Over the next 4 weeks we’re going to share some key client bonding strategies….
Why do we need to do this? – let me explainI’m sure you know that simply increasing your client retention by 5% to 10% will increase your practice profits by a WHACKING 50%-125%. WOW.
Increasing your client retention is the quickest, easiest and most profitable way to grow your veterinary business – and it’s also easier than trying to ‘find’ new clients.
So – what are you currently doing s to bond your clients with your practice?
If you feel like sharing – I’d love to hear.In the meantime let’s get stuck into WELCOMING your client to your practice. Some practices do nothing.
Some practices send a ‘Welcome To The Practice’ letter – studies show that this will definitely increases new client retention.
The more ‘advanced’ practices will send a ‘Welcome Pack’. This increases new client retention a lot more than just a ‘Welcome’ letter.
The even more advanced practices send a combination of; welcome letter, welcome email and a series of ‘getting to know us’ emails over about a two to three week period.
This works gang-busters and results in by far and away the highest new client retention of all. In today’s video – I explain EXACTLY what to do and how you need to do it – quickly and easily.
Click Here to listen to the Podcast
See below to read the Transcript
Enjoy
and I’ll see you next week when we talk about more simple and effective client bonding strategies.
dg
TRANSCRIPTION
Hi, it’s Diederik Gelderman here. Welcome to the Marketing Month of June.
Let me just quickly go through the four videos that I’ve got planned for you for this month.
- Today, it’s all about welcoming your client to the practice, setting the culture and setting the expectations.
- Next week, we’re going to talk about bonding your client.
- In week three, we’re going to talk about how to collect your clients’ email addresses smoothly, quickly, easily, and painlessly.
- And then in the fourth week, we’re going to do an introduction to joint venture marketing; and if you say, what’s JV Marketing? Diederik, I don’t know what that means. That’s okay, park that thought for now and we’ll talk about it in the fourth week.
- And then in July, we’re going to get you set up for August, for Pet Dental Health month.
Today, it’s all about welcoming your client and setting the expectations.
Why would I even want to talk about that?
Well, the fact is that in most practices worldwide, a good 12-month client retention rate is about 40%-45%. So, what does that mean?
That means for every 100 clients who come into your practice this week or this month or this quarter or whatever, in 12-months’ time, you have only kept 40%-45% of those 100. That’s a terrible attrition rate.
Each new client who comes in in your door cost you a fair amount of money to acquire and I had some videos that I’ve done before about working at how much it cost you to acquire a new client. You can go back to those, you’ll find them on You Tube – we don’t have the time to go through that today, but just trust me, it’s costing you multiple tens of thousands of dollars to have that degree of clinet loss / client turn over in your practice.
You can easily increase that client retention from 40% to 45% up to 50% or 60%.
And, with my good coaching clients, we have it up to 80%-85%, double the industry norm.
- So, how do we create that?
- How do we do that?
- How do we double that industry norm?
Well, it’s a very simple process, it’s not at all complex or involved, and I’ll give you all the steps to the process TODAY, and when you implement all the steps to the process, then you’re going to get up to that 80% or 85% retention.
AND – even if you implement just 1 or 2 steps in that process, you’ll usually increase your client retention by at least 10% above what it is now!
Let me talk about the steps to the process.
Step 1
The first step is to send them a very simple ‘welcome to the practice’ email the day that they com in, or at lease within the week. If your client comes in today, having them receive an email or an SMS this afternoon would be just awesome and fantastic. Very simple, a couple of lines, ‘thank you for the trust, we appreciate the fact that you had other choices as to where you can go, it was great to meet you, if you’ve got any questions or any challenges, let us know immediately and we’ll fix them for you.’ So, that’s the simplest thing and that works really well.
Step 2
The second thing is the ‘welcome to the practice video.’ When you do a welcome email, and in that email you say that you’ve created a ‘’welcome to the practice’ video to welcome the new client to the practice, and you have that link in the video, you’ll typically get about a 50% viewing rate of that video, and that’s awesome if you get 50%.
That video should be a 2-3-4-minute video, it should thank them for coming to the practice video, talk a little bit about the culture of the practice, those sorts of things. It’s not a ‘here I am, we’re fantastic, this is everything we’re going to do for you type of video. No, it’s not that at all. It’s a welcome, thank you-type culture building video.
Step 3
Now, step 3, and you want to do this within a week of them coming to the practice is a welcome pack. A welcome pack is something they physically get in the mail. We rarely get good mail these days. We always get invoices and statements and things like that, and typically from tax people and energy people and things along those lines. So, getting a really nice packet, and I’m going to suggest you have a nice envelop, and maybe even express post it, or you have a big yellow envelop that looks like it’s wanting to be opened and has some picture of animals and whatnot on the envelop. All those sort of thing that make it look really schmick and ‘demands’ that it be opened.
In that welcome pack, you’re going to include a number of things:
- a welcome to the practice letter that’s personally signed by someone—and you just have to work out whether that letter comes from the practice owner or owners, whether it comes from the lead receptionist or the practice manager, and/or whether it’s signed by the whole team. There’s no right or there’s no wrong, it just, again, sets up a different culture on the way that you frame and phrase that welcome letter. It must be personal, it’s must be personally signed, maybe half of an A4 page at the most. Again, no opening hours and we take credit cards and this is our fancy equipment and all that sort of stuff, this is, again, a culture setting letter.
- And, all those ‘we take credit cards, and this is our opening hours,’ and all those team commitment and all those sorts of things and the products and the services and that sort of stuff, they go on a practice brochure, and certainly in that welcome pack, you’re going to put a practice brochure, but you’re not going to put all those things on the letter.
- So, you’ve got the welcome letter, you got the practice brochure, you’ll then going to have some fridge magnets, 3 or 4 fridge magnets. And on that welcome letter, you’re going to have a P.S. that says, ‘hey, if you’ve got any other friends that you believe can use veterinary services like ours’—you MUST just say friends, acquaintances or colleagues, you put in 2 or 3 examples of people or groups who can give this fridge magnets too, please give out these fridge magnets with our compliments.
- And then, the next thing is a recall device. A recall device is something that’s going to get them back into the practice within the next 60 days, 30-60 days so that they get exposed to you again, they get to be exposed to you again, and meet those lovely receptionists and nurses and vets. It may be for a free hydro-bath and maybe a free nail trim, it may be a free packet of food, maybe a complimentary health check for the pet. There’s lots and lots of different things that a recall device could be aimed at, all sorts of things.
Now, with a recall device, I’m going to suggest that you target about a 65% redemption for dog owners, and about 40%-45% redemption for cat owners. They’re the minimum acceptable targets.
Okay, so that’s the welcome email or SMS, welcome video and then the welcome pack, and they’ve got to receive that pack on within a week.
You can / must automate all of this through your practice software, you don’t want to do this manually, you’ve got to set it up automated. And if you don’t know how to do that, if you’d like a hand doing that, give me a call and I’ll help you do that over the phone.
Now, as well as those things within the first three or five days, that client should get a second welcome email, and in that welcome email—obviously, it’s a bit longer than the first email which should only be one or two sentences, and it’s certainly longer than an SMS—in that welcome email, you’re going to set the culture and the expectations for the practice.
You’re going to talk about the practice culture, you’re going to talk about the client’s expectations, and a whole heap of things along that line. You’re also going to tell them to look out for something in the mail, that there’s an exciting packet coming your way—that’s obviously going to be the welcome pack.
And you also going to set up the fact that over the next two weeks, they’re going to get three or four more emails, and these emails are going to be from people who have been with the practice for a long period of time who set the culture and the frame for the practice.
So, that may be an email from your lead receptionist, the lead vet, the lead nurse, or practice manager, and they’re going to introduce themselves in those subsequent emails. I’ll talk about this subsequent emails in a minute.
So, we’re still on this email that comes 3 or 4 days after they’ve been in… and in that email you say; ‘look, over the next two weeks, you’re going to get an email from this person, this person and this person.
So, over the next two weeks, you’re going to get another four or five emails from us. Don’t think that this in going to go on forever. We simply want to welcome you, let you know what we can do for you and what you can expect from us. but, after you get those three emails, you’ll just get our monthly blog or our monthly newsletter’.
You don’t want these people to think they’re going to be hammered by you three time a week for the next five years. You want to just say, ‘this is how we’re going to get to know each other better, and then after that, you’re just going to get the monthly newsletter, the monthly blog, and when something special happens like snake season, or ticks-gone-crazy or fleas-gone-crazy, or there’s a special product release that’s going to help your pet – you’ll get an extra contact. You’ll get the odd thing like that as well, but certainly, typically you’ll just hear from us on a monthly basis.’
That welcome email needs to come from a real person, and it needs to come from a real email address. It shouldn’t come from info@abcvet or reception@abcvet, and it shouldn’t have your logo and hospital things plastered all over it. Yes, they can be there in a demure low-key way, but this email needs to come from a real person from a real email address.
It might be your personal email address that’s been setup specifically for this, and may be not the one you use all the time in real life, but you’d use this for this, but it looks like it’ll come straight from you; michelle.jones@abcvet or something like that. So, it’s a real person’s email address. And certainly, Michelle Jones would have an email signature, and there might be a little demure logo or something from the practice there, but’s going to be a very personal email coming from a real person.
Now, does that come from the practice manager, or the owner or who specifically? That’s for you to work out. Again, it depends on the culture of the practice. If it comes from the owner, then you’re going to have a lot more people wanting to talk to the owner. If it comes to the practice manager, then the people will typically more want to talk to the practice manager. It could be from someone called the ‘Director of First Impression’ or someone like that, or your ‘Client Coordination Supervisor’. There’s all sorts of ways that you can set this up.
Now, as part of that email, what I’m going to ask you to do, I’m going to suggest that you do this as well – you’re going to put phrase in there, it might even be a P.S. – that you hope that their visit today was—you might say ‘perfect’ or ‘excellent’ or ‘extraordinary’—you want to set yourself with high goals, and you’re going to say to them in that email that ‘if your visit was anything less than perfect,’ or, ‘anything less than what you expected, ‘or ‘if it wasn’t superb’….., that you want to know about it, and they can they reply to this email or ring this number 123456 and you’ll do something about it.’ This is CRITICAL
And on that email, you’re also going to ask for a review, and you’re going to send them to a review site.
You might have a review setup on Survey Monkey or something along those lines, you might refer them to Yelp, you might refer them to Google Reviews, there are all sorts of places that you can refer them to.
The more review that you get, the higher your website ranking will be. It’s really, really good to start collecting reviews, and typically, your new client reviews will be the ‘wow-est’ if you’ve done your job correctly.
NOTE: reviews are becoming more and more important. Let me ask you; when did you last go to a restaurant or when did you last book a hotel without reading the reviews first……
Point made!
So then, over the next two week, they’re going to get some emails from long term people at your practice, people that have been there for a long time.
Like I said, lead vet, lead nurse, lead receptionist, whoever the long term people in your practice are.
They’re going to talk a little bit about their part of the practice, whether that’s reception or whether that’s the veterinary side, or whether that’s the kennels or the surgery or whatever it happens to be.
They’ll talk a little bit about themselves and how long they’ve been there, and why that’s important for the client—they won’t go ‘I’m fantastic’, but you’ve got to to say why that employee means something to the new client / new pet.
You can’t just say “Well, I’m fantastic” and leave it at that. It’s got to translate into benefits for the client.
When you set that whole process up over a two or two and half week period, and then the client starts to get regular monthly email newsletters, or blogs, or whatever, you will put your client retention rate up to 80%-85% over a 12-month period.
This stuff is all critical to retaining your client. You are sharing your culture and setting expectations for your client. So now, the ball is in court, so you’ve got to start actioning this material and putting this system in place in hour practice.
It’s easy to do, you only need to do it once and it’s worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to you!
I’ll see you next week. Bye.