Boost Your Dental Practice With Effective Dental Patient Retention Strategies

Dental practices often place such a heavy emphasis on marketing to new patients that they lose sight of what matters most. Your current patients bring in your largest revenue source, so they should be your top priority.

Dental patient retention preserves your revenue at a low marketing cost while allowing you to provide high-quality dental care to satisfied patients. Read on to learn how you can measure, monitor, and significantly impact patient retention rates at your dental practice for scalable growth.

Understanding Dental Patient Retention

Client retention in dentistry refers to implementing marketing strategies to keep existing patients engaged so they schedule follow-up care visits rather than choosing another dental clinic. The key components of dental patient retention include a positive patient experience, easily accessible dental services, long-term treatment planning, and frequent follow-ups encouraged through your practice management system. With a high patient retention rate, your dental practice can increase patient satisfaction and revenue without spiking your marketing costs.

Increasing your retention by just 5% can increase your revenue by 25% to 95%. Meanwhile, spending resources on acquiring new patients can cost as much as 25 times more than retaining your existing clients. With these figures in mind, you can see how losing patients harms your practice growth.

Maintaining retention in dentistry today comes with numerous hurdles, though. Dentistry is already stressful as practitioners struggle with high overhead costs, staffing shortages, and restrictions from insurers, among other top challenges noted by the American Dental Association. Yet, many of the most successful dental practices are spending resources on their online visibility, digital tools, practice management systems, and retention strategies, setting the bar high for smaller organizations.

More patients continue leaving their traditional dental practices for those investing in excellent patient care, which can be challenging to provide. If you want to retain patients, you must keep up with the digital age.

Key Metrics for Measuring Patient Retention

The patient retention rate for dentists is a calculation that allows you to measure the percentage of active patients who scheduled additional dental visits during a given period versus those who left or remained inactive. To find this figure, you will need to gather the following data points:

• The period you wish to measure
• The number of patients at the beginning of the timeframe (S)
• The number of patients at the end of the timeframe (E)
• The number of new patients gained during the timeframe (N)

Now, complete this formula: [(E – N)/S] x 100 = the percentage rate.

For example, if you started the year with 400 patients, gained 60, and finished December with 300 actively scheduling visits, you would complete this equation: [(300 – 60)/400] x 100 = 60%. Based on these figures, your rate of retention would be 60%.

Beyond measuring retention, you may also use the following metrics for a full picture of practice performance and patient loyalty:

• Patient churn: How many patients cancel their dental appointments to (presumably) switch to a new dental practice
• Appointment adherence: The percentage of patients that adhere to their treatment plan by arriving at their scheduled oral care appointments
• Average lifetime value: How much revenue your dental office can expect to receive from a particular dental care patient over the lifetime of their treatment plan
• Average attrition rate: The rate at which professionals or patients leave the practice over time and are not replaced

By tracking all of these metrics, you can gain a better picture of concepts like whether you’re losing dental patients to the competition or poor scheduling and communication tactics.

Effective Dental Patient Retention Strategies

So, how do you improve patient retention? We recommend beginning with the effective dental patient retention strategies described below.

Providing Exceptional Patient Care

When you provide exceptional care, patients should have no reason to choose another practice or skip their next appointment. As long as your patients feel valued, understood, and well taken care of, they’ll feel more encouraged to schedule their follow-up visit as they’ll trust the recommendations made by their dental professional.

Delivering top-notch care to your dental patients can be challenging, though. You need to provide personalized experiences with simple communication so patients can easily get in touch with you, even outside of business hours. Attempting to provide this at scale typically isn’t feasible without tech that can help you automate communication between staff and patients.

A few of the top pillars for exceptional patient care are as follows:

• Friendly staff: Your staff should make patients feel welcome, comfortable, and informed.
• A comfortable environment: Making your practice welcoming to dental patients may involve careful lighting choice, routine sanitization, comfortable seating, equipment upgrades, and more.
• Timely service: A long wait time can make patients leave. You must streamline the check-in process to ensure a positive experience from start to finish.

Consistent and Clear Communication

If you want to retain existing patients, you must remind them about their next appointment or prompt them to schedule one. By employing a clear communication strategy, you can send follow-up reminders to hygiene patients, encouraging them to maintain their oral health.

We recommend using multiple communication channels to reach patients on their most convenient platforms. With Weave’s communication software, for example, you can automate your follow-up message via phone call, text message, or email.

Implementing Online Scheduling and Digital Forms

Patients shouldn’t have trouble scheduling their appointments — if they do, they may end up skipping the process entirely and going elsewhere. By offering convenient online scheduling forms, you can streamline the scheduling process, encourage oral health visits, and reduce wait times at check-in as you will have already collected the need-to-know information. Your clients can enjoy a better patient experience as you see more revenue with less wasted time on phone calls.

Leveraging Patient Feedback and Reviews

If you’re losing patients and can’t identify the reason for this downward trend, you may need to begin implementing feedback. With feedback forms and online patient reviews, you can locate areas for improvement to improve your dental health services so more patients feel satisfied with their experience. You can also email patient satisfaction feedback surveys to current clients while encouraging patients to complete online reviews after their visits.

Online reviews can also help build your website and Google Business Profile visibility. Be sure to encourage patients to leave positive reviews while promptly addressing any negative feedback you receive.

Offering Flexible Payment Options for Dental Patients

Patients can become frustrated if your payment process doesn’t accommodate their needs. By prioritizing financial flexibility, existing and potential patients will see your practice as the right option for their needs.

Here are some tips on adding flexibility to your payment policies:

• Be transparent about all costs upfront
• Offer multiple payment methods (text-to-pay, online, in-office, etc.)
• Provide financing options
• Send payment reminders to patients with text links to complete the transaction

The Role of Technology in Enhancing Patient Retention

The above tips for increasing dental patient retention may sound quite challenging to implement if you’re already struggling with tight resources, short staffing, and other restrictions. If this sounds familiar, we recommend embracing technological advancements to automate the experience you deliver to patients. Here are the most helpful ones to start with:

Automated Appointment Reminders

With automated appointment reminders, you can reduce patient no-shows and cancellations while freeing up your front desk staff to focus on checking in new patients. Weave’s automated reminders seamlessly integrate with your practice management system and CRM for fluid communication across all platforms.

Patient Communication Platforms

It takes an enormous amount of time to manually craft and send phone calls, texts, and emails to potential patients who need to schedule their follow-ups. With a comprehensive patient communication platform, you can streamline patient loyalty efforts while personalizing your messages to each patient at scale. Weave’s communication platform, for example, allows providers to view critical information on the patient’s oral health records, scheduled appointments, overdue payments, and visit notes to customize messages for strong engagement.

Building Strong Patient Relationships

People value connection. Strong relationships are rarely overlooked in today’s society, and building strong relationships can increase retention rates.

We recommend the following strategies for nurturing your patient-provider relationships:

Personalized Patient Engagement

People want to feel heard and understood. Here are some basic tips for proving to your patients that you listen to their needs and care about their preferences:

• Send out reminders using their preferred communication method (i.e., text vs. email)
• Remember their favorite toothpaste flavor by adding it to the client’s notes
• Send out a special note on their birthday or anniversary with your clinic
• Jot down additional notes on any important client preferences

Patient Education and Resources

Patient engagement also requires helping your clients understand their treatment plans. You should provide educational materials to each new patient or existing client in your clinic to ensure that patients understand how to care for their teeth at home and when to schedule appointments moving forward.

You can also host informational events or webinars online for further patient engagement. Doing so can help you build a strong social media presence.

Analyzing and Improving Patient Retention Efforts

As you employ numerous efforts to boost your client retention, you need to keep an eye on the metrics we discussed above. Data analysis ensures that all efforts push your practice in the right direction.

Regularly Reviewing Retention Metrics

By regularly reviewing your retention metrics, you can identify growth trends and areas for improvement to maximize how you’re using your marketing resources. If your new patient figures skyrocket but no one continues scheduling their follow-ups, you’ll know you must revisit your strategies. You can use various tools for tracking retention data, such as Weave’s comprehensive practice analytics, which syncs with your communication platform while offering actionable improvement insights.

Adjusting Strategies Based on Feedback

Data only helps you when you use it to implement changes. As you collect data and feedback over time, you must use this information to improve your strategy accordingly. For example, if many of your clients complain about the new patient check-in process, you may want to consider offering a simpler online check-in form to streamline things.

You may be wondering what your goal retention rate should be by now. Industry standards show that you should aim for a rate of around 85%, but the average retention of dental patients sits at around 41% following the first visit. You might want to keep these figures in mind when reviewing your data.

Weave: Helping Dental Practices Retain More Patients

Dental patient retention allows your practice to grow at scale without expending resources on new patients who will not return. To keep patients coming back, you must deliver a phenomenal experience backed by consistent, personalized communication and modern technology. To learn more, watch Weave’s free webinar today on increasing retention!