I hope you all had a relaxing holiday weekend and some time to spend with your friends and family members.
The summer months are upon us, and even though I love the summer and what it brings weather-wise, as a business owner, it’s not my favorite season of the year.
Why…
If you’ve run a practice for any length of time, you know what summer means:
Vacations and travel
For a lot of patients, this means that they will be traveling to see family and friends or just taking time off from their normal work schedules.
(As a friendly reminder, If YOU are taking some time away from the office this summer, please let your marketing manager and/or call center team member know ahead of time so we can plan around your time off)
For practice owners, summertime usually means that you have a drop off in patient visits and/or an increase in missed appointments or rescheduled appointments.
So we wanted to give you a few strategies to prepare the practice over the next few months to be the most effective you can be.
1. Reminder Calls – Everyone does these the night before for new patient appointments, but if you have active patients that have not been in sometime and they have scheduled out a few weeks, give them a reminder call a few days before their appointment, maybe 3 days prior.
2. Travel Announcements – Make sure your staff and patients know when you will be out of the office. For physical medicine offices, make sure your time away is covered by associates or other team members. For dental practices, just schedule around travel time.
3. Produce More Content – July is the month to produce additional content for your practice. Emails, blogs, live videos, anything that you can do to put out more content on your social channels or list, this is a great month to do it.
4. Get more Video Testimonials – July is typically a great month for getting video testimonials because your team usually has more time to ask for them and record them. Set a goal of generating at least 2 testimonials a week.
5. Schedule promotions around holidays – The week of July 4th is typically a slow week for marketing or promotions, so for most clients we pause ads that week. Let your marketing manager know your preference for running ads that week.
If you and your team plan ahead of time, you can all have a very productive and busy summer.
