Growing Your Practice through Relationship Marketing

By: Eric George, Senior Consultant, Williams Group™

One of your greatest assets is your relationship with your patients. Regardless of whether you are just starting your career as an optometrist or have been in business for years, relationship marketing is a great way to manage your patients. By taking a fresh look at your patient base, you are able to target their needs based on lifestyle, occupation, medical diagnosis, age and other factors.

Relationship marketing not only helps you better meet your patients’ needs, it can also help you secure your standing under managed care. The same dynamics that make relationship marketing a practice growth tool also strengthen your provider profile in negotiating for managed care contracts.

The Shift from Data to Relationships
Whenever marketers talk about databases, we talk about technology. The incredible power of computers and the array of available database programs is fascinating. However, technology is only a tool. Instead of simply using it to help you work faster, you should use it to develop deeper relationships with your patients. Your focus should be on each patient; understanding and satisfying her or his individual needs.

Never before has there been greater marketing costs in acquiring new patients. And, because of these formidable costs, it’s even more important to retain patients you already have. Thus, relationship marketing.

Relationship marketing can be broken down into four key areas: the Marketing Database, Marketing and Communications, Patient Management and Patient Satisfaction. These four components work together to provide positive patient outcomes, increased patient retention and loyalty to your practice.

Marketing Database
Learn how your current practice software can work for you. At minimum, your database should be able to generate a mailing list or store codes to be identified with patients’ medical conditions, lifestyles and hobbies.

Then begin the process of gathering information about your patients. Not only should you be recording a patient’s name, address, email address, phone number and insurance, you should be gathering the name of the patient’s employer, participation in flexible spending accounts, hobbies, family information, lifestyle habits, medical conditions and specific interests to use in market planning.

Here are some questions you can ask to better know your patients:

• Do you work at a computer for long periods?
• Do you have more than one pair of current prescription eyewear?
• If you wear glasses, would you like to have thinner/lighter lenses?
• Are there times you would rather not wear glasses?
• Are you interested in a free contact lens test drive?
• Do you have sunglasses that filter 100% of UV rays?

Not only is it important to enter this information into your database, but you should use it immediately in the exam room. Armed with this data, you can better develop and offer programs that will meet the needs and interests of your patients.

Marketing and Communications
Once you’ve established a marketing database, you need a project leader to coordinate the marketing activities and communications for your practice. Your entire team will participate in the activities, but this project leader is essential to initiate and carry out the marketing plan. This person is responsible for segmenting your market and then spearheading the task of determining how much to invest and what activities are appropriate for each segment.

Here are categories in which most of your patients will fall:

• Star Patients
  These are your top revenue producing or best referring patients and families.
• Good Patients
  These patients bring in a fair amount of revenue and referrals.
• Lost Patients
  Where have they gone? These are patients you haven’t seen for more than three years.
• Potential Patients
  These are people who have access to your referral system, but currently are not patients. They may have family members or friends who are your patients, but they have not made the choice to become a patient of the practice.
• Non-Referred Consumers
  These potential patients are not in your database. They include the rest of the population who knows little or nothing about your practice.

Your Star Patients and Lost Patients offer the greatest potential for your practice. Here are some examples of how you can enhance your relationship with patients in these segments.

Star Patients
Develop a program to help keep your Star Patients referring others to the practice. Keep a list of patients who you think will enjoy attending a frame style show or contact lens open house. Plan these events and invite them! Consider sending Star Patients a specialized newsletter. Be creative — email is a great way to stay in touch with Star Patients, and helps keep your postage costs down. By planning activities that educate your Star Patients, you keep them loyal to the practice and arm them with information to tell others about you.

Lost Patients
Send them reactivation letters and have your staff follow up with a phone call. Offer them incentives for coming back your practice. Create a direct mail piece updating them on what is new with your practice. You can even try an outbound marketing survey to find out if they just haven’t been in or are visiting another practice (and if they are, make sure to ask them why!).

It’s also important to plan external marketing and advertising strategies to reach Non-Referred Consumers who know nothing about your practice. Analyze the demographics in your area to identify the community groups for which you would like to see more market penetration. With many businesses and organizations, such as teachers and preschools, try screenings, letters, special-subject brochures and speaking engagements. Advertising is always an option, but first explore ways to build one-on-one relationships with individuals.

These are just some of the marketing strategies you can explore to communicate with your market segments. Once you have determined your target markets and how to reach them, make a calendar outlining these strategies. Break it down monthly and be proactive in your planning.

Patient Management
Patient Management literally means blending patient care with marketing. The goal of patient management is simple: make sure patients understand the value of every experience they encounter when visiting your office.

Analyze how you manage the relationship between you and your patients once they enter your office. What is their experience like? Do you do a good job of reviewing findings from data collection? Do you continually provide diagnostic feedback during pretesting and the exam? Are you making recommendations based on their lifestyle, hobbies, and other data gathered earlier? Do you encourage patients to refer others? And finally, do you tell patients exactly when you will see them next and why it is important?

Never forget this simple truth: People don’t know what they don’t know. For patients to truly understand the value of services and products you provide, you must teach them. That is how you manage their perception of value.

Patient Satisfaction
So far, we’ve discussed the Marketing Database, Marketing and Communications, and Patient Management. The final component in relationship marketing is Patient Satisfaction. How do you know when your patients are satisfied?

One way is to use patient satisfaction surveys to evaluate your services. You can also place follow-up calls to all new and former patients who made new purchases to discuss their level of satisfaction.

Keeping and monitoring practice statistics will also give you feedback on how you are measuring up. For example, are you meeting your production goals and per-patient-revenue? What’s your recall success rate? What are your new and former patient percentages? If you’re falling short, use your data to determine if is it due to lack of patient satisfaction and/or education. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Take time to set performance goals. More importantly, take the time to manage them once they are set.

Being able to identify who your patients are, having strategies in place to communicate with them, managing their perceptions and monitoring patient satisfaction are the keys to practice growth in today’s market environment. Concentrate on relationships and you will strengthen loyalty and position yourself favorably in any market — including a managed care environment.

Eric George is a Senior Consultant for Williams Group™. He is a board-certified optician who first became affiliated with Williams Group™ as a client at a successful independent optometric practice. Since joining the Williams Group™ team, he implements special consulting programs for clients with an emphasis on marketing, staff management, technology and dispensary issues.

Williams Group™ is the world’s largest practice management firm providing consulting, software and web solutions for eyecare practices. Its mission is simple: Help successful optometrists take their practices to new levels of growth, profitability and efficiency. Williams Group™ can help optometrists put the fun back into owning their practice.