Your Dental Website Return on Investment (ROI)

In our sister company,

TheWealthyDentist.com
, it is standard procedure to analyze the net value of a new patient in each of our client’s practices. The value, or contribution to overhead, is the amount of money generated by a new patient in the first nine months in your practice – less the cost of providing the dentistry (variable cost). This means we take the gross production of a new patient and subtract lab fees, dental supplies and collections losses, to net out how much money goes into paying overhead.

Hygiene Production:

X-Rays $19
Prophy $39
Other 0
Total $58

Dental Production:

New Patient Exam $25
Consultation $42
Dentistry $625
Total $692
 
Total Production $750
Collections @ 96% $720
Less: Variable Costs @ 24% $165
Net Contribution to Overhead $555

For example: Patient-generated production in the first nine months:

In this example, the practice generated $750 in gross production from an average new patient in the first nine months. The net, after the cost of providing the dentistry, was $555. If the cost of setting up your first Internet marketing campaign is $280 a month, $3,360 a year, we would need only 6 new patients to break even ($3,360/$555) in the first year.

It gets even better when you realize we are targeting high-value new patients. If this were a Cosmetic patient at an average value of $5,500 it would only take less than one new patient ($3,360/$4,015) to break even!

Click here to view a chart that illustrates the industry norms.

Obviously, gross fees and lab fees will vary depending on your local demographics and clinical choices, but as you can see from the last column on the right, Marginal Profit, it doesn’t take a lot of new patients to make your IDA Internet marketing campaign successful.

A successful marketing strategy is defined as one that generates more net income than it costs to build and maintain. Remember, to keep asking yourself: if you hand someone $1 and they give you back $3 – how long do you want to keep playing the game?