental exam be done within 1 year of the start of the school year. Why not save yourself the headache of the August rush and schedule them now? In your recall list in Practice-Web just enter the date range of the recalls that you would like to contact and click the refresh button. Then click on Run Report
The report screen will allow you to select which criteria you want to use when you contact your patients. Just make sure any contact information you want is highlighted in blue.
The list generated can then be exported to Excel and you can easily generate a report of patients under the age of 12. Keep in mind that if you don’t have a lot of children on your recall list when you have changed the date ranges you can always use the control key and highlight the patients under the age of 12 and generate postcards and labels directly from the recall list. It just depends on how many you have.
If you’re looking for a less direct approach you can always use the patients_raw under the reports menu.
This link will allow you to write a custom report with almost any criteria range. So if you just want to send a postcard to all of your patients under the age of 12 you can generate a mailing list for just those patients. You can also save your generated reports to a favorites list for use next year. Your existing patients are going to be your best source of recurring revenue.
What about using National Children’s Dental Health Month to generate new patients? Think about staging an after-hours open house. Offer small refreshments and maybe hire a magician or children’s entertainer. You can offer one free exam, it doesn’t have to take long. Just 5 minutes so you can build a rapport with the patient and parents, then schedule their full exam and cleaning appointment during your business hours. You could contact your local elementary schools and offer your practice location as a field trip destination. This can be scheduled on one of your non-business days or during non-business hours in the morning. Just make sure you give out goody bags with your practice business card or information in them. There are a lot of possibilities. 🙂
No matter what you decide to do to market your practice in February, make sure you use the data you have in your Practice-Web software to help you market effectively. If you have any questions about the reporting features in Practice-Web please call support at 800-845-9379 opt 2.
Until next time 😉