Although running special offers is nothing new, and most dental practices have gone down this path at some point, they still remain controversial.

They are particularly controversial with the dentists whose personal income can be affected by the price of the special offer. If you are running a ‘No Gap’ exam, scale and clean, it is not unusual to find the rebate received from one of the health funds is very low and if your dentist is remunerated on a commission basis, they can easily find they would have been paid more working at McDonalds for the time they spent with the patient. The low initial income generated by a patient availing themselves of a special offer, can also be very frustrating for the practice owner as they have to factor in the cost of the dental nurse, steri, and the rest of the overheads they have to carry. But very often these ‘back of an envelope’ calculations are done on a single transaction, so lack prospective.

So, how should you work out if it is worth running special offers?

Practice owners very often say to me that they don’t need special offers as the practice is busy and they are booked-out a few weeks in advance. On the face of it, this would make sense as there is no point discounting services unless it is of benefit to the business, but is it really as simple as this?

Well, not really.

What your practice needs next week and what it needs in two years’ time can be

very different things. Most dental practice owners, should be playing the ‘long game’ and therefore planning several years ahead. Considering how long most dentists own their practice or practices for, it often surprises me just how reactionary their business management methods are.

“If you need more 30 years olds in society, you should have been planning 31 years ago” – Peter Zeihan – author of The End Of The World Is Just The Beginning

Many businesses really don’t know that much about their customers, but this is certainly not true of dental practices as we have a huge amount of data about our patients. Getting your practice manager to run some demographic reports is a great starting point when thinking about special offers. Let’s say these reports show that 70% of all your patients are over the age of 60, and the same report shows you are devoid of young families, this pretty much tells you that the practice is going to fall off a cliff at some point in the next fifteen years. So, although you are busy next week, you still may wish to consider a special offer targeting young families to fill the void in your database. Even if you are planning on selling the practice before you reach the cliff edge, imagine how much value you could be adding to your practice and how impressed your buyer will be if you have projected the forward needs of the practice.

The next thing to do is to analyse what your current or previous offers have produced. I had the classic whinge from some dentists in Queensland about the value of the special offers we had been running for the past few years. So, instead of trying to argue the point, we got the practice manager to run the numbers. New patients who had joined the practice from a No Gap / $149 Exam, Scale and Clean, spent an average (so some much less and some much more) of $3423 over the first three years of their patronage. The figure for those new patients who had joined the practice due to a $199 Teeth Whitening special sat at over $6,000 over the same period.

In his book, Pillars of Dental Success Dr Mark Costes DDS states that on average, every new patient is worth $10,000 over a ten-year period, through what they spend personally and who they refer – Something to think about when considering the use of special offers in your practice. u

IDM have been helping dental practices achieve their goals through effective marketing for over 20 years. To book a complementary marketing strategy meeting, with chief strategist, Tony O’Brien, call

02 92111477 or e-mail info@idm.com.au