Posted on 2011-02-03 13:42:04
Sometimes you'll be buying ads to send traffic to your dental website and you'll wonder if you're really getting your money's worth. For example, you might spend $2500 on a directory listing and get one patient all year. Was that a waste?
It could be, or maybe you should spend even more money in that directory for a premium listing.
Any time you pay for traffic, you are being an investor. You buy new patients and hope to bring in more money from treating them than you spent. The secret to knowing how you're doing with this is to find your lifetime patient value, which is how much each patient spends with you during your entire professional relationship.
Here is a way to roughly find that number. Put together all your revenue and divide it by the number of patients that contributed to that revenue. Suppose the "average" patient spend $5000 with you over time. If this is the case, than you're getting a very significant return on your investment from that directory and it would make sense to buy more listings if you have the availability in your schedule. All things being equal, it makes sense to lower your cost per patient, but this is secondary to getting a positive cash flow by maximizing the volume that you're getting from your proven profitable patients.
See if this perspective makes you think a little differently in how you should market your dental website. If this sounded uncomfortable, wait until next week where we'll show you how to adopt this mindset.