Transcript
00:00:00:13 – 00:00:08:23
Jonathan Fashbaugh
Dental membership plans. Are they added overhead or a key to success in your office? Learn more today on Marketing Chairside.
00:00:08:24 – 00:00:24:13
Announcer
Welcome to the Marketing Chair Side Podcast by Pro Impressions Marketing, where the team covers a variety of dental marketing ideas. To help you attract more new patients in the quantity and quality you need to grow your practice.
00:00:24:16 – 00:00:34:25
Jonathan Fashbaugh
To help me talk about dental memberships today, I’ve got Kristin Davis, Marketing manager at Dental HQ. Kristin, thanks for coming.
00:00:34:27 – 00:00:36:00
Kristin Davis
Thanks for having me, Jonathan.
00:00:36:07 – 00:00:49:20
Jonathan Fashbaugh
One of the things that I have learned about dental memberships, membership plans, is that they can help bolster kind of trust and loyalty and even a sense of transparency and pricing. How does that work?
00:00:49:20 – 00:01:10:08
Kristin Davis
Dental insurance claims don’t often guarantee coverage for all treatments, and so you have to haggle with the insurance company that costs time, money and energy for your front office staff and for your patients. So these dental membership plans offer transparency and pricing and service expectations. So when you’re a part of a dental membership plan, you know what you’re paying for.
00:01:10:08 – 00:01:19:09
Kristin Davis
It’s all spelled out for you and you get to see everything upfront. So more clarity means better patient loyalty and better communication all around.
00:01:19:16 – 00:01:42:27
Jonathan Fashbaugh
Well, and at the end of the day, that just for me flows right back into marketing. Because if you’ve got happier patients that are more loyal, they’re going to refer more patients to you. They’re going to be more likely to give you a five star review and tell our friends about it. You got to check out this dental practice because you can be a member with them and you get special pricing and special booking and special special, special.
00:01:43:05 – 00:01:44:26
Jonathan Fashbaugh
Who doesn’t want to be special?
00:01:44:29 – 00:01:52:18
Kristin Davis
Yes, everybody’s all about subscriptions. We love our Amazon Prime. We love our subscription boxes that come once a month and make you feel special.
00:01:52:21 – 00:02:11:21
Jonathan Fashbaugh
Well, so loyalty, I think, of as a retention strategy. How do offices introduce this in the new patient conversation, like ring, ring, ring, Kristin. I’m interested in being a patient at your office. When and how should a dental office introduce a membership plan if they have one?
00:02:11:23 – 00:02:31:01
Kristin Davis
So they should definitely do that at the beginning for that new patient call. Say, you know, do you have insurance? Do you not have insurance? And one of the great things about Dental HQ is where we’re right about to offer plans for all. So we’ll have plans for uninsured patients to help you get them in there for their regular cleanings.
00:02:31:03 – 00:02:53:08
Kristin Davis
You know, that’s a big problem. Keeping patients that don’t have insurance in your office. And membership plans are a great way to do that. And for insured patients to help them get a little more of a discount off of services that maybe insurance doesn’t cover or make them even more loyal to your office by offering perks, like maybe they have a different waiting room, maybe they have preferred appointment times.
00:02:53:11 – 00:02:55:19
Kristin Davis
There are a lot of different things that you can offer to them.
00:02:55:22 – 00:03:25:09
Jonathan Fashbaugh
I like the preferred appointment time. Sounds definitely exclusive. And what about restorative work? You know, the crown filling. I mean, our membership plans designed exclusively for essentially hygiene driven practices. Or do you have plans that help patients and doctors kind of streamline the financial decision making involved in restoring restorations?
00:03:25:12 – 00:03:44:07
Kristin Davis
That’s a great question. So one of the great things about dental HQ is we are fully customizable. We don’t have plans that you have to subscribe to for your practice. Our team helps you during implementation, set up like, Hey, these are my costs for these particular services and I feel like I can offer this much of a discount.
00:03:44:07 – 00:03:58:03
Kristin Davis
We have a whole calculator. We work with them to make sure that it makes sense for your practice, whether they’re more of a restorative practice or more of a cosmetic practice. So the decision really is up to the office and how they want their revenue to be.
00:03:58:06 – 00:04:02:09
Jonathan Fashbaugh
Right, because it has to be essentially a win when when, you know, I mean.
00:04:02:09 – 00:04:03:00
Kristin Davis
Exactly.
00:04:03:01 – 00:04:21:16
Jonathan Fashbaugh
You guys have to make money. The practice has to make money and the patient’s not going to do it if they don’t feel like it’s a win for them. I mean, it’s got to work for everyone involved. It’s got to be a win for you guys, a dental HQ, it’s got to be a win for the practice. And the patient’s not going to say yes if they don’t feel like they’re getting something out of it.
00:04:21:17 – 00:04:40:23
Jonathan Fashbaugh
So I’m really I’ve never heard of a membership plan kind of factoring in insurance. How does that work in a situation where the office is a fee for service office, but the patient has insurance? Because that’s the disconnect that I. I mean, it’s gold if you can solve that.
00:04:40:28 – 00:05:00:12
Kristin Davis
I can, but I can’t really give you all of the details yet, which I hate telling you that because, like, we’re still working on that. That’s maybe like a like our two, three plans for all. But that’s one of the things that we’re working on because I know like some places like Washington have restrictions on what you can offer as far as a membership plan with insurance.
00:05:00:15 – 00:05:21:03
Kristin Davis
And we’ve had a couple other things, too, but we are definitely starting to create plans for offices that have insurance and the fee for service patients on the things that aren’t covered, like, you know, Invisalign, like crowns, like the cosmetic work. If you’ve got offices that want to offer things like that and offer the membership plan to help pay for them, you can.
00:05:21:05 – 00:05:47:15
Kristin Davis
Another thing with dental HQ is we automate everything. We’ve got, you know, PMF, integration. We’ve got financing available through a partner. We’ve got, you know, you can post payments, you can do patient communications. We’ve got marketing resources to help market this plan to your offices. And we’ve got a dedicated success team that’s going to help you every step of the way from implementing it to adding members to helping you market to the members.
00:05:47:21 – 00:06:08:00
Jonathan Fashbaugh
Everything I saw on your website, there’s like graphs galore and in my experience, dental dentists love graphs and I do too. Like we’re data nerds. So how can offices leverage the data that they get from dental HQ?
00:06:08:03 – 00:06:27:28
Kristin Davis
That’s a really good question. We offer a bunch of information in the dashboard that you can use and things like the morning huddle or team meetings or anything like that. We give you a count of how many current active members you have. The difference in members up or down. In the past month, members added per month on a monthly and an annual basis.
00:06:28:00 – 00:06:45:23
Kristin Davis
You can see all your active members and you can see your activity feed as well as pay out. There’s a ledger for, you know, who’s paid, who is not paid. If a payment has failed. And then you can also see the activities for the day for, you know, how many have joined. How many have not and things like that.
00:06:45:27 – 00:07:11:25
Jonathan Fashbaugh
I guess let’s maybe start at the beginning. A patient comes in, they don’t have insurance. They want help making dental care more affordable, more cost effective for them. You know, most people don’t think of dentistry in the same way as they do going to a hair salon or a spa or anything like that. This is a cost to them that they don’t want to pay.
00:07:11:29 – 00:07:36:11
Jonathan Fashbaugh
So they want to reduce that. Obviously, there’s some dialog there to help fix that thought process. But if we can take finances or at least maybe not take it out of the equation, but reduce the level of priority that the patient is giving it in their minds. If I’m a patient and I’m like, okay, I’ve got to pay for this, but now I’m going to have a recurring payment about dentistry.
00:07:36:13 – 00:07:39:22
Jonathan Fashbaugh
I’m not sure I’m up for that. Can you sell me on that?
00:07:39:25 – 00:08:02:11
Kristin Davis
Absolutely. So when you don’t have dental insurance, you have to pay out of pocket for everything. And those costs can add up a lot. So if you think about joining our dental membership plan, so you’ll have a recurring cost. Yes. But you’ll know what the cost is every time. And here are the benefits you’re going to get your cleanings and your exams and your X-rays for the year, totally paid for.
00:08:02:13 – 00:08:22:00
Kristin Davis
And then any other services you need, like if you need a filling, if you need a crown, you’ll get 15% discount on that out of pocket. It’s really easy to sign up. All you have to do is click here and you’ll be a member of our office. You’ll hear from us all the time, will remind you you can set up your appointments ahead of time, months ahead of time.
00:08:22:02 – 00:08:27:06
Kristin Davis
And you know, just one payment and annually or the monthly and that’s all you need.
00:08:27:09 – 00:09:09:04
Jonathan Fashbaugh
In our current hygiene or hygienist crisis, I think that having a service like dental HQ, which by the way you can check out at dental HQ, AECOM, they’re not a sponsor. I just think Christine’s awesome and I think that these membership plans are kind of a hack for getting patients to say yes to dentistry, yes to scheduling. I do think you’ve got to work at pitching it and the team has to be comfortable talking about this of yes, especially if you’re a preferred patient at our office, I’d be happy to schedule you for a hygiene appointment.
00:09:09:09 – 00:09:33:22
Jonathan Fashbaugh
And in fact, as a preferred patient of John Doe dentistry, you actually can get exclusive scheduling options with us to get appointments on Fridays and even Saturday appointments. Or, you know, like I talked to an office yesterday that’s but more than six months out for hygiene. If I’m a new patient calling that office, I’m probably going to say, okay, well, thanks.
00:09:33:22 – 00:09:51:05
Jonathan Fashbaugh
I’m going to go check out some other things. But if I was presented with actually most of our hygiene patients enjoy being preferred patients at our office and as a preferred patient, I can get you in in a couple months rather than in six months. If you’re not, is that something you’d be interested in hearing more about?
00:09:51:08 – 00:10:19:15
Kristin Davis
Yeah, and see, that’s one of the benefits of dental HQ as well as when you start with our platform, you get dedicated success. So in your onboarding call, we talk about team training, we have email templates, we have text templates, we have scripts for your office for how to talk to patients. Again, we have marketing resources, so we’ve got the text last, we’ve got email blast, we’ve got social media post, we give you a dedicated page for your website where people can sign up, you can get the QR codes.
00:10:19:17 – 00:10:38:12
Kristin Davis
We have several different templates available to drop in the QR code for patients to just click and go straight to your signup page. Like we we try to make it as easy as possible for the offices because they don’t want to to track membership plans either. We’ve had people track them on an Excel spreadsheet, we’ve had them track them on paper.
00:10:38:14 – 00:10:56:24
Kristin Davis
We want to make this easy and like I said, like built by dentists, for dentists, like you don’t want the, the tracking and everything that you have to do manually. You want it all done for our dental membership plans, right? For your dental practice. Do you want to boost patient loyalty? Your recurring revenue, and reduce those patient cancellations and no shows?
00:10:56:27 – 00:11:01:02
Kristin Davis
Then you want to join Dental HQ? Visit us today at www.dentalhq.com.
00:11:01:05 – 00:11:31:27
Jonathan Fashbaugh
So I’m going to be an ordinary doctor. Let’s pretend that I’m I’m walking up to you at a conference and I’m like, Kristin, I pay my marketing guy, I pay Google, I pay my team, I pay all these costs, and you want to add another monthly bill that I’ve got to pay. Why? Why would a dentist who’s built this for me do such a thing to me, that’s easy.
00:11:31:28 – 00:11:50:09
Kristin Davis
We’re taking a lot of work from you, so if you can have a solution where you could get more patients, those patients would pay you more, they would cancel less, they would know, show less, and they would be more loyal to your practice and more loyal about recommending your practice. Would that be worth it?
00:11:50:12 – 00:12:06:02
Jonathan Fashbaugh
It sounds like it’s built by dentists for dentists at that point. No, but seriously, the cancellation thing is also something I hadn’t thought about. Like how does I know you mentioned loyalty, but how does that truly reduce no show rate?
00:12:06:07 – 00:12:33:13
Kristin Davis
So there’s a lot of things you can do as far as cancellations and a membership really, really helps you for that, especially using dental HQ as your membership plan platform. So we’ve got lots of information for your team for clear communication. If you’re paying a membership fee for something like you’re going to show up, like you’re not going to cancel because you want your money’s worth for things like if you have Amazon Prime, you’re not ordering stuff from Walmart every time, like you’re going to Amazon because that’s where you get your free shipping.
00:12:33:16 – 00:12:52:05
Kristin Davis
Same with the dental office, same with the dental membership plan. You want loyal patients, That’s how you get them. Unfortunately, you know, last minute cancellations and no shows are always going to be a part of it. But if you’ve got your membership plan in place and you’ve train your team how to handle it, you know you’ve got a clear policy for cancellations.
00:12:52:06 – 00:13:11:05
Kristin Davis
You’ve got maybe a fee, maybe you’ve got a team that make sure they communicate that with new patient forums, you know, get somebody to sign the cancellation form saying that, you know, if I cancel within 24 hours, I’m going to get a fine. But your office is also trained and communication. So like, you know, you have a mom who’s got a kid that’s throwing up.
00:13:11:05 – 00:13:35:14
Kristin Davis
Obviously, you don’t want her to come to the appointment, you know, especially if it’s for her child who’s throwing up. So you’re going to give a little grace. But the platform has so many cool features like Business Connect and Community Connect, where Business Connect is where we empower offices to reach out to local businesses who don’t offer dental insurance for their employees to offer them, like an exclusive dental membership plan for that.
00:13:35:16 – 00:14:03:09
Kristin Davis
Also for communities, same same kind of thing. So community groups can sign up for this dental membership plan that’s all built into the platform. We also have team incentives. We have launch rewards. So, you know, as you go through the checklist, you get rewards. We have the team incentives, which are, you know, if you add so many members a month, you’re entered into a drawing for, you know, $25 gift card and then your $50 gift card and then you’re you know, you can be entered in for a $250 gift card.
00:14:03:09 – 00:14:08:24
Kristin Davis
So you have the potential to earn like $500 a month just by adding members to your plan.
00:14:08:27 – 00:14:41:16
Jonathan Fashbaugh
One of the things I like about having a membership plan for a dental office is that it gives you another option to present. I mean, if you just think about the average dental websites, payment options or insurance and financing page, it’s like there are relatively few options, especially if you’re taking away the option of insurance. And people just generally like to know, I could do it this way or this way, and membership plan is going to give you a third option to present.
00:14:41:19 – 00:15:18:08
Jonathan Fashbaugh
Speaking of options, I wanted to give you a new option for your website marketing, and that is Pro Impressions Marketing. If your website is fairly invisible, we have a package called our Pro membership that will help you with visibility, especially if you’re disappointed with your ad performance. Or maybe you lack an ad strategy altogether. Our pro membership PAY PER Click management program creates and fine tuned your ad campaigns for maximum impact driving more ideal patient leads to your office and that’s something you’re interested in.
00:15:18:14 – 00:15:40:23
Jonathan Fashbaugh
We’ve got a link in the description (www.proimpressionsgroup.com) that you can click on and learn more about that. One of the things that I think dentists struggle with sometimes is how they can be expand the brand of the office, how they can get more involved in in the community, make, you know, network with local businesses. How can membership plans do that?
00:15:40:23 – 00:15:43:23
Jonathan Fashbaugh
Is that a component that you guys do?
00:15:43:25 – 00:16:06:18
Kristin Davis
Yes, absolutely. And I think a good way that a practice could do that would be by offering the dental membership plans to local businesses or local community groups. So instead of adding only one member at a time when you partnered with local businesses or local community groups, you’ll get to add entire sections of members to your practice at once.
00:16:06:26 – 00:16:11:28
Kristin Davis
So think about that as instead of one new patient, you’re going to have 20 new patients.
00:16:12:00 – 00:16:17:08
Jonathan Fashbaugh
I don’t know any dentists that would be like NA Pass.
00:16:17:11 – 00:16:42:27
Kristin Davis
Yeah, yeah. Honestly, great groups that have the potential for this are retirement communities. You can do like freelancers, freelance groups, local artist, gig workers. Co-working spaces are really popular for this, as well as universities and community colleges, because if you think about it in that age group, you’ve got a lot of kids that have aged out of their parents insurance and are looking for the first time at doing their their own.
00:16:42:29 – 00:16:51:13
Kristin Davis
And, you know, everybody talks about millennials and how they love subscription. So it’s definitely a a winner there.
00:16:51:18 – 00:17:15:21
Jonathan Fashbaugh
I don’t know if my average client would be like, yes, sign me up for more millennials. No, seriously, I get a lot of offices that are interested in ways to attract more young patients because in these fee for service models, a lot of the older patients, they’ve done the dentistry, you know, they do a good job, so they’re not necessarily coming back.
00:17:15:21 – 00:17:38:15
Jonathan Fashbaugh
And sometimes they’ve positioned their offices as being specialty kind of dentistry and they’ve got a regular dentist that does their hygiene and stuff. So getting fresh blood in kind of by turning that model on its head, I think could be a great idea for a lot of offices, especially when the economy is not doing backflips right now or in the future.
00:17:38:15 – 00:17:45:28
Jonathan Fashbaugh
Having a plan for injecting new blood into the practice sounds like a membership plan could be a tool that could accomplish that.
00:17:46:03 – 00:18:03:08
Kristin Davis
They definitely are. They build a lot of trust with you and your patients. We’ve seen a lot of case acceptance increases. You know, patients are more loyal to your office. They’re they visit you more frequently when they’re members, so they’re more trusting of the treatments that you and your team plan out for them as well.
00:18:03:09 – 00:18:18:28
Jonathan Fashbaugh
So give me an idea of the process involved in starting a membership plan. I mean, your processes may be different at dental HQ then I know there are others out there, but like is it a hassle because it seems like it could be a hassle?
00:18:19:02 – 00:18:41:24
Kristin Davis
No, it’s super easy. You can talk to a member of our team or you can enroll straight from our website and our team will schedule an onboarding call with you to make sure all of your numbers are correct. It takes less than an hour and a lot of cases, I think it’s like 30 minutes to get everything set up as long as you know your numbers for, you know, like those hygiene cases or for cleanings, you know, how much does it cost, How much is this, how much is this?
00:18:41:26 – 00:19:00:14
Kristin Davis
And we plug it all in. We’ve got a formula. We help you build your membership plans. You know what specifically is offered in each one and then you’re off. We help you market it. We offer the the code for the website to be added so that your patients can go directly from there and schedule training if you need it.
00:19:00:17 – 00:19:04:02
Kristin Davis
But other than that, we’ve got some great help documents and a great team that’s always there.
00:19:04:09 – 00:19:28:12
Jonathan Fashbaugh
Do you want to see your dental practice grow like never before? Well, here’s your tip. Go to Dental HQ dot com and sign up for custom membership plan software and you can go to Pro Impressions group dot com and schedule a consultation to learn more about our pro member marketing people to call us today at 970-672-1212 and we’ll chat.
00:19:28:19 – 00:19:55:01
Jonathan Fashbaugh
It sounds like it’s easy to get started and signed up, but to be a success story for dental HQ, what has to happen inside the practice to actually make it happen? Because I know of offices that we work with that have a membership plan. They don’t tell their patients about it. Like we record their calls, we listen to them, make sure they’re doing a good job, and that’s something I don’t hear them talking about.
00:19:55:07 – 00:20:14:24
Kristin Davis
We make it a part of the normal, everyday script. So when you’re, you know, when you’re greeting that patient, when they’re coming in, when they’re getting signed in, and you’re talking about insurance, not insurance, you’re saying, oh, hey, we offer this membership plan. Here’s some information. We’ve either got the QR code card that we’ve got slides that we offer that they can snap the QR code.
00:20:14:29 – 00:20:33:08
Kristin Davis
We’ve got anything that that you can think of that would help the office with, especially with the text, with scripting to let the patients know better. So we just really drive home that it should be a part of your everyday conversation, not every day script that you have with your patients and it should be everywhere in your office too.
00:20:33:14 – 00:20:47:00
Jonathan Fashbaugh
I think you’ve got to make being a preferred patient a thing. I mean, our offices, white labeling, dental HQ are are they like your preferred patient with us through dental HQ?
00:20:47:03 – 00:20:56:28
Kristin Davis
No, it’s white labeled for them. So it’s their membership plan? It’s their plan. It’s. We’re just the platform that helps them manage it. So it’s 100% their plan.
00:20:57:00 – 00:21:00:1
Jonathan Fashbaugh
Got it. The John Doe dentistry membership plan.
00:21:00:16 – 00:21:02:19
Kristin Davis
John Doe Dentistry membership plan. Absolutely.
00:21:02:25 – 00:21:31:12
Jonathan Fashbaugh
Today on Marketing Chairside, we talked about how to use membership plans to get people to say yes to treatment, how to make people feel special, and how to know whether or not membership plans are actually increasing your patient loyalty speaking, which you know what, That sounds so good and right now. A Yes, and I’ll have one of those.
00:21:31:15 – 00:38:15:05
Jonathan Fashbaugh
Ooh, shiny.
