Dental Appointment Reminders
As a dental professional, you’ve spent countless hours creating a wonderful dental practice. You work hard at marketing and enhancing your practice. You are dedicated to creating an atmosphere of high patient satisfaction. So, the inevitable frustration that comes with patient no-shows is understandable. Fortunately, there is a solution. Automated Appointment Reminders designed for your dental practice.
With AppointmentReminders.com, we can help you lower the number of patients who don’t show up at your dental practice. Whether you send email reminders or text message reminders, they are proven to reduce no-show rates. Decrease your patient no-show rate by over 90% by utilizing our HIPAA compliant text, phone, and email patient reminders
Are you sending Dental Appointment Reminders to patients via Text?
If not, you should be. Here are three big reasons why:
- 95% of Millennials say they want to receive text message appointment reminders and other texts from your office.
- The preference for appointment reminder text messaging extends to older generations as well. Two-thirds of Boomers want texts from their providers.
- More options = better communication. Add our text appointment reminder service to email and voice calls to meet patient preferences.
Dental Industry Stats & Trends 2021-2022
Here are some statistics about the dental industry in 2021. The first thing you need to know is that the dental industry in the United States is in a period of rapid growth. In 2020, dentistry was a $15.57 billion industry, and it is supposed to double by 2027 to a staggering $30.59 billion. That means there is tons of potential for growth at the practice level.
The biggest drivers of growth are increased demand for the following:
- Cosmetic surgery
- Dental implants
- New dental technology
With a large aging population in the US, there’s more demand for dental services in general. Here are some other statistics to keep in mind as we head into 2022:
- The dental implant market is $3.6 billion and grows 11% yearly.
- The market for cosmetic procedures continues to grow by 5% yearly.
- According to the CDC, only 64.9% of adults and 85.9% of children saw a dentist in 2019, the last year for which numbers are available.
These statistics show us that there’s room to grow for any dental practice in the United States.
3 Dental Trends going into 2022
1. Personalized Content
Personalization is a big trend in marketing, it’s important in healthcare marketing. According to Piesync:
“Marketing personalization means interacting with your audience and customers in a way that feels personal and human, taking into consideration their likes, preferences, and interests.”
There are few “products” that people feel more of a personal connection to than healthcare, so it’s not surprising that dental practices are embracing both automation and the personalization options that come with it.
Personalization can take many different forms. You might personalize content by:
- Use first names in email greetings.
- Allowing visitors to your website to choose the content (another term for this is adaptive content)
- Targeting potential patients with specific ads based on their behavior on your website or their location, age, or past visits
- Creating groups on Facebook and sharing targeted content tailored to the members.
The more your target audience feels that you understand their needs for dental care, the more likely they are to choose your practice the next time they need a dentist.
2. Dental Practices Go All-In with Digital Marketing
Dental practices have traditionally been small operations without a large digital marketing budget.
Though slow to catch up, the pandemic underscored the necessity of online advertising for many dental practices.
In a survey of dental practitioners conducted in January of 2021, 38% believed more marketing would make their practice more productive and profitable.
Across all industries, digital ad spending to reach $389 billion in 2021, a growth of 17%.
A survey of dental patients found that 1 in 3 say that dentists cannot go without Facebook marketing.
They also found that 58% of patients prefer seeing video content from dental practices.
Social media has become a popular and low-cost channel to help dental practices to get in front of new patients.
In 2013, only 86.2% of companies used social media for marketing.
In 2021? 91.9% of businesses use social media.
3. Text Message Marketing
Text marketing was one of our dental industry trends for 2022. Sending texts continues to be popular thanks to its convenience and high ROI. Text messages are far more likely to be opened than emails, with 90% of smartphone users reporting that they open texts within 90 seconds of receiving them.
One of the dental industry trends that we suggest you implement is using text messaging to send appointment reminders. 80% of patients say they prefer to confirm appointments via text, but only about 20% of businesses do so. The same is true of promotions, which only 17% of businesses do via text message.
One of the biggest headaches for dentists is missed and canceled appointments. Surprisingly, more practices haven’t adopted SMS marketing. You can capitalize on this dental industry trend by:
- Collecting mobile numbers from new and existing patients.
- Add a field on your intake form to allow new patients to opt-in for text messaging.
- Implementing appointment confirmations and reminders via SMS messaging.
Considering the number of dental patients and dental practices that rely on technology, it surprises me that more dentists are not incorporating text messaging into their digital marketing strategies.
Care for your Patients as well for your Office
Our appointment reminder service for dental staff allows you to send out reminders as far in advance as you wish. We give you the ability to easily send multiple reminders for an appointment. Roll failed patient text reminders to automated call reminders at no extra charge.
Most dental professionals who use our services experience a huge reduction in no-shows. A HIPAA-compliant reminder system is usually worth it financially, even if you only prevent ONE no-show. Of course, another real benefit is that you won’t have to spend all day at work waiting for patients who don’t show up.
With our patient appointment reminders, you can even send different reminders for different types of appointments. For example, you may want to let your new patients know that they need to arrive early to fill out the appropriate paperwork, or maybe you want to let your patients know that they need to fast before the appointment. You can also include links to download forms and paperwork as well.
Our service will read the appointment type you sent to us from your EMR (Electronic Medical Record) and send out the appropriate automated patient reminder. Our service is WAY MORE FLEXIBLE and customizable than built-in Reminders from your EMR.
Once we configure your account and set up automation, there is very little that you will need to do!
