Business Innovators Radio - Dr. Tyler Williams Shares the Secrets to Creating a Successful Patient Membership Program

Episode Date: August 1, 2023

In this episode, Nina Hershberger sits down with Dr. Tyler Williams, a renowned dentist and expert in dental practice growth. Dr. Williams reveals how he revolutionized his dental practice by introducing a patient membership program, and how this concept can be applied to businesses in any industry.Dr. Tyler Williams has been practicing dentistry in Utah for several years and is the founder of Pine Crest Dental and Pine Crest Practice Growth. He is a regular contributor to Dentistry Today online and is known for his expertise in dental marketing. He is also the host of the Practice X Factor podcast. Dr. Williams is a firm believer in creating unique and innovative solutions to improve the patient experience.During the interview, Dr. Williams discusses his journey in implementing a patient membership program. He shares how he was inspired to create an alternative to traditional insurance models after experiencing the limitations and frustrations they can bring. He explains how he combined the idea of a membership program with a focus on providing a Goldstar service to create a win-win situation for both the dentist and the patient.Dr. Williams breaks down the different levels of his membership program, from basic to premium, and how they cater to different patient needs. He emphasizes the importance of customization and personalization in creating a membership program that truly adds value and meets the unique needs of each patient.This episode is a must-listen for dentists and business owners who are looking to differentiate themselves and provide a more comprehensive and satisfying experience for their patients or customers. Dr. Williams’ insights and expertise will inspire and guide listeners in implementing their own successful membership programs.To learn more about Dr. Tyler Williams and his innovative approach to dental practice growth, visit his website at www.yourpracticegrowth.com. You can also reach out to Dr. Williams directly via email at [e-mail] Radio with Nina Hershbergerhttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/megabucks-radio-with-nina-hershbergerSource: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/dr-tyler-williams-shares-the-secrets-to-creating-a-successful-patient-membership-program

Welcome to Megabox Radio. Conversations with successful entrepreneurs, sharing their tips and strategies for success, real-world ideas that can put Megabox in your bank account. Here's your host, Nina Hirshberger. Welcome to today's show. My guest today is Dr. Tyler Williams. Dr. Williams is still a practicing dentist in Utah. He's a renowned dentist, in fact, and he's a founder of,

of several things, Pinecrest Dental, Better Sleep, and Pinecrest Practice Growth, because he helps other dentists do what we're going to talk about today. He's a regular contributor to Dentistry Today Online, and he's the host of the Practice X Factor podcast. So we've got a lot of things. He's an author. He's a writer, and he is a brilliant marketer, which is always what's so exciting when I have guests like Dr. Williams on the show.

So anyway, welcome to today's show, Dr. Williams. Hey, thanks for having me. I'm super excited. I've been following you for a few years, Nina, and love a lot of the marketing ideas and the passion you have for it. So I'm happy to be here, and hopefully listeners get some great value from today. You know, it's really interesting.

You're right. I met Dan Kennedy back in 1994, and that's when my marketing journey really began, even though I had a marketing degree, didn't really understand it. But every guest I have on this podcast, I learned something from, I take notes. And today we're going to talk about patient membership. So don't think if you're listening to this and you're not a dentist, that you can apply this to your business as well. But Dr. Williams, I know you've got what's called nine deadly sins.

So take us back in time. How in the world did you even think about doing a membership? Because that's not typical in the dental market. So tell us your backstory. Yeah. So, you know, I think back to when I first got into practice in 2010. It's when I opened my practice. And, you know, I remember a patient specifically, you know,

and it's like this dark echo impregnated in my mind of, you build my insurance wrong and that's your fault, not mine. And so I've thought about that. And, you know, this was someone who I didn't know really well. Most of our patients would never do that. Most are very understanding. But it gave me some perspective of how hard it is to, you know, have a third party getting in between you and the patient.

You know, the example I think is, you know, if I was going to go buy a nice, you know, red dress for my wife and I went to the store and they told me that I could only pick a dress from this section and this brand and this size or if I could pick any dress I want but the store could only charge me a certain amount it's kind of somebody loses there's it's not a good you know collaborative win win win situation so it really got me thinking of you know how do I work around because I found that where I live in most places that are nice to live, there's no shortage of dentists or many kinds of healthcare professionals, but there's a huge shortage of people who love to go and have a great experience. So kind of combining those two things, I started

looking at, all right, well, how can I take my dependence off of some third party who's never going to call my patient, who gets in the way of the decisions, and combine that with, how do I create an experience, what we call a gold star service, so that people actually enjoy coming to the dentist, which is not something that most people think about. And that's kind of how we kind of came to the idea of, hey, maybe this membership plan thing we should look into. So, you know, there is quite a few people that have insurance. So do you not then even, they're not your avatar, they're not your ideal client? So we talk about it like, We're an insurance-friendly practice, but we're not insurance-driven.

And so the way our scripting and our training goes is we never say things like, well, your insurance only allows this or your insurance only covers that, or you have to call your insurance first. Okay, we talk about with patients and say, hey, we're insurance-friendly. We'll help you maximize your benefit. But we're going to make decisions and offer options that are best for you and then let you decide how you'd like to proceed. and, you know, we've had situations where someone goes, well, hey, you know, I called my insurance,

and they said I can only do X, Y, or Z. We say, hey, well, the good news is we're never going to make decisions for you based upon what your insurance suggests. We're going to let you choose. So it's, otherwise it can become kind of a tug of war between the providing office and the insurance. So we found that we always just kind of turn it back to, hey, you're the patient. We want you to decide how you want to proceed. then we're going to give our best recommendations. And so we're insurance friendly in that way.

We'll still help submit insurance for our patients. And we still accept a couple plans. There is a plan to phase that out where we'll go 100% membership and fee for service, but we will still continue to help our patients submit their claims. We're just not going to accept what was called the assignment of benefit or the benefit being paid to us. Okay. So talk about what your member.

is like. Who tell me, do you have different levels? How does it work? Yeah, so we started out with just having one membership and called the Pinecrest Smile Club. And it was interesting. I had a CPA who was a, you know, specialized in dental care. And when we first were doing it, he was like, I probably wouldn't do that. You know, why would you give your patient a discount when they're happy to pay your full service or full fee? It's like I, you know, I would maybe consider it if you, you know, we're doing it for like a group or a small employer nearby, but on a one-on-one basis, he's not to do it. You know, and so for a couple years, I kind of backed off on it, and it was an expensive lesson for me because I think about, you know, how Costco does it. And I really like the Costco model in a lot of ways, not every way for a service business, but in a lot of ways.

and so we started out with one level because once I got over that hump and realized, no, it's not so much about the savings even. It's about if people know that you have a program and something built in place for people without insurance, now we can lead with a membership instead of having it as a backup. And that's where I find a lot of practices. That's one of the nine deadly sins is the membership is sort of the afterthought or it's if you don't have insurance to do this. Whereas now we're leading with the membership and we're showing why for probably two-thirds of people, it's actually a better option than their insurance. It's about having a plan. So we started out with the Pine Chris Smile Club.

And then we've experimented with a few different levels, like a junior one, silver, gold, platinum. We have a gold plus that's like for four more people. So right now what we've found kind of a sweet spot for us is we have our gold membership plan, which is, the most popular one, and then we have a gold plus, is if it's a household of four people or more, they will do the gold plus and they get some extra savings off of the enrollment. And then the platinum includes some really cool stuff like teeth whitening. Someone can basically come in every month to the office, more of a concierge level, you know, where there's not limitations on, you know, how often they can come in and frequency and number

of offices. And then we have a silver one. It's mainly for people if they have like full dentures and they don't have any teeth because all three levels include maintenance, checkups, and then scheduled savings on whatever procedure. And then include some cool perks like free refills on teeth whitening, free sedation for certain procedures because a lot of people hate the dentist because they don't like the needles and the anxiety of putting our hands and someone's face and rightly so because it is,

you know, we're literally in people's personal space and that alone is sometimes enough just to get people to go, yep, that's what I want. Let's do it. So that's interesting. So it was silver, golden and platinum and then you have a gold plus, which is with a household. So tell me the difference between the gold and the platinum. So the platinum you had, come in as frequently as you want, free whitening. So there must be a few things more? Yeah, so like in a platinum one, someone can come in four times a year for maintenance. A lot of people for reasons of maybe they have gum disease or they get a lot of plaque on their teeth or they get a lot of cavities.

We know that six months was actually invented, six month checkup was actually invented by insurance companies of all things. It actually goes back to a PEPSident commercial a long, long time ago, after World War II, only 9% of households had toothpaste. And that was one of the number one reasons soldiers were getting sent home from the World War was teeth problems. And so Pepsident came up with this kind of marketing jingle. The guy was brilliant. And he said, you know, brush your teeth twice a day with Pepsident and see your dentist twice a year for checkups. And that's when they started adding mint to toothpaste.

So if anyone listening has ever had an original flavor mouthwash, like an original listrine, original toothpaste, it's weird, it tastes terrible. There's no mint. What Pepsident found was that the, with that mint editor, gave people kind of that lingering fresh taste. And so the insurance companies just started adapting that, go to you, Dennis twice here. That's what six months came. So with the platinum, with any of our memberships really is we're customizing it to the

need to the patient. There are people who we see them once a month, you know, especially some special needs patients, people with Alzheimer's. They're not really brushing or flossing. We put them on the platinum plan and see them every month for a touch-up preventative visit. And we just find so many fewer problems. And again, it's having a plan in place. We like to create an apples and oranges to insurance, not just try to make it sound and smell and feel like insurance. We want to make something that's very different.

So with the platinum, they could come in every month for a policy. They could come in every month for, hey, my tooth hurts, hey, I chipped a tooth, hey, this is broken. No extra cost there. Because we find that on the back end, we end up doing a lot more procedures. And the acceptance rate is higher than with insurance because, you know, they're going to get savings on any procedure they need done, not just the ones that are allowed on that specific plan, whereas your gold would be twice a year. And then for additional visits, they still get significant savings. So it's still better than insurance for a lot of patients because insurance typically for dental,

you get two office visits a year after that. Any exam, any emergency visit, any checkup, the exam portion, the part that's coded where the doctor looks in your mouth, that part would be denied after two visits. And so with our plans, that's not an issue. So you probably, is the membership done on a monthly basis or does somebody pay on an annual basis? So we offer it both ways. They can pay monthly or they can prepay it full annually and get some extra savings off the top there. And so if they don't have chip teeth or some other kind of things, it pretty well pays for all their dental work for the year, I assume.

Yeah, and one thing, you know, we found helpful was we, I looked up, you know, AARP and some local, just individual plans. And, you know, if you're listening to this, you can look that up in your area and just go, all right, if I'm, you know, if I'm retiring and I'm losing insurance with my employer and I'm going to go on Medicare and I'm going to go shop for a private dental supplemental add-on, whatever, what's that going to cost me per month? And, you know, the platinum one we have is more than the average plan. I think our gold one is just slightly below. And, you know, wherever it's at, it doesn't mean you have to price it higher or lower. I mean, you just got to make that decision based on what kind of practice or service business you have. But for me, it was just kind of some market research to see what was out there. And so we put together a one-page guide for patients that goes, hey, here's what a membership plan is and what it isn't.

Here's what insurance is and it isn't. And here's if you were to go get insurance. here's what it would cost you per month and here's what the membership would be and here's what includes it's just a little table that I put together in about five minutes and you know it's that framing you know sales

framing and sales concept where it helps people see otherwise they go well I don't know maybe I need to go insurance but now they know oh we've already done the research for them and they gives them an idea of what's out there yeah you and I both have followed Dan Kennedy for years and I'll never

forget one thing he said years ago that if there was one thing that he could do over again, that would be have a continuity program. So that's what the membership does and has that continuity. If they're on a monthly plan, they're going to, you know, every month, the number of dollars are coming in the first of every month. Exactly. And we found we have some really cool mouth rinse and toothpaste that we like.

They're big tubes and bottles of it. It's a brand that's harder to find. It's a very, you know, it doesn't have all the chemicals and stuff added to it that a lot of the kind of the main branch at the store. So when patients come in for their, we call them re-cares, but their maintenance checkup visits, they get free refills on those. And so we have a little bag we put together and we set it on their chair. So when they come and they get that refill and there's that, you know, that feeling of, hey, they know me, they thought about. me. They don't have to ask for it. But it also creates that separation or that loss that if they discontinued, they wouldn't get that. As small and simple as it seems, our patients love it.

They look forward to it. And just like you said with Dan Kennedy, you know, is what's the continuity? Because in dentistry, it's all about continuity, maintenance, and the long-term relationship with that patient because not everybody's ready to get a smile makeover today. Or not everybody he's ready to get Invisaline today. But, you know, you meet them where they are, and then you build trust, and then when they're ready, you know, who are they going to call? Well, I suppose if they're a member of yours, they get a discount. So they would, if they wanted Invisaline, they would get a discount on Invisaline.

Yeah, exactly. And we offer them some things like, if you're a member, you'll get an extended warranty on that retainer with your Invisaline. And so if it breaks, you know, we'll fix it for free within this certain amount of time period as long as you're keeping your regular checkups in the office. So again, it creates, you know, that blue ocean strategy, so to speak, where let's go somewhere that insurance is never going to go because the word warranty is never going to impair insurance ever, right?

That's probably like an actuary's nightmare would be the word warranty, right? but we look at it from, hey, we want to be around for a while and take care of you. And so here's what we're going to do if you're a member. So what changed in your practice then? When you decided to make that decision to go to membership, did you see a real change in your practice? Yeah, so it took some time to build because, you know, for the first couple years, we just had like a handful of members. But what we started to find when we would run the report,

is you find that the membership patients actually, on average, usually spend about anywhere between three and eight times as much as a non-membership patient. And so once I had that data revealed to me, it made it really easy to start backing down from feeling so intimidated by insurance. Because that's how you feel, and that's how team members feel, especially, is patients talk about insurance can be a little bit intimidating or it's almost like something you don't want to talk about. But we have a couple reports.

We suggest people listening to this run if you have some kind of CRM or practice management software. And this could apply to other businesses as well. But in healthcare, we call it the IVNI. So it's IV stands for insured versus non-insured IVNI report. And it just showed you, okay, over the past 12 months, how many people came into your office that had insurance and how many did not. Okay, so that's kind of your first side-by-side you compare. All right.

And then we run, we call it a bank deposit report, which would be like your actual revenue. And we would go in there and we figure out, okay, how much money came in from people and how much of it came in from insurance. and then you kind of divide those in. And so, you know, when we ran that, we found, okay, well, like three-fourths of our patients had insurance, but about 60 to 70 percent of our revenue on a monthly basis was coming from people, not insurance. Now, that does include co-payments, and a lot of the services we do for insured patients are non-covered anyway. And a lot of times, like implants or whitening isn't covered anyway. So, you know, there is some skew to that a little bit that you've got to account for when you're looking at this.

But to me is, you know, if someone's willing to cut a check or swipe their card, that's the ultimate level of them accepting treatment, right? Even more than the consent form is. If someone's willing to pay for it, they see the value. And so, you know, again, if you're listening to this, you know, figure that out in your practice, business, you know, your clients, customers is, okay, if you're, You have different ways people find you or maybe different types of programs or sign up for us. You've got to figure out how many are in each and where the money's coming from. And it helps you make smarter decisions about how to move forward. Yeah.

So when we talk about the nine deadly sins, because one of your businesses is Pine Crest practice growth. I assume that that is a business where you help other dentists learn these strategies, get over the fear of membership and not fall into any of those nine deadly sins. Exactly. So, and, you know, anybody who wants a copy of this, just shoot me an email after the podcast, and I'm happy to send you the list because depending on time, you know, we may not have a ton of time to go through each of these. But the nine, I'll just run through them real quick here, okay?

the nine deadly sins of membership's done wrong. The first one would be poor ROI on hygiene, so on your hygienist and your checkups. Some practices look at hygiene as being a lost leader. And if you're not familiar with a loss leader, I know Nina is, there are times to do it in times not to, but a loss leader would mean that you lose money on every checkup with a patient just to try to get them to get their treatment done.

And that's a bad situation. to be. So with a membership plan, because the patient's paying before the treatment's done or on a monthly basis, you're collecting it up front versus if you're all on insurance, you're going to pay your hygienists, and it might take two or three or six payroll cycles before that check comes in from the insurance company. And so you don't have the revenue and you're basically subsidizing your hygienist to be in the office. The second one is if your membership sounds too much like insurance. So don't copy insurance, make it different apples and oranges. We mentioned that. Third one's not promoting it internally and externally. A lot of people do one or the other, but not both. Fourth one is not knowing the lifetime value of your patient. Fifth one is not knowing your numbers, so we went over a couple of reports.

Sixth one is flat rate discounting. You know, we don't like to say make it 10% off everything when you sign up for membership. That's a little too easy, and it sounds a little bit like insurance, you know. So you can segment areas, you know, maybe 10% off implants, but I wouldn't suggest you in 10% off everything. Also because your profit margin probably isn't the same on every procedure. So you want to know what those are. The seventh one will be not making it look professional.

So, you know, don't have it just on some handwritten piece of paper or something you print it off off Google Docs or Microsoft Word. But, you know, have a graphic designer put something nice together so it looks like something that's real. one is thinking that your patient's too sophisticated or that it sounds too silly or, you know, uh, too much like a punch card or something. And then the ninth one is, you know, the worst marketing sin of all, which is being boring. So don't make your membership boring. Add some fun stuff to it, you know, recognize your patients, uh, you know, give them free samples of unique new

products that are coming out. All that kind of stuff makes it fun. So that's kind of a, a quick overview of the nine deadly sins. Yeah, I know. They're great. In fact, I have a couple questions. So do you do the selling of the membership or does your hygienist or who's the actual salesperson for this? So typically it's our treatment coordinator, but we kind of look at it as a process of from

the moment someone calls, because a lot of people call and go, hey, you know, I want to get some implants or I want to get my teeth whitened. but I don't have insurance. Do you guys offer payment plans? Do you have some kind of program? And so we'll say, yeah, absolutely. We have some payment plans and membership options. We'll go over those with you when you get here to see if it would be a right fit for you.

So they're planting the seed. We're not put hard selling it. We're not pushing. I don't believe in hard selling anything. I believe in asking diagnostic questions, just like I would as a doctor. I'm not going to jump to a diagnosis. I want to ask some questions, get people to open up. So it starts with that.

phone call and then when they're here they're going to meet with the treatment coordinator is going to introduce them to the membership and then as we go through and put together a customized plan then we're going to go okay look here's kind of some side-by-side comparison if you did this self-pay it would be x if you did it with insurance it would be y if you do it with a membership it would be z and even even you know on that initial call is we will ask hey are you self-pay or insured, not do you have insurance? Because do you have insurance is a closed-ended question. And if someone says, no, they might feel like they can't get it done or it might create some kind of mental block. And so we simply say, hey, are you self-payer? We lead with the self-pay. And that's really where we would

like people to go more often than not has become a self-pay membership patient. Well, it sounds like you've scripted your staff. Yeah. It takes a lot of practice. I mean, just like a car, it's easy to get out of alignment or start kind of going off the cuff. But for the most part, I like to have, I don't like scripts to be super rigid, but I like to have templates. I really like things to be templated where you can semi-customize it to each patient. But, you know, we get people certified on the phone. We do mystery calls. We have a remote team member who mystery calls the office a couple times a month and runs through our script and then sends a grade to that patient.

so we can make sure we're in alignment with what we need to be doing. So what is the analogy? Whatever you inspect, if you don't, it won't. Yeah, exactly. Inspect what you expect? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So one other things you also said about in your marketing, you do internal marketing, which is kind of what you just explained,

but also external. So tell me, is that ad? Do you do a newsletter? What do you do that way? Yeah, so we do a patient newsletter where we promote the membership plan. And then we also have like some automated emails that go out just to remind people, hey, you're halfway through your year. Hey, you're three quarters the way through a year. Don't forget to get your refills at your next visit.

Those kind of things. And then externally, you know, we don't get too much into the specifics of it. And the reason we don't is a lot of people don't know what, you know, have never really heard of the membership concept of a dental practice. It's becoming a little more common. More offices are doing it. A lot of them are calling the dental savings plan. I don't like to call it a savings plan.

I like to call it a membership just from a perspective of who it's going to attract. And, you know, you probably don't want people who just want to deal, deal, deal unless you're like the low cost you know there's a there's a place near me i think called half dental and they're like everything's half off they probably want a dental savings plan because that's just the the market they're targeting um but we we look at bringing in people who would be a good fit for our membership and so externally like when we're say sending out a postcard we'll put something to the effect of, hey, if you're looking for a new smile and you would like some options that may work out better than insurance, please call this number.

Kind of along those lines so that people are just being introduced the idea that, hey, you don't need insurance and there are other options that may be better. We don't specifically name it because, you know, we're not Coca-Cola, where we're that big, where we're trying to, you know, as Dan Kennedy would say, you know, brand building is a deposit side effect of your marketing, but that's not how we're leading with it, if that makes sense. Yeah, it does. Now, when you said a patient newsletter, do you do a physical printed newsletter or a knee newsletter? Yeah, we've been doing a printed newsletter for probably seven years, I think, six or seven years. And it's amazing, you know, I wouldn't say that we have people calling,

mentioning that newsletter specifically a ton, but it is amazing how, you know, when we look at the call, numbers, the number of people who call that number. And then also just, you know, some of our best patients will go, hey, yeah, I read about that in your newsletter. And it's some personal story about, you know, when I crashed on my bike or something. And, you know, I had one lady just a while ago coming in. She's like, yeah, I love this comic. It was so funny. There was like a little picture that was funny. She's like, I took it down to the hair salon and I showed it all the gals at the hair salon and they were all we were all laughing and I'm like you can't beat that type of organic referral marketing you know in some ways as you can at the newsletter you know so many

businesses I don't care if it's a dentist or it's anybody else will say it's too expensive I don't have time I don't know what to say we're too busy anyway I don't have anybody to do it I mean, the excuses can go on and on. How in the world have you made that happen for seven years? Well, I mean, you're exactly right. It's tempting. I mean, at times, like some months we're looking at, you know, what we're spending marketing and sometimes you go, oh, man, you know, because it is becoming harder, in my opinion,

to measure the ROI on any one given campaign, right? Like, marketing as a whole has to be accountable for what you spend. But it's becoming trickier because, you know, people say, how did you find? find us and they'll put, I googled you. But then you sit down and talk to them and they say, no, I drove by and I saw your sign, looked like a nice building. So then I looked you up on Google and saw you had five-star rating and then I checked with my insurance and I can use my insurance at your office. And so that's how I got here. So that makes it a little bit trickier. But, you know, what's really made it more, I guess, tangible for me is I look at what like,

Target and Amazon, every year for the last five years, at least that I can think of, we get this big magazine early November, early to mid-November, all the stuff for Christmas. And my kids, especially my two younger, I mean, everything, there's like three things that weren't circled in those magazines, you know, they're like 30 pages. you know and I'm like I'm thinking man I got to start like five more companies to pay for all this stuff but they you know they know what they're doing and a magazine is not a newsletter for sure but I'm just thinking hey if Amazon that supposedly you know was going completely away from brick and mortar even though now we know they're going back to brick and mortar if they are mailing a physical I mean that probably costs them five to ten $10 per household.

Who knows how many millions they're sending it to. They're not dumb. They're not just wasting that money. They know that it's getting through the clutter and less and less things are being mailed out. So sometimes something in the mail is exciting. So we take that same approach and it works. And I've even had patients go, a couple of patients a few months ago, hey, yeah, by the time

I got your newsletter, the calendar was already five days into the calendar. And so it gave us some good feedback on how to fix that, but also, you know, having something wrong with it actually helped us know people reading it. It was like a built-in tracking mechanism. Yeah. Yeah. Before we got on the call, we talked about I have a presentation I do called Million Dollar Mailings. And I share about how I did a million dollar mailing for the University of Notre Dame. And the reason, a part of the reason why is I did a two-step.

but the second step, I recognize there was a mistake in the first step, and so it was a reason why. And so having mistakes in any of that kind of stuff is really actually very beneficial because you could say, whoops, you know, I had the wrong calendar. You know, we're going to send it to you the month before now, whatever it is. Right. Do you in your practice, do you do any kind of promotional things? Do you have a marketing calendar where, you know, this month you're going to do? this and, you know, customer appreciation or patient appreciation next month and whatever?

Yes. So we put together an annual marketing calendar, and that's really fun. That's kind of, you know, one of my favorite things to do is big picture thinking. So I like to look at all of the fun stuff we're going to do for the year. But we put a marketing calendar and then we'll do a monthly giveaway. And so what we do is each month we have something in the office. We give away. It might be tickets to a football game or a paddle board or, you know, event tickets to a music event, something.

And we rotate those throughout the year. And so if somebody refers in somebody new or they sign up or renew their membership plan, they're automatically entered to win. So we take a picture with them. We include it in newsletters. so we're able to repurpose that marketing. We do some email as well. Email I still find is great.

It's a great way to reach people. Obviously, open rates are dropping a little bit, but I think if you do it right, you know, it doesn't cost anymore to send a thousand emails than it does one. And so we keep, so we send some promotional things through email. For the most part, the emails, we try to give tips on dental health, sleep health, things going on in the office, construction that's going on in the neighborhood. And then every couple months we'll plug in something promotional.

There are little promotions inside of it as well. But we try to make things more about people and not too salesy, and then every so often we'll do that. But the giveaway in the office is fun. And then we have a couple charity programs we put together, one where people get dental work done, we donate a portion to Smile for Cycles, which is a charity program. We're setting up where we buy bikes for people who are underprivileged. So we try to make it multifaceted. We call it the seven rap, seven RAP, the number seven RAP, relationship action plan.

And the seven is we have seven R's, which are different than the seven pillars we were talking about earlier. But the seven R's we have are retention, referrals, reputation, recruiting, reactivation, reactivation, reach out, and recognition. So those are kind of the ours we use to think about our calendar, everything from Google reviews, positive PR, how we're getting involved in the community, and then go by it on a month-to-month basis, and then it makes things happen really fun.

And then we do a patient appreciation party, usually in the summer, and that's kind of our biggest event of the year on our marketing calendar. and that's a fun way to get outside the office and meet with people as well. This is amazing. So, Dr. Williams, I'm looking at the clock and we are out of time. But I know you've got this time crest practice growth, and a lot of what you were just sharing could really be beneficial to somebody. And do you ever coach anybody who's not addentist just on these kind of strategies?

Yeah, I mean, you know, as long as someone's, you know, willing and interesting, to see how a membership program could benefit their business in some way. You know, there's a difference, too, between a subscription and a membership, which is a whole different conversation. But we really want to help people create members that are loyal, fun, easy to work with people. So if someone's listening to this and they're not a dental practice, just kind of, you know, send me some info on what you're. have and what you're doing and we'll see if you'd be a good fit for what we have to offer because

that you know we definitely do um it's not you know it's not every case but there are a lot of people who ask about this topic and so and we really have a fun time sharing and even if you're not we have some resources we'd be happy to give away for free for listening to this podcast as well okay so how do they get hold of you so the best way is probably just email me um just letter t for my first name tyler and then last name william so t williams so t williams at Your Practice Growth.com, T. Williams at Your Practice Growth.com. If you email me and just put Nina's podcast in the subject line, that way I'll know where it came from,

and then just tell me a little about you and be happy to send you a copy of the book that I wrote for practice owners and then any of the resources we mentioned in the podcast that you'd like more information about. Well, that's fantastic. I am sure there's going to be somebody who will reach out to you So this is going to be another wrap of another amazing podcast. So Dr. Williams, thank you so much for your time and for your generosity of sharing all of these ideas.

Oh, I had fun. It was an honor to be here. And, you know, you're someone who I know cares a lot about your community and the people that you share the podcast with. So I'm happy to be a part of it and happy to help out however I can. Well, thank you so much. So until next time, this is Nina Hirshberger saying go out and start that membership. Thank you for listening to Megabucks Radio with Nina Hirshberger. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or to listen to past episodes, visit megabucksradio.com.