Improving Patient Retention Using Loyalty Programs

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.

Do's and Don'ts of Loyalty Programs

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 APX Platform powered by Engage Technologies, we offer financial calculators that make it easy to determine this information. 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:

• A signed consent form
• A process for enrollment and cancellation fees
• Cancellation policy. It’s important to make sure you are clear how this cancellation policy will work with your merchant vendors and credit card processing, etc. 

Preparing to Launch Loyalty Programs

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:

• Applying discounts (your staff knows how to handle this)
• HIPAA-compliant referral credit
• Enrolling a patient
• Terminating enrollment
• Handling of consent and card information
• Monthly processing of fees
• Contact & collect payment when it doesn’t process.

Arm your team with scripts and talking points for: 

• Offering your program (credentialing and sharing the value)
• How to handle FAQs so team is not caught off guard
• How to navigate a no and handle objections (good to role play this to practice)
• How to handle a termination request (gathering information on why and collecting valuable feedback on how to do a better job)

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.

Promoting Your Loyalty 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:

• Your staff is well-versed and able to talk about the loyalty programs to everyone that enters the practice. Your front desk team should talk to every patient about it. They should be excited and upbeat about the programs and know exactly what each program entails and how it works. Your clinical staff in the rooms giving quotes should also be able to speak to patients about it while they are prepping them or performing services. 
• Your office should be equipped with branded materials that promote your programs such as rack cards and brochures. Perhaps you want to create a banner for a big new membership program. Even your loyalty punch cards should be branded to your practice. They should be out on the counter and at the front desk to make sure everyone sees them.  
• Your newsletters should have a call to action for a lot of these loyalty programs. Your website should feature program rollouts. Promote them on social media. 
• With your vendor loyalty programs, make sure when patients come in for Botox or fillers, ask them if they are an Allē member and look up their points available. If they are not, you can tell them about the program and sign them up. 

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.