If you’re working hard to acquire new clients but don’t have a system in place to automatically flag appointment booking opportunities and past-due reminders for existing clients, you may be working harder than you need to improve practice profitability.
If the idea of achieving more by doing less work seems illogical or counterintuitive, that’s understandable. Most of us have been steeped in the idea that in order to achieve something, we must work hard and struggle to get there.
While this may be uniquely true to specific things like mountain climbing, it’s only one side of the coin when it comes to general business sensibility and the objective of growing your practice revenue with more appointments.
The other side of the coin involves what marketers and businesses of all kinds have known and followed for years as part of overall principles to grow and maintain profitability:
It takes far less time, effort, and money to keep an existing client than it does to acquire a new one.
“Acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.” —Harvard Business Review
Here’s a quick analogy of how this applies to veterinary practices.
When businesses invest thousands of dollars into TV commercials, display ads, or other traditional advertising mediums to attract new customers, they know it’s fundamentally cheaper to stay in touch with those customers and keep them engaged for repeat business than it is to reach back into their wallets and spend more money to attract new customers.
In a similar manner, you’ve invested your time and energy to build your client base. When you have an efficient system in place to stay in touch with your clients and send them timely appointment reminders, you maximize your potential for profitability through repeat business, which involves a smaller expenditure of time and energy than trying to attract new clients to replace the ones who may have become disengaged or simply don’t show for repeat visits because they don’t get reminders.
And therein lies a big challenge for many practices.
Whether through appointment-tracking systems that are less than optimal, or reminders lost with manual email systems, veterinary practices on average have over 1,091 active clients who are missing reminders, and 19 chances per day to schedule additional appointments.
In other words, most veterinary practices (whether they know it or not) have a reservoir of untapped revenue just waiting to be switched on. All that’s missing is the right system to track daily appointment opportunities and make it easy for staff to send out reminders, and that’s exactly what ALLYDVM was designed to do.
Watch the short About ALLYDVM video
Trusted by organizations like Zoetis, Elanco, and Merck Animal Health, the ALLYDVM Communication + Retention System is one of the veterinary industry’s most powerful and customizable software solutions for improved client communications, engagement, and profitability.
- According to research published in Veterinary Advantage, one group of practices saw a 17.9% drop in missed appointments and $59,000 in additional revenue over nine months after using ALLYDVM.
ALLYDVM’s industry-leading Retention Calendar automatically tracks appointment opportunities, and built-in system prompts make it simple for your staff to send out appointment reminders with automated email, text, and postcard communications.
To improve client engagement, ALLYDVM empowers pet owners to be more involved in their pet’s health. Syncing directly and securely to your existing practice management software to eliminate the need for duplicate data entry, ALLYDVM provides your clients with access to pet health records and a direct line of communication with your practice. So, you can stay up to date and in touch with your clients. ALLYDVM also includes a convenient client-facing mobile app and an optional Loyalty Program to further boost engagement, repeat business, and client retention.
- According to research by Bain & Company, a 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75%.
To help you easily track revenue gains from extra appointments, ALLYDVM includes powerful and easy-to-read analytics and reporting.
To see all of ALLYDVM’s features, visit the ALLYDVM page at LifeLearn.
Even less work:
Watch the short About ALLYDVM video (It’s only 80 seconds long.)
