Real Case Study: 55 Bookings ($74,378) Direct to Calendar

Matt: It’s episode 100 of the Medical Practice Marketing Podcast. I’m your host Matt Coffy. We are going to be talking today about a case study. This case study covers a very interesting topic which relates to auto-positioning patients on your calendar without any touch needed from the practitioner’s staff. I implore you this is a very critical component to getting your staff out of the way and letting patients book on their time and then calling them back to confirm and get their information. This is super helpful, on with the show again if you need help with your medical practice, marketing your practice, getting a project done, getting a website done. We are here for you go to practicebloom.com/start. Again, practicebloom.com/start and we’ll get you started on your project. On with the show.

Alright, welcome to another episode of the podcast. This is a case study. So we’re going to talk today about a very interesting situation we ran into with one of our practitioners. Now as you might know if you run a busy practice a lot of things happen during the day. There’s a lot of activity coming in, people coming out, back and forth between insurance and all the things that need to happen in a typical practice. With all the different activities related, finding the lead path for activity that’s coming through from new patients has always been a challenge with a lot of the practitioners we work with because the attribution has been a big issue. Where did the actual call come from and where did it end up? Because you can get phone calls and lead forms and referrals and really all of it gets mixed together and because there’s so much in the practice that goes by every day, the key is to get simple systems built. So in this particular case, in this case study which you’ll see the video that will be just following this brief introduction, Chase who’s the V.P. of operations will talk about how we instituted a program that’s really cool and basically a direct books right on the website and in this case we had 55 appointments that equaled about$74,378 in revenue.

Why’s that important? Because there was a no-touch system. So basically the product, service, an offering was out there on the web that people came through these different various offers into the website booked directly on the calendar on the physical calendar for the practitioner and then that resulted in confirmations of 55 appointments in a month to equal this amount of value of revenue. So really here was the problem. So receiving forms, poor follow up and process. This particular practitioner was receiving inbound forms, hundreds of them. And the question was whether or not they were following u? This happens a lot when you get really starting to be actively marketing your business. A lot of stuff comes at you at once and you try and sort of go through the wheat in the chaff as they might say and what actually makes sense. Well once you receive enough forms, following up on these to make sure that people actually books in is becoming a challenge for a lot of our practitioners because there’s so many. Hundreds and hundreds in a month. Well, what we did we said well let’s qualify those people right in the booking process and put them right on your calendar. We hooked it up to the actual calendaring functionality within their systems and was able to fully book straight from those ads that were running in the digital space whether it was Facebook or Google.

The leads basically were falling through the cracks for this practitioner. So one of the things that we kind of realized was that if you start to develop enough activity is that even if you have let’s say 300 leads that came through in a month that are people who want to take advantage of an offer or anything, even if you can’t get to them all. Without a system to follow up, meaning a salesperson or somebody a P.A. or an office manager or even someone just basically to work on this, there is such a fall through the crack mentality because so many things are happening the next day. So great we got after this, but the process was not actually delivered so we built this so we get the people directly onto the calendar.

No way to complete the cycle on attribution. That’s what I’ve brought up in the first part of this video, which was that in order to make sure attribution (where the lead came from) this was directly related. So we could tell when a lead came through on direct booking, we knew that those appointments came from specific vehicles. Because we could track them directly from the form right back to the ad. So we knew exactly where it’s coming from instead of it being a phone call or form lead or something that came in that whether or not to it got closed or not, we never know because we send the leads but we have to rely on people who are office managers PA’s, people to pick up the phone to actually close the lead. In this case, they are closed and they’re on the schedule. So really this is a major thought change and the thought change is that people, patients want to save time so they’re willing to book online right now.

They’re not going to pick up the phone, make a phone call, start talking to someone, maybe get an answer or don’t know. They can literally look at their calendar. Look at that calendar that’s on the site and make a booking within the framework of their life. This is sort of looking at Uber and Airbnb and some of the things that are happening, people’s lifestyles are changing to save time.

The second thing is it’s simple. So the process of basically getting a booking online is so much easier, especially if you’re on your phone. You go from one thumb click to an appointment click to boom you’re into their calendar, so simple. No stress involved, very very light friction. So think about simplicity when you think about your own practice and the last thing is routine.

So we’re matching up with someone’s routine, their calendar to your calendar. And that’s where it becomes more important. The basis of what’s happening in this society is that people are managing time by looking online and seeing what they can book. Think about it, everybody will go online and see if they can make their life easier. And pretty soon you’re going to be doing it right through your echo or your Alexa and asking that question “when can I book my time at so and so practice?” All right. That’s it. We’re going to go on to the case study. Enjoy it. This is Chase Buckner, the V.P. of OPs who you’ll see next.

Chase: Hi everyone, Chase Buckner here from PracticeBloom with another video case study and today we’re talking about the power of online scheduling. One of our clients, as you can see here Ethos Spa in Clifton, New Jersey came to us after a few months and said “hey you guys are doing a really good job of driving new leads for us. But what I’d love to be able to do is actually see how many of these leads are going to conversions without having to do all sorts of manual mashing up and cross-referencing”. So what we said was great. What we should do is implement online scheduling for you and allow people to book into a service online without having to go through anyone, and that way we can track straight through from campaign all the way through to conversion and not just leads.

So they were all on board. We implemented acuity, which is an online scheduler that we’ve worked with before. I just want to show you a little bit of what that looks like. So essentially let’s say we start with the first visit promotion which we know does really well. We set that up and then we basically create some automation behind it. So when someone claims that promotion, you can see this is what’s going to happen automatically on the back end.

First, they get added to a list and then they get an e-mail that goes back that says “Thanks for joining our newsletter. Please visit our appointment request page to schedule your first appointment in order to redeem the promotion that you just claimed”. So if they click on either of these links or this button, they go into the booking system. So let’s take a look at what that looks like really quick. Here I have a screenshot of my phone so you can see what it looks like on mobile which is very nice. So let’s assume someone’s on their phone, they get their email, they click the link.

This is how you could get to the same link from an actual page on the site, but here’s what they see when they click the link from that e-mail that I just showed. So you can see you can easily pick your date, pick a time, go ahead and click through and then you just enter your details and you’re going to actually book online without having to go through anyone. And then you’ll get a text message and an e-mail confirmation back about your booking.

So once you are in the system, now we can match up how many of those people actually claimed the offer versus how many people actually came in to redeem. Then you can actually calculate a true cost per conversion not just the cost per lead. So let’s take a look at what happened once we implemented that back in the beginning of September, the first month that we implemented the acuity booking for them. And as you can see it generated a total of 55 bookings. So 55 bookings over the course of a month. As you can see the majority of them were that first visit promotion that we set up which worked really well.

Fifty-five bookings for them. I can’t remember the exact number but it was something over fifty-five thousand dollars I think in online revenue generated that month online without them having actually do anything. People scheduling themselves putting them on the calendar and essentially putting them into the cash register with no one else having to get involved. So as you can see, the power of online booking is extremely strong and if you have a medical spa or some other service that could benefit from online booking, definitely give us a shout, let us know. We’d be happy to implement it for you and start driving more revenue into your practice today.

Matt: Alright, thanks for listening. This has been a PracticeBloom Medical Practice Marketing Podcast. If you are interested in getting your practice started with a really great strategy to bring in patients, get your branding set up. All things digital. Please contact PracticeBloom at practicebloom.com/start and we’ll get you a customized package just for your practice. Again, practicebloom.com/start.