For years dentistry relied on things like Demandforce and Healthgrades to gather positive reviews. Demandforce, a popular dental software integration for emailing and texting patients, can accumulate literally hundreds of positive reviews from your patients, but they will live on the Demandforce website. The same goes for Healthgrades, where it is even more difficult to amass reviews that ultimately will never be seen.
The cold hard truth is that 6 out of 10 people look for reviews on Google before anywhere else (Review Trackers, 2018). The other 4 out of 10 people turn to places like Facebook and Yelp to seek out reviews.
So what are you losing by not having Google Reviews and more importantly, how can you generate more positive reviews for your dental practice? Well, a Forbes study from 2016 shows that 90% of consumers read online reviews prior to visiting a business or making a purchase.
There are a startling number of other facts uncovered in this survey, including tidbits like 84% of people trust an online review the same or more as a personal recommendation and that having four or more negative reviews can decrease your potential customer base by up to 70%.
Seriously, you should check this study out if you’re still on the fence of the importance of online reviews.
Being now convinced (hopefully), let’s get down to how you can generate more positive reviews without even trying. If you’ve worked with any dental consulting agencies, you’ve heard “the best way to get reviews is to ask for them,” and while they are right in theory, they are severely antiquated in their execution.
The easiest, most successful email sequence you will ever run is a positive review generating email campaign. It literally runs itself and will yield so many positive reviews that you won’t believe it. For you skeptics out there who say that asking for reviews opens the door to negative reviews(yes you!), this campaign sorts that all out as well.
So here is how it works, time for the big reveal.
In your email management software, you set up a simple campaign that sends an email to patients after their visit asking for feedback. How was your experience, good, bad, or so-so? Patients click a button that corresponds to each answer.
The bad and so-so clicks are funneled to a page that asks them some follow-up questions regarding their visit, asking them on a scale of 1-5 how different parts of their visit were and giving them a box to describe any additional concerns.
We’ll get back to the value in this later.
The good responses are taken to your Google page (or the site of your choice, Yelp, Facebook, etc.) where they can easily submit a review giving you props for your great work.
That’s it, and it works like magic.
Now let’s circle back to those bad and so-so reviews and dig into the value that lies there. The biggest value in collecting feedback this way is that it is sent directly to your office via email. The patient is able to submit their feedback while not being driven to Google to leave a potential negative review.
By implementing this campaign strategy, you are literally weeding out the negative reviews. But you aren’t just discarding these complaints, you are getting an opportunity to make the patient feel heard, recover, and apologize where necessary.
An office where this system has been implemented for two years has accumulated 5 star reviews to 1 star reviews at a ratio of more than 40:1. The office currently has more than 125 positive, 5 star reviews and an average of a 4.9 on Google.
