If you own dental practice, you likely understand the importance of reaching your patients. Your dental software is one way to reach out to your patients and remind them that they need to schedule their next appointment. In addition to scheduling reminders, your dental practice management software can also provide marketing information for other aspects of your business. Here are six ways to effectively reach your customers with dental practice management software.
Dental Marketing through Social Media
Today, social media is a popular tool in providing a business message out into the world. The good news for dental professionals using a customer relationship manager (CRM) dental practice management system is that there are many types of tools available, including apps and widgets to post status updates on social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more.
Updating an online calendar
Your dental software can also help you reach out to your patients by updating your online calendar with important events such as upcoming appointments or special promotions available only for a limited time. Just like the popular on-site calendars commonly used in dentist’s offices worldwide, these tools allow patients to see their appointment times and dates at any given moment from anywhere because the information is stored within the practice management system.
In addition, patient reminders can be set up ahead of time based upon prior user responses to predict whether they will likely forget about their appointment date and alert them well before it’s too late.
Sending an email campaign
One of the most common reasons patients move away from a dental office or stop scheduling appointments is the lack of communication. The good news is that your dental software can help you send out email campaigns to remind your patients about upcoming appointments or a holiday special that is available for a limited time only.
In addition, the dental software can be used to send out mass email messages to all of your patients at once, which makes it an even more valuable tool because you won’t have to waste time going through one-by-one messaging as you would with some other systems.
Marketing with printed materials such as pamphlets and brochures
In addition to online tools, marketing also comes in printed materials such as brochures and pamphlets that can be handed out at community events or distributed directly to those who may need additional information regarding specific services and/or fees associated with them. On top of this, print serves as a great way to post important contact information such as your address, phone number, and other outlets where patients can find you.
Targeted Advertising
Your dental software can also be used to send targeted advertisements that reach just those who need it most – your existing patient base – at the precise time when they may be looking for a new dentist. For example, suppose a patient hasn’t been in for an appointment for six months and has missed three scheduled reminder calls.
In that case, likely, they are no longer interested in seeing you or any other dentist at this point because they simply aren’t getting the service that they want or need from another source. In this situation, marketing directly to those individuals will prove to be more effective than marketing to everyone as a whole because you are only casting a much smaller net.
Dental billing and payment options
Another way to reach patients is through your dental software’s billing module, which can be used to inform patients about the various forms of payments accepted by your practice and what services qualify for insurance reimbursement versus those paid out-of-pocket. This information will prove invaluable for many reasons, including that you won’t have to spend countless hours explaining this during the next patient visit because they can log into their online accounts and see it for themselves.
There are several ways to use today’s technology to reach your customers more effectively, but implementing dental office management systems with corresponding customer relationship tools is one of the most efficient ways.