Eye Care Practice Management in Today’s Competitive Marketplace

Growing your practice in today’s competitive marketplace is no easy task. Traditional means of getting the word out to your patients—ads in the Yellow Pages, newspapers, and on the radio—are effective, but also costly. How can you expand your practice without also paying more? Does optical practice management need to cost a lot?

Fortunately, it doesn’t. You can harness the power of the Internet to do all of the things that traditional advertising did for you, and at a fraction of the cost. Your current patient list is like a pot of gold waiting to be discovered. By revising your optical practice management to be in step with current best practices, you’ll be well on your way to outperforming the competition.

Here are some ways you can market to your current patient list:

o Write a periodic newsletter and send it to patients via e-mail.
o Build a better website. Include special offers to visitors, and offer them the opportunity to sign up for you e-newsletter.
o Ask visitors to return. It’s amazing what a simple, “Thank you, come again!” will do for your optical practice management. Courtesy counts.
o Ask for a referral. In other words, if you can tell a patient is happy with the service you’ve provided, see if they can’t recommend some of their friends, relatives, or co-workers to visit you. Make things easier by handing them a few extra business cards for good measure.

A quick note on the e-newsletter—make sure you get permission from the people to whom you intend to send it. Federal spam legislation now requires that people give you permission before you send an e-mail to them. By creating an “opt-in” for these patients, you’re following the guidelines and showing your courtesy at the same time.

Want to market to your current patient base effectively? Following the eye care practice management suggestions listed above will get you on the right path.

Eye Care Marketing and Snail Mail: To Be or Not To Be

We’ve practically eliminated all post card or snail-mail marketing.
Response rates (we measured) on post card campaigns were in the 1-2% range. Of course, you get very little feedback or metrics.

In essence, I now think of snail mail as a back-up for recalls (we send reminders by email) and a way to purge the snail-mail database (i.e., usually with an end of year flex spending reminder – which of course also gets mention in the email).

Email is the absolute way to go. You need about 1000 to be really effective, but any number is a good start and enough to create a conversation. I send out approximately 1 email/broadcast/newsletter per week- information mainly.

Just pick a topic or ask in the email what people want to know more about.

Most software programs ($10-$20) per month give you a ton of metrics (who opened, clicked, etc). You can segment the list to test different offers or wording, identify your big fans…etc… And most importantly, you can set up multiple emails in an autoresponder series that go out automatically at an interval you specify.

(We use icontact, but there are many others out there.
Basically, I can count on at least 35% will open and read any note I send. This is very high (in the world of email marketing) and reflects the unique opportunity for a list people have opted in a setting such as ours.

We did a trunk show last June that was the most successful that we’ve ever done. In fact, it was better than the last two combined.

This time I used email (and my website) as the only method of promotion. It frees up money and therefore options in terms of what you can offer by way of promotion.

Their are challenges. You must keep it real, simple, short, and personal. Sounds easy, but it takes practice. Some people will opt-out or use it as an opportunity to ask about their glasses, but basically its a home run.

And by the way, you absolutely do not need fancy graphics or technology.

Hope this helps and good luck!
Jeff Lewis