One of the foundations of running a busy aesthetic medicine practice is providing a five-star patient experience and showing patients how much we appreciate and value them. Your patients are your best referral source, so you want to show them some “love” and reward their loyalty.
Some of the reasons we create loyalty programs are to help increase revenue through patient retention. We want our patients to return and increase their lifetime value, so we want to give them some incentive and benefit from returning. We want them to have a great experience, get fantastic results, and refer others by word of mouth to your practice.
When we talk about loyalty programs, we often are talking about some very simple, easy programs to put together in your practice like punch cards for purchases, and referral credits when they refer to other patients. Additionally, you can set up a service-specific membership. For example, maybe your patients have done a package of BBL (Broadband Light), and to keep those great results, you want them to do another BBL treatment every six months. You can set up or create a one-year maintenance program for them where they get special pricing or a savings because they have already finished a package with your practice.
There are also full-on membership packages, which are great for loyalty and increasing patient retention. Membership packages help patients who are treated for one thing expand into other areas and book other treatments/procedures. Membership packages are typically charged upfront on a monthly or annual basis and offer discounts across multiple services. Memberships can be very simple and straightforward, or they can be a bit more complicated if you structure them with pricing tiers and different levels of discounts.
Finally, there are vendor loyalty programs. These can be a huge asset to your practice. When you are working with some of these great vendor companies (such as Allergan, Merz, Galderma, etc) that have these programs available, you’ll want to take advantage of offering these to your patients.
Every practice is different, so some of these types of programs may work for you, and some may not be a great fit. I recommend if you don’t currently have any loyalty program in place, that you start small and incorporate one or two of them.
As you are thinking about adding memberships or loyalty programs, make sure you know your Revenue Per Hour and Profit Per Procedure for the services you are offering, so you know what kind of discount you can offer without interfering with your profit margin and over-discounting. Within the Clarity Practice Performance System, we offer financial calculators Think about promoting recurring services that require maintenance treatments for optimal patient outcomes. Try to promote services with higher profit margins. You can create fun events for your VIP membership patients to make them feel special.
Now this is very important. Whatever you do, don’t make your programs too complicated. Start out simple. Even if you jumped right in, you may want to take a step back a little bit and streamline and simplify.
Do take advantage of your top vendors who offer patient loyalty and rewards programs. Take the time to understand exactly what they are offering. You should also evaluate and re-evaluate from time to time what is working and what is not and adjust if necessary. Finally, DO NOT price match. Your programs are already adding value for your patients.
One thing to note is terms and conditions. It is very important to be transparent. Again, keep it simple as we don’t want our patients to feel like we are trying to pull something over on them. We want them to be able to take advantage of these programs and reap the benefits. We want to include terms and conditions even when it comes to simple programs like a punch card. The patient needs to have clarity on how it can be used, what it can be applied to. Can they save up multiple cards and use the discount from all three cards at the same time? These are things you need to think about and put together simple terms and conditions.
You do want to ensure you have some room to make changes. So somewhere in the terms and conditions, you might want to include a condition statement for membership programs saying something like, “Subject to change as our pricing, service lines or product lines may change over time.” We need to be careful not to make them too specific where someone can come back and feel we were not honest with them.
If there are financial terms involved or if the patient is pre-paying for something, you want to make sure you are very clear on how that is handled financially. Specifically, regarding memberships, you want to make sure you have the following in place:
Before you roll these out in your practice, you want to ensure your team is prepared to handle all the details.
Here’s a short checklist of things you want to make sure you are prepared to handle.
Processes for:
Arm your team with scripts and talking points for:
What gets measured gets managed, so you do not want to wing this. You want to create some realistic goals for your staff and the practice. You can use a goal tracker to keep track – it’s a great tool for measuring success of these programs. You want to have a plan in place and a timeline for launching. Commit to training your team on how to handle the program and institute check-ins with your staff who are in the trenches to gather feedback on what’s working and what isn’t and what challenges they are experiencing.
One thing to note is to be careful about double discounts. Be very cautious about offering multiple programs and patients somehow being allowed to use double or multiple discounts as that can really eat into your profit margins.
Something that I see happen often is selling gift cards at a discount. Gift cards are great; however, if that patient uses a discounted gift card along with a discounted monthly promotion, you have eroded your profit margin. So, I caution you against selling gift cards at a discount as it is difficult to track.
Utilization of your Alle points and other vendor rewards programs are typically set up where there is not a double discount because your practice is recuperating the discount that you’re giving. Make sure you’re very clear though on the terms of these vendor programs.
How many of you have had these loyalty programs in place that were underutilized, and your patients did not even know about them?
You want to make sure that:
If you're ready to calculate your Revenue per Hour, head here to access our free version and start jump-starting your loyalty program offerings today.