Sending end-of-year benefits letters as you enter the calendar year’s fourth quarter is a great way to help patients maximize their benefits and generate production for you in the fall months. While email is more convenient, you’re lucky to have an email open rate of 25%, unlike the letter open rate of 90%, as it’s easy for email to get buried in a patient’s inbox. Sending these end-of-year benefits as you approach this fourth quarter to remind your patients that their benefits expire at the end of the year, not only helps your patients use their year’s allotted benefits but also helps your practice stay busy as the year comes to an end.
Using end-of-year benefit letters is an incredible way to generate production at your practice as we reach the end of Q3 and start to enter Q4. We’ve been using them for a decade now. You might be wondering what exactly this type of letter is, but it’s exactly how it sounds. It’s a letter that goes to your existing patients to remind them of their benefits that are potentially expiring at the end of the calendar year. The majority of your patients have somewhere between $1,500 to $3,000 of benefits that they can use every calendar year. If you’re doing a good job, then you’re probably burning through those benefits and really helping your patients maximize the value of those benefits. The thing is, there are a lot of patients that have a lot of their benefits still on the table and if they don’t use them, they lose it. Then that $1,500 or whatever amount, is reset at the beginning of the new calendar year. By sending out end-of-year benefit letters to your patients, you’re helping them maximize their benefits and you’re also generating production for your practice in that last quarter.
You may be thinking that email is more convenient and will lead to better results than letters, but actually, emails generally have a low open rate. The average open rate of emails is between 20-25% and if you’re getting 25%, that’s great but then there’s a whole 75% who don’t even know about your email. It’s easy for emails to get buried in one’s inbox. They may see it and think “I’ll go look back at that later” but sending an email just doesn’t compare to getting a physical letter. When you send out letters, you’re looking at about a 90% open rate. People are more likely to open letters because they don’t know what letters they’re going to be getting from their dentists. They might think it’s a bill, but instead, they get this letter educating them on how you can squeeze them in before the end of the year to help them use the full value of their benefits. For them, that’s free money, so they’re probably going to want to utilize what they have in their office chair.
The real reason I’m reaching out to you is because of COVID and everything else that’s been going on. Regardless of what you’ve been doing in previous quarters (or years even), whether you’ve been marketing or whether you’ve been a little more conservative with marketing, or even haven’t done any marketing at all; You probably experienced some really good numbers right after lockdown, right? Whenever you have a period as we did during lockdown where it was 2-3 months of no appointments, you had all these patients that couldn’t be seen. Then all of a sudden in the summer months, it’s like the floodgates opened. Your numbers took off and you’re doing great, but what happened is that you received this artificial confidence.
You saw your numbers increase exponentially compared to your numbers from the previous year, but what happened is that you were just working through that backlog. Then you started to see people picking their heads up and looking forward to their schedule, in October and November based on that six-month cycle of how we’re rescheduling hygiene and other visits since you didn’t have anything from March through May. Then you had nothing coming up for October, November, and December. With these letters, you’re re-engaging your existing patients. The audience here is the people who have already spent money with you and already trust you, so this is the way to re-engage with them and invite them back. Of course, if you’re looking for new patients, we can help you with that with a different product like direct mail, postcards, and other things like that.
This is specific to the letters and who we’re sending them. In that letter, you’ll educate your patients on how many remaining benefits they have to go through before the end of the year and you can help them maximize them; along with increasing your own cash flow. It’s a great win here because it’s truly a service for your patient and is also a great revenue generator for you. If you’re noticing your schedules for October and November looking a little slim, this is a great way to kickstart that schedule. There’s still time as well because we still have August to get through.
You have plenty of time to be able to get this all out and into the mail stream. That way your patients can open it, engage with it, pick up the phone, and call you to schedule their appointment. That way you can start filling that schedule for that last quarter. That way by the time you get to those months, your problem is solved. This message is a proactive one, so even though you may be living in abundance right now while working through that backlog, I’m asking you to start looking ahead in those schedules. Realize that there are tools there to help you boost your schedules in October and November. Communicate with your patients to fill your schedule and ultimately boost your revenue.
So, reach out and fill out the form below to get more information about these letters. We’d love to get a sample of the copy, for example, we have some standard copy that goes out. We’re able to pull information from your dental system for the names of your patients and also their remaining benefits. That way we can identify which patients have remaining benefits at let’s say $250 and above or whatever number you choose, to mail letters to all of them. Basically, we can pull all of that information and give you a quote so that you know exactly how much it’s going to cost. We can also give you an estimate of how much revenue you may earn from sending these letters. Again, we’ve been doing this for a long time so we have a lot of knowledge that we’d love to share with you. Again, we can’t live in abundance unless you do, right?
It’s truly our objective to serve you at a higher level, to help you continue to grow your practice and live in abundance so that in turn, helps us live in abundance as well. With the pandemic still going on, I hope that you, your staff, your families, and your friends are staying safe, healthy, keeping sane, and keeping a good sense of humor. I hope that this message is hitting you at a time when it’s relevant but with a little cash flow that you can use to reinvest into your marketing and help prime your practice for filling those October and November schedules. Many people see marketing as an expense, but it’s really not if it’s done properly and responsibly. You’re just priming your practice for future abundance. If you have any questions, just give us a call. Otherwise, fill out the form below and we’ll reach back out to you so we can start putting some creative work together and identify some kind of scope. Of course, the scope and the price varies on whether you have 1,000 patients or 5,000. Within a few weeks, we can give you a quote that you can budget into your marketing so that we can get this done and get this rolling within the month. Until then, take care.
