Clinic marketing audit

Next Month’s Patients Are Already in Your Records

Somewhere in your system is a list of people who were told to come back in six months, and six months was four months ago. They are not unhappy and they have not gone anywhere. They simply have no reason to think about you today, and nobody has reminded them. The clinic marketing audit above calls that dormant revenue, and for most practices it is the largest single thing on the list.

A recall is not marketing. It is the appointment you already agreed, arriving late because it was left to memory.

What the Clinic Marketing Audit Asks

Nine statements about how your practice runs. Tick the ones that are genuinely true, and the panel scores you out of nine, places you in one of four bands, and lists what to fix from the ones you left blank.

Nothing is connected to anything. It cannot see your diary, your records or your patient list, so the answer is only as good as the honesty of the ticking. Answer for a busy Tuesday rather than for a well-run week.

The nine questions in the clinic marketing audit follow a patient from before they book to months after they leave, which is a useful way to read them.

Before They Book: the Phone Is the Barrier

Two of the nine sit here, and both are about removing a wait.

The first is whether patients can book without phoning. A phone number is a barrier for a large and growing share of people, and it is only available during the hours somebody is at the desk, which are exactly the hours those people are at work. The fix in the audit is practical: put a booking link in your Google listing, in your bio, and in the message you send back to every enquiry.

The second is whether every enquiry is answered within fifteen minutes, including evenings and weekends. That is not a target for a receptionist and the audit does not pretend it is: its fix is to put something automated on first response so nothing waits until Monday, with a person picking it up properly afterwards.

An enquiry on a Saturday afternoon is somebody in pain, or somebody who has finally got round to it. Both of those decisions get made before Monday.

What You Can Put in a Message Is Not a Marketing Question

This is the item a checklist cannot help you with, and it applies to every message on the list.

A reminder that names a time is one thing. A reminder that names a procedure, a condition or a department is a different thing entirely, because it may be visible on a lock screen, on a shared phone, or to somebody standing next to your patient. What you are allowed and expected to do with patient information is governed by rules that this audit, and every marketing tool, has never heard of.

So write the messages with that in mind from the start rather than retrofitting it. Names and times, not diagnoses. A generic practice name where a specialist one would say too much. And whatever your own professional body says about contacting patients, which is the version that governs.

None of that stops any item on this list working. It changes the wording, not the automation.

Between Booking and Arriving

Two items, and the first is the one with the most evidence behind it in any appointment business.

Reminders at 24 hours and 2 hours, going out without anybody remembering to send them. The audit calls it the single biggest no-show fix there is, and the reason the two timings differ is that they do different jobs: the day before is your last chance to refill the slot, and the two hour one catches somebody who has genuinely forgotten and can still get there.

The second is holding high-value slots with a deposit or a card, which the audit suggests for anything over an hour of a practitioner’s time. That is a real lever and it is also a decision rather than a setting: asking for money up front stops some people not turning up, and it stops some people booking at all. Which of those matters more depends on how full your book is and whether your no-shows are concentrated in new patients or in regulars.

If you are weighing it up, price both sides first. The no-show cost calculator puts a figure on the empty slots and on what reminders and deposits each recover, and the cancellation policy generator writes the policy that has to exist before you can charge anybody anything.

When Somebody Cancels

One item, and it is the one that quietly earns the most: a cancelled slot offered to a waitlist automatically, within minutes.

The situation it fixes is familiar. Somebody cancels at four for an appointment at nine the next morning. The slot is now worth nothing, and there are half a dozen people who would have taken it if anybody had asked them, several of whom rang last week and were told there was nothing until March.

Within minutes is the part that matters. A slot offered the next morning is an offer nobody can act on. A slot offered at four in the afternoon for nine the next day is genuinely useful to somebody, and it converts because it is a scarce thing arriving unexpectedly.

Done by hand this is a job nobody has time for at four in the afternoon, which is precisely why the audit asks whether it happens automatically rather than whether it happens.

After the Appointment: Eighteen to Twenty Four Hours

The review item comes with an unusually specific window, and the specificity is the useful part: ask 18 to 24 hours after the appointment, once, automatically.

Too soon and you are asking somebody who is still at the desk paying, which turns a favour into a transaction. Too late and the visit has stopped being a thing they have an opinion about.

The word once is doing as much work as the timing. A patient who comes every six months and is asked every time has been asked four times by their second year, and a practice that nags is a practice people describe that way.

The review request generator writes the message for a clinic rather than for a shop, and the Google review calculator turns the rating you want into a number of patients, which is usually smaller than it feels.

Months Later: Recalls by Treatment Type

Back to where this page started, because it is the item with the most money attached.

The audit’s fix is more precise than a general reminder: set recalls by treatment type. Six months and twelve months are not the same interval, a check-up and a follow-up are not the same message, and a practice that sends everybody the same recall at the same interval is sending most of them at the wrong time.

The reason recalls get skipped is not that anybody disagrees with them. It is that they require somebody to run a report, work through a list and send messages, on a day with patients in it. So it either happens in bursts when things are quiet, which is exactly when it is least needed, or it does not happen.

Underneath Everything: Source and Paperwork

The last two items are the ones that never feel urgent.

Knowing which channel each patient came from, whether that is Google, Instagram, a referral or somebody walking past. Without it, decisions about where to spend are guesses dressed up as strategy, and the fix is simply to record the source on every new contact from now on rather than trying to reconstruct the past.

And sending treatment plans and invoices digitally, into the chat the patient already replies in, rather than printing them at the desk. A plan handed over on paper at the end of an appointment is read in the car park by roughly nobody. The same plan sitting in a thread is there when they are deciding, and it is there to be replied to.

The Four Bands

Eight or nine is running well, and the note carries a warning worth heeding: most of these break quietly when staff change. A process that lives in one receptionist’s head is not in place, it is borrowed.

Six or seven is solid with gaps, and the items below the line are where the growth is sitting.

Four or five is leaking patients: enough is manual that enquiries are being lost without anybody noticing, which is the defining feature of this band. Nobody reports a message they never saw.

Under four is urgent, and the note names it precisely: most of the patient journey depends on somebody remembering, and that is where the revenue goes.

What the Clinic Marketing Audit Cannot Do

• It cannot see your practice. No records, no diary, no patient list, no account.
• It does not know your specialty. Nine items written for practices in general, and a physiotherapist and a dental practice do not have the same book.
• It knows nothing about your obligations. Professional standards, patient confidentiality and what you may send are outside it entirely.
• It cannot rank the fixes for you. It shows the first few of what you left blank, in its own order rather than in order of value.
• Nothing is stored. Write your score down if you want to compare it in six months.

The whole checklist is rendered on the server before any script runs, so every question, band and fix is readable before anything loads.

Three, in the Order Your Book Needs Them

Nine changes at once is a project that stalls in week two. Three is a fortnight.

If you want an order, work backwards along the patient journey rather than forwards, because the far end is where the people already are. Recalls first, since those patients have already agreed to come back. Then the review ask, because it compounds. Then reminders, which protect everything you have already booked.

What most of these have in common is that they are a message on a trigger rather than a task somebody has to remember. With DMly the reminders, the recalls, the review request and the treatment plans all go out on their own, into the same thread the patient already uses, which is the difference between a list of good intentions and a practice that runs without anybody holding it together.