Maintaining a steady flow of patients is essential for your dental practice’s growth and success. However, even the most dedicated practices can face the challenge of inactive patients who have fallen out of regular care. This is where a well-executed dental patient reactivation campaign can make a huge difference.
In this guide, we’ll explore eight essential tips to help you craft and execute a successful dental patient reactivation campaign. These tips will empower you to reconnect with inactive patients and drive more appointment bookings.
What is a dental patient reactivation campaign?
A dental patient reactivation campaign is a marketing strategy designed to encourage patients who haven’t visited the dental practice in a while to schedule appointments and return for dental care.
The goal is to re-engage inactive patients and bring them back into the practice. These campaigns typically involve reaching out to inactive patients through various channels such as email and phone calls, as well as direct mail or even text messages. Your practice might also update its healthcare call center script or social media presence to do this.
Reactivating dormant patients helps your practice improve patient retention rates, as well as increase revenue and maintain a steady flow of appointments. It’s an essential aspect of dental practice management aimed at fostering long-term relationships with patients.
Run a dental patient reactivation campaign with these 10 steps
1. Segment your patients
No two patients are the same, but there are broad groups, or segments, that you can divide your patients into and market to them accordingly. Four key bits of info you’ll need for segmenting patients for a reactivation campaign are:
- Last appointment date
- Treatment history
- Age
- Any specific dental needs
You can then split your patients into distinct groups that receive tailored messages. For example, you might run different reactivation campaigns for patients who haven’t visited in over a year versus those who had an appointment fewer than 12 months ago.
2. Personalize your communications
Try to use any personal info you have, such as your patients’ names, when reaching out to them. This adds a personal touch and might grab their attention quicker than a standard blanket message.
Personalization doesn’t mean you must write an individual message for every patient. There are plenty of marketing tools and automation software that you can use to personalize your messages. These often allow you to create emails or texts with personalized fields where the patient’s name or location is automatically inserted.
3. Use multiple communication channels
Different patients prefer different communication channels. Ideally, you should ask your patients to let you know how they’d like to be contacted. But for patients who haven’t been in a while, it’s best to take a multi-pronged approach.
That means making the most of all available channels. These typically include text messages and email but can also cover phone calls and direct mail. It’s worth investigating cloud vs on premise computing for your business too, as the former can often be integrated with communication platforms so you can easily contact patients across all channels.
4. Send reminder messages and follow-ups
Gentle reminders about the importance of dental care can go a long way. These messages should have engaging and informative content, maybe using testimonials or even videos, to explain to patients the benefits of regular checkups. These messages should also highlight any special promotions on offer.
In addition to reminder messages, whether by phone or email, remember to consistently follow up with patients who haven’t responded to your initial outreach. Persistence that is regular but not excessive and messages spread out over intervals is often key to reactivation.
5. Provide easy appointment scheduling
It’s possible that making a phone call is putting patients off from returning to your dental practice. You should find ways to make appointment scheduling easy and pain free.
Online appointment scheduling is a must, especially if you want to keep your younger patients in your practice. For your older patients, you might offer assisted scheduling over the phone, since some older patients may not have internet access or smartphones to book appointments digitally.
6. Train your staff
Recruiting the right staff and training your employees is crucial for the success of a dental patient reactivation campaign. Your front desk staff are often the first point of contact for patients, so they play a vital role in conveying the message of the campaign and addressing patient inquiries as well as, ultimately, scheduling appointments.
Make sure your staff are aware of the campaign and any incentives in place. They should be well trained in scheduling appointments and answering queries. You might do role-playing sessions with them so they can practice common phone call interactions or complicated requests.
7. Track and measure results
It’s likely you’ll run many patient reactivation campaigns over the years. Whenever you do, you should track and measure results so you can keep improving your tactics. You should track metrics like:
- Number of appointment bookings
- Revenue impact
- Response rates
- Patient feedback
- Results from patient satisfaction surveys
- Patient retention
These metrics will give you insights into how well your campaign is working. You could even try out some A/B testing, which involves trying two different campaigns and comparing them afterwards. All results will be useful for refining your approach in future.
Conclusion: Prioritize excellent dental care
You’re now equipped with a range of tips and tricks for re-engaging inactive patients. But above all else, amidst the strategies and tactics discussed in this guide, one principle remains essential: prioritize excellent dental care.
While a reactivation campaign may serve to bring patients back through your doors, it’s the quality of care and service they receive that will ultimately determine their loyalty and satisfaction.
About the Author
Cory Plachy is the Senior Marketing and Communications Manager at Convoso, the leading contact center software for powering sales and lead generation As an adaptable and naturally curious Marketing Communications Manager, Cory channels years of content creation, marketing and sales experience into the world of SaaS communication. Follow her on LinkedIn.