External Marketing
What You Need To Know: PLZ is the only external marketing system in dentistry that's integrated with your practice management software. We employ traditional (mail) and cutting edge (Internet) approaches to reach patients in any demographic group you're interested in. Our RealCall telephone tracking system (optional - extra fees apply) validates your external marketing investment, and ensures that incoming calls from prospective new patients are being handled professionally.
Does your practice management software (PMS) manage your external marketing? Of course not - PMS's are for managing existing patients. Which is yet another reason you need practice management extension software - because external marketing is a critical component of managing a dental practice! And it should be integrated with your existing patient database - your PMS.
How Can External Marketing Be Integrated With My PMS?
It can't... unless the company doing the external marketing also has full access to the data in the practice management system... which we do, of course. That means that we can:
"Mine" your existing patient data to identify demographic groups that are your best patients - the patients who keep current for hygiene visits, don't break appointments, etc. Then we use that information to define the demographic groups to target with the external marketing.
"Scrub" the initial mailing list for any direct mail marketing we do for you, so that we don't mail to any existing patients. Not only does that save you money, it prevents existing patients from asking why you're mailing to them, and perhaps from asking why they don't get the "special offer" in the marketing piece.
Stratify the mailing list by age and/or gender, and send a different marketing piece (with a different image, different wording, different special offer) to the different groups automatically.
Notify you when you get a new patient who came to you because of the mailing we sent, and cancel any future mailings to them.
It Takes All Kinds
All kinds of ways to reach new patient prospects, that is. Not just direct mail. Not just the Internet. And for heaven's sake, not just the phone book! We don't do everything, but we do have a number of ways we can help new patient propsects find you. Click on the links above to see all the ways we can help attract new patients to your practice.
Tracking Is Crucial
External marketing isn't cheap, and some aspects of it are more "art" than "science" (the words and images used on mailings, for example). So it's important that you be able to track the results of everything you're doing to attract new patients, so you know what's working (so you can keep doing it), and what's not working (so you can stop wasting money on it). Our RealCall tracking phone numbers automatically monitor every call that's generated by any external marketing tool (whether it's part of PLZ or not) - so you'll know how to spend your marketing budget.