How do you get around the down times, when your practice is not (yet) full of patients or you may have just opened a new practice?

Here are some tips on how to ensure your practice can make it through tough times and perhaps thrive.

Add to and ‘milk’ your database

If you own an established practice, you probably have a database of potential patients. If not then start building one! Make contact and start inviting them in for a practice experience. Email and snail mail them AT LEAST 4 times a year (although you can readily do more with Email). Add a subscription service to your website, blog and social media presence, and then do everything you can to get new patients and steadily build your numbers.

Use your time

When it’s quiet in the practice, develop your marketing plan and act on it. Devise a HEAP of ways to contact your database, build your database and keep them coming back for as little cost as you can. Email and Facebook pages are one way, tweaking your informative and engaging website is another, adding to your web blog is yet another.

Get Excited!

The more you can add excitement to cause patients to come into your practice, more the more value you can get from them. And the patients you are already seeing feel this excitement, they will tell all their family and friends about it, too.

Give simple and effective reminders

Promo products can do this, hand out a small gift at random to a patient at the end of their appointment, give them a voucher to use themselves or for their family and friends. Display business cards on reception as people soon keep them for friends if the service is sensational and the experience is good.

Get out there!

Sitting in your practice will not be helpful. Get you and your staff out in the community, for example, set up a stall at a local shopping centre, so you can show everyone what your practice is about and they can meet and interact with your team