Effective Dental Marketing: 5 main Reasons Patients Don’t Return
How often have you been frustrated because you couldn’t convert any leads?
Numerous dental marketers struggle to convert prospects into clients and professionals marketing for dentists often share this concern. Ever wondered why? Converting leads to patients is tough, and it’s disheartening when the rates are disappointingly low.
Based on our dental industry knowledge and expertise in tracking dental KPIs, below are the top 5 reasons why leads do not come for the treatment after learning about your practice.
1. No follow-up calls
For many dental practices, one of the key reasons they lose their prospective patients is not making follow-up calls or missing their calls. We live in an era where people need instant gratification, so if you take longer than one or two days to return a phone call, they will not return.
To avoid you can invest in software that aids you in understanding how many calls are being missed. For instance, the Practice by Numbers Phone IQ dashboard aids dental practices in recognising when phone calls are ignored and if the call was returned to them.
Most commonly, your practice must catch up on numerous phone calls during regular business hours. To avoid this, add extra staff to take calls when other team members are busy with patients. This step can act as an effective marketing plan.
2. Ideal appointment times aren’t available
Many times, patients need help finding suitable times for an appointment. This can also be the reason why patients don’t return. But it would help if you never let this happen with a potential new patient. So, if your appointment time slots are booked, find a way to adjust their schedule to fit yours.
Being a dental marketing expert, One Stop Dental Marketing want to give you an important tip to manage such a situation. Give your front office staff training on how to talk to prospective new patients on the phone. Front office staff often show annoyance at how busy your schedule is.
If you find many patients looking for later appointment times that are constantly unavailable, you may adjust or extend your hours. It will help you achieve improved overall patient satisfaction, and this way, you will not miss out on new patient opportunities.
3. Holding onto an outdated website
Your website is a way to generate leads and convert them into new patients. However, an outdated and poorly designed website will not serve the purpose. But an out-of-date, badly made website won’t accomplish the goal. It might even be worse than not having a website at all. Go through our blog post on how having a fantastic website can alter everything to find out why you need one.
Some of the most common issues an old website design can cause are:
- Low site loading speed (It’s a critical factor that affects Google rankings)
- Lower domain authority
- Struggle to navigate on a mobile device
- Broken links
- Irrelevant content and no content at all
You will lose potential patients if your website is out of current. Leads won’t trust your practice because your website reflects this when they visit.
Keeping your website free of bugs and up to date with the latest trends is the most important aspect of our dental marketing approach. Ignoring this component may prove costly.
4. Overlooking your online reputation
Many dentists don’t consider online reputation a segment of their advertising strategy. This is a big mistake. Especially when seeing those unaddressed negative reviews. It can turn your leads away. Have a look at these online reputation statistics:
- 90% of customers read online reviews before going to see a business.
- 84% of customers rely on online reviews as a personal reference
Every one-star in your overall rating on Yelp can mean a 5-9% increase in revenue. After reading reviews and ratings, new patients don’t return to your practice. Thus, online reputation management is a subject of constant attention. Invest some time to control your presence on every online review site.
5. Taking marketing lightly
Do you give importance to marketing? Have you employed a trained and educated marketing professional? Managing this aspect of your business is very important. Your marketing manager should clearly understand your marketing needs. They should be able to create and implement an effective marketing strategy designed to meet your goals, track results, and make necessary changes.
Many dental practices count on busy front-office executives who can’t keep up with patient care and marketing duties. If your leads are not converting into patients, this might be the reason. So, hire a qualified and experienced marketing manager for your dental practice
If you want more leads on your dental website, read our blog on how to get more leads for dental practice.
The key takeaway
The top 5 reasons listed here can be why your leads are not converting into patients. Connect with us today to talk about how we can aid your dental marketing strategy to succeed.
In addition, we provide services for Social media marketing, Website Design, dental SEO, and PPC. Get in touch with us now!
