The Proceptive Perspective Dental Blog

Recently, I received an email from Dr. Roden, an 18 year dental veteran with www.deerfieldsmiles.com in Deerfield, Illinois. He wrote: “What offers have been working lately to make consumers pick up the phone and call?”

Well Dr. Roden, there are several things you can do to encourage visitors to your website to pick up the phone and call your office.

Offers such as “Free Teeth Whitening” or other services can definitely encourage potential patients to call and give your practice a try. Our client Impressions Dental (www.impressdental.com) in Chandler Arizona is offering patients Free Whitening for Life. This is a great promotion that not only helps attract new patients, but encourages them to return for more dental work and pay their bills on time which increases cash flow. While a Free Whitening for Life promotion may now work for all types of practices, its basic concept of offering a value added service as a way of encouraging people to become lifetime patients is an idea that most can implement.

Another promotion that has been known to work, in all service industries, is the discount to new patient / customer offer. Offering a stated $25, $50, $100 credit to first time patients is a great way to attract people whom have never been to your practice. The benefits behind such an offer is that your patients will likely have their initial visit covered by their insurance company and will have to come in for additional procedures to reap the benefit of their credit. If they do not have insurance, then the credit will encourage them to come in for an initial exam.

Another thing you can do to have a higher percentage of your visitors call your practice is to make sure that your phone number is prominently displayed on your website, preferably near the top or near your site navigational items (where all the links to your other pages are). Make sure it is in a large font size so it stands out. Also make sure the color does not blend in with the colors around it, as the phone number should be easily read and understood.

If someone is searching for a new dentist and they have seen a couple other dental websites, you want to make sure that when they visit yours that they get a good first impression. A nice looking site that is easy to read and clearly represents your practice makes people want to continue to read or learn more about you. Having photos of you, your staff and office go a long way towards making your website visitors get a better feeling about you and your practice. In the dental industry, people are “buying” into you, your staff and your practice, they are buying a personal service, not a product that they can buy anywhere from anyone.

It is for this reason that you also want to be careful about running too many promotions, or poorly implementing a promotion; you don’t want to seem to “gimmicky”. Promotions and free offers are not normally associated with the dental industry. What should really drive new patients to a dental practice is the quality of the practice itself. Modern equipment, advanced services, an attractive office plus a welcoming feeling generated by a good website will bring patients in more then a coupon or special deal.

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Thanks,

~The Professor


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