178: Best Follow Up Strategies To Increase Patient Show Rate | The ChiroCandy Podcast

Hey, guys. Welcome to another edition of the Coyote Candy Podcast. My name is Matt Keenan and I am Billy Sticker.

And when Matt and I were discussing what we wanted the theme for this episode to be, we thought it'd be valuable and beneficial for you guys for us to talk about the importance of lead, follow up the tactics and why you need to do it, how you need to do it. And so that's what we're going to be covering this week. It's been almost 10 years since we started running ads for chiropractors. And there's so many of these companies that you see nowadays that they're literally brand new. They just pop up, start targeting chiropractors. But we've been in the game for a while, and a lot of you guys, if you followed me much, know I used to work in office for a chiropractor. So I'm very passionate about the profession. And we really want you guys to have the best success that you can. You know, Matt's been with us for what, five years now?

Five years this month.

Yeah. And so we've seen a lot. We've both seen. We know what works and what doesn't work. And it is frustrating to us whenever we're generating leads and nobody's showing up. And I know it's frustrating to you guys because you're spending the money on ads. So whether you're doing this, these, you know, running campaigns for yourself or you're working with a company, we really think what we're going to talk about today, you are going to find valuable, and it's going to help increase your bottom line. So, Matt, do you want to just kind of start off and talk a little bit about just the importance of following up with leads or no?

Absolutely. I mean, if you think about it, when as soon as somebody signs up, they're. They've already made a decision in their mind by signing up. Right. And you want to capitalize on that as soon as possible because you don't want that decision to expire. You know what I mean? Because then if you. If you wait even an hour, then already there's going to be, you know, it's going to be pushed to the back of their minds. You want to. You want to attack when it's really fresh on their brain that they made this decision to sign up for whatever your offer is, and then you want to act quickly. You or your team want to jump on that when they're still in that decision phase, essentially?

Yeah, absolutely. Because you want to strike when motivation Is the highest, and it's the highest as soon as they filled out that form. But also, let's even talk about how important it is for your team to know how valuable each one of these people are.

Right?

Right. So one of the things that we tell you know, our staff here at Chiro Candy, look, these doctors, these chiropractors spent a quarter of a million dollars or more to get their education, start their practice. They've got, you know, two to $300,000 easy that they've invested in their business. And they're entrusting us with managing these, you know, with helping them get their message out. And the same thing is true for your team. Like, they need to understand what you have on the line to grow your business. And you're holding your team accountable for carrying out that vision. Right. They need to know that this is a big deal, that this isn't just a job. Like, this is. You've got a lot invested in this. So not only is that important, every one of these patients, let's say that your lifetime patient value is $1,500. You know, if you're just doing chiropractic, and we've got a lot of offices where it may be, you know, four to six thousand dollars.

Many.

Yeah, depending on what all you're doing in your office. Well, every single lead, every single signup, every single person that fills out a form that says they're interested, they could be worth a multiple of that. And so you need to think, every time you see a name come through, you see a. You get a notification that somebody filled something out. Anytime the phone rings, your team needs to know that is a potential of $10,000 in value. Because they become a patient, the people they may refer, other services they may do, like, there is a lot of value on every single person. You know, we refer to them as leads. We've got some clients that refer to them as signups. But when it comes down to it, they're. They're people. They are actual people that have real struggles, that have real hurts, that woke up, put their pants on one leg at a time just like everybody else. They're real people that you get to serve and you get to love on. So there is a lot of value there. So that is, like, so important. And then going back to what Matt was saying, the speed of follow up is you've got to get to them as soon as possible. One of the stories I like to share is I don't like to do yard work. And as a matter of fact, I don't. I haven't mowed the grass in years. But even when we used to mow our own grass. Let's just use this as an example. Let's say you decided it's Saturday, you need to go get the yard mode, change clothes, put on your old shoes. And then the phone rings and it's your brother, your cousin, your friend, whoever it may be. And you start talking to them 20 or 30 minutes about whatever it is. And then you hang up the phone and then you look around and you're like, nah, I'll mow the grass later. It's like you were motivated to do it, you got distracted. And then now that motivation's gone. The same thing happens with these leads. They see something, especially if it's Facebook or Instagram. This is not intent marketing. Like, this is interruption marketing. We are interrupting them with your message. And then they were interested and filled something out. If it's Google Ads, that's a lot higher intent because they actually looked for you filled out a form called your office, whatever it may be. So there is higher intent there. But as soon as they. They make that step, the clock starts. And I actually have some statistics here. The within the first minute. Calling a lead within the first minute increases conversion rate up to 391%. Sheesh. 300. So it's almost 400% more likely to convert if you can reach them within the first minute. So depending on how you're finding out the leads are coming in, you want to be able to have your team respond immediately. The first five minutes. Okay. Responding to a lead within the first five minutes can make them 100 times more likely to respond and 21 times more likely to convert compared to waiting an hour and waiting an hour. In a way, it doesn't seem like much. And then, you know, some people are like, what's the big deal? It's only an hour. It was just recently. Surely they're going to remember filling it out. Well, yes. Yeah. Well, depending on what all they're doing. You know, if you're ever going to be distracted, it's going to be on the Internet, right?

Yeah.

On Instagram or TikTok or Facebook or whatever it may be. But, you know, waiting an hour is, though, there's still value in those leads because we do still want teams to be following up with them.

Absolutely.

But we have. It's just so critical that you strike while that motivation, you know, while that motivation is high.

Right.

And another thing. So we have, you know, the value we have, you know, Just understanding how valuable each lead is, how important it is. You know, the second thing would be how important it is the speed of following up. The third thing that we would want to cover is, you know, things that you can do to generate higher quality leads. What would be some things there that.

You would recommend Matt, for generating higher quality leads? I mean for one obvious, the big obvious answer for us is video content. Because we're in the age where if you're not creating customized content like video content, then you're not really caring about your audience. You don't care about growing your, you know, presence in the community. If you're just posting photos that's very two dimensional, you know, you need, you have to have videos to show, you know, personality to show, you know, yourself educating your community. But those are the two main things. But then on the technical side, on the back end, some things you can do. Number one, I would say in your lead forms, if you're doing lead form campaigns or if there's like a, of even a form on a landing page, you want to make sure that none of the questions are pre filled questions, meaning it doesn't just automatically extract information from those leads. You want to make sure that every single question is a custom question that they have to type out every single answer. I know it sounds like you'd want them to be pre filled so it's faster and easier for them to get through it. But ultimately it's going to bite you in the back because those people are going to be lower quality because then they'll, they'll forget they're not as serious. But if they're serious about it, they're going to take the time to fill out their name by hand. But if they're not serious about it, then they're gonna get to that part and then they're just gonna exit out of the lead form. Which we don't want, we don't want anybody just because for us obviously on our, on our end if we see that we got like 20 leads in one week, we're, we're like, that's amazing. But if most of those leads didn't really care and they just did the automatic pre fill questions and you're not gonna contact them, then what's the point? We wasted ad spend on those people. So we wanna do the higher intent.

Right so, and something else that happens is when you do the pre field questions, Facebook and Instagram, like they're just pulling content information or contact information and sometimes you know, the email that they use for their Instagram and Facebook accounts may be an old email that they don't check that often. That's a good point. And so you may not even have proper contact info or information that they're not even checking. But if you have it where they actually have to type in their phone number, type in their email address, there's a lot higher, higher quality person just from that and even putting in some specific questions. The more you have them fill out, the higher the intent is going to be. You know, if we make the wall a little bit higher for them to have to climb over, then that's going to actually increase the quality of that lead also. But doing things like what Matt's saying, when you can work, have specific content that you can be putting out in your community that build. It builds that know like and trust factor. And there's several previous episodes we've done where we, we kind of dove deep into, you know, what's working right now. So I definitely encourage you to go back and listen to those episodes. It's just a few episodes back where we talk about like, this is how you really build great retargeting audiences of people who know like and trust you. That's going to help get quality people in because we all agree that a referral is typically one of your favorite new patients. And with a referral, you don't really know them and they really don't know you. Y' all just, you have a shared relationship. And so when they come in, there's just, you know, that barrier is down some. Well, very similar to that. When people are watching your content and they start to know like and trust you and see what you do, how you do it, why you do it. Now when that person becomes a lead, when they come in, they feel like they already know you. You don't know them yet, but they already know like and trust you. It's not even happened to. That relationship isn't being borrowed from a third party anymore. For them, the relationship's already been built. So it's definitely can help increase the quality of the lead.

Yeah, it's like a built in, built in familiarity.

Yeah, exactly. Good point. And then let's get into a little bit of the tactics. How is it that you follow up with the leads? What are some things you would suggest?

Well, first of all, obviously if you're with us with Kyra Candy, you're going to have some automation, some automated text and emails that go out at certain times. But that's not everything that you should be doing. You should definitely have if you're a one man band, I understand if you can't call them immediately every time. Obviously if you're with patients, you're busy, but you want to have somebody calling the leads, of course, within like the first five minutes, preferably. But another thing on top of that is what we were just talking about earlier, Billy, is double calling. So what that looks like is not just calling twice, but when you call someone and they don't answer or it's asking you to leave a voice memo and voicemail, don't leave a voicemail that first time, just go ahead and hang up and then immediately call them back. Because oftentimes if they don't recognize the number or you know, they're, they're just going to think it's a robot. And this is something that, that I used even just when I'm trying to contact clients. You know, when I call a client and they don't answer the first time, I just hang up and immediately call them back. And probably eight times out of 10 they answer the second time because the first time they just didn't recognize the number. So they didn't want to answer. So there's going to be a much higher chance that they're going to answer on the second time. Plus none of the robo calls call twice like that. So if somebody's calling back, then even if it's subconscious, they know. Okay, so this is a real person and they're trying to actually contact me about something important. And in this case they've already signed up. They, you know, put the intention out there. This isn't a cold call, you know, this, that's something that you need to make sure that you and your staff knows. Like you're not cold calling these people. These people signed up to be called by you, so you don't have to feel weird about contacting them.

Absolutely. And speaking into that, going back to realizing these people are real people, having the mindset, they gave me permission to contact them, they gave me their information, but also realizing we get to serve these people, we get to transform these people's lives, your team and you understanding that this is an act of service, an act of love. You following up with these people because you totally believe if they become a patient, they accept care, like, you know, what that can do for their life, then you owe it to them to follow up with intent and, you know, to follow up in love. Reaching out to these people because they've already said they're interested, they already raised their hand, nobody accidentally pushes the button and then gives you all their information. It doesn't happen. Right. They're every one of these people. So I love the double call idea. You know, just seeing that number come through the second time also tells them this is important. Like there's somebody behind this really trying to get in touch with me. Let me see what's going on. So you're definitely just like what Matt said. You're going to see a much higher answer rate on that second call. And if they don't answer, then, then leave a message and then after that send them a text message. So if you're with us and you're using like the Chiral Candy app, we set all that up for you. And you can send them a text message straight from the app so you're not having to use, you know, a cell phone or anything like that. But there's a lot of offices now where they'll actually have a cell phone in office that'll allow them to send messages or they'll do it. You know, there's different texting platforms out there that you can use.

Right.

What we like to do is double call. So you call once, they don't answer. If it goes to voicemail, immediately hang up, call back. If you have to leave a voicemail at the end, just let them know, you know. Hey, this is Jessica with Dr. Matt's office. I saw that you responded to one of our posts. I like to say post instead of ads. You know, you responded to one of our posts on social media. I just wanted to, you know, be honorable and follow back up with you. Call me as soon as you can. Here's the number. But also send a text message right after that. And what would you suggest the text message say, Matt?

Well, for the text message, I would acknowledge that you called or, and, or acknowledge that it's a response to something, that it' just a text out of nowhere. So you want to say, hey, you could say something along the lines of, I'm sorry, it wasn't a good time for a call. I'd still love to get in contact with you. I was just following up on the information that you submitted to sign up for this appointment for X office. You know, however you want to mention it. But you want to, you want to include the fact that they signed up for something and that you, you know, tried to call them, that this isn't just a random text out of nowhere because they accidentally signed up or, you know, some kind of newsletter or these texts from companies. You know, we all, we all know what we're talking about. We all get those, but this is actually like a response to a call to action.

Yeah. And that can be as simple as, you know, hey, Samantha, this is Jessica with Dr. Matt's office. I just tried to give you a call. I saw that you had responded to one of our Facebook or one of our Instagram posts or whatever. You know, are you available for a quick call? Something like, like just easy. It needs to sound personal. Like the same way that you would text a friend or your staff would text a friend. So just doing these steps right here, you're going to dramatically see just a response in your leads because, you know, step one is generating leads, step two is getting them in the door. And if you can't touch with them, you're not going to be able to get them in the door. And then once you get in the door, like, we actually have scripts that we give to our clients that help train their team on how to actually have a solid conversation. And a lot of you guys already have training that you're, you know, you're teaching your team on this. I like to tell people, you know, CAs get a little bit of history, you know, what's going on, you know, what are some issues they're having. You know what, Obviously I'm not the doctor and so I don't know for sure if we can help, but I will tell you this. We see patients just like you in the office every single day. So let's do this. Let's go ahead and get you scheduled. And what's going to happen is, you know, you're going to have an exam and then a report of findings with the doctor. And if he can help you, he's going to be able to lay out and show you, you know, how that he or she's going to be able to help you. If not, they're going to be able to point you in the right direction, you know, so either way, it's a win win. We have today at 4 o' clock available or in the morning at 10. What works best?

I love that, Billy.

Yeah. A simple conversation like that, letting them know they have absolutely nothing to lose. And then something else that works well is having them prepay before they come in.

Right.

And now this is one of those things you don't want to make it, you know, where they absolutely have to prepay before they come in. But once they get to that part of the conversation and they commit, it's as simple as your staff saying, okay, great. Well, for this offer, they are requiring that you prepay. So did you want to use a visa or MasterCard? And then the majority of the time they will give you a card number. If they don't, that's still fine, but it will increase their show rate. But as long as they can kind of build some rapport with the new patient before they come in, that in itself is going to help increase the show rates. But if you can get them to prepay, then that's going to.

Even they've already invested something, so they're like, you know, I've. Now, I've given them my information and I've signed up to pay for something, so the show rate's definitely going to improve there. But something. Something that I liked about your approach when it comes to talking to the leads and potential patients is how personable it is, you know, because nowadays and personal trumps professional to an extent. Now let me explain that. Obviously you want to remain professional, but you want to err on the side of more personable with these leads. You want to talk to them, you know, like you're. Like they're an individual. Not that you would talk to everybody the exact same way, but you can just have. Have a conversation with them, be normal. Don't sound like you're reading a script every single time you talk to someone. And I know that that can get monotonous if you're talking to people, you know, all day saying the same kind of things. You know, it's like when you get on the phone with somebody from an insurance company, they're going to sound like they're droning on and on because they've just been repeating the same sentences over and over and over again. But you don't want to. You don't want them to have that experience. You want them to feel like they connected with you on that phone call to give them that extra reason to come in. It's like, oh, this person was really nice on the phone. They were easy to talk to. They answered my questions. They weren't in a hurry to get me off the phone. They actually cared about what was going on. They wanted to make sure my questions were answered. I think I'm going to go give them a shot.

Yeah. What's great also, if your ca. Like, this is how you know they're really good. If you walk by the front desk and you hear them on the phone and it sounds like they're talking to a friend or somebody they've known for a while, and then they hang up and you find out that was a lead that Is what you want like you want. And if you're a cause, there's a good chance that your doctor asked you to listen to this to get some tips on following up with leads. That's what you want. You want it to sound like when you're talking with that person that anybody else in the background hearing your side of the conversation, it sounds like you're talking to a friend or somebody you've known for a long time. You want to be that friendly, that personable. Ago I sold rare coins over the phone. Now we didn't cold call. We it was all people that, that had done business with us. Well, in a way we would cold call because we may call somebody that hadn't bought in several years. And that was one of the things that we would teach our sales manager for a long time. We teach our sales guys. It's like I want to be able to. When I hear you on the phone, it sounds like you're talking to somebody that you've had a relationship with for years. Even if this is your first conversation with them, you just want to be that personable. One of our clients who does a fantastic job with their lead follow up. They actually allowed me to interview them and we did a kind of a case study video. They consistently have a 60 to 70% show rate from their leads.

That's great.

If you want to, if you want to go to chirocandy.com case study it's so, so good. Now they're one of the offices. They don't like referring to them as leads. All right. They're not leads. These are people that signed up. So they actually call them sign ups. But what's great about this interview is it is the doctors. It's a husband and wife team. And their which they have several associates that work in office also. But their CA is on the interview also and so talks about the different steps that they do. So I definitely would encourage you for a deeper dive into this. Go check out carolcandy.com case study. So case study and we'll be sure to put the link in the show notes as well. But that actually brings me to one other thing. Just kind of covering the tactics. You know, you're double calling, you're sending out a text, but you also want to be able to track who you're calling, how many times you're calling, how often you're calling. You know, I would try at least two times a day. So if they came in, you want to respond immediately. A couple of hours, try them again. So Maybe they respond, you know, came through in the morning, you try them, then try them again in the afternoon. And then after that I think it's fine, you know, trying them every day. You know, they signed up for a reason, follow up with them until they tell you they're just not interested. You know, and that's one of the things you'll listen to or you'll learn when you watch that case study video. That is what they do. Like, she spends time every day following up with people who signed up a month ago that they never got in touch with. And that's one of the reasons they get, you know, 90 something patients a month walk through their door because they do such a good job with the follow up. Anything in closing that you'd like to cover?

Yeah, I'd say with the tracking aspect. I mean, if you're a Kyro Candy client, we have a Kyro Candy app where you can easily move somebody over from different columns and say like, hey, Mark that we called this person one time or twice or whatever. But if not, you could use a spreadsheet so that you can keep track of your leads there. And you can mark, you can color code how many times you've reached out to someone if they said that they're not interested or if they just, you couldn't get a hold of them, because then you can go back and use that list and revisit. So if you have a slow month where you're not really generating new leads from ads or whatever marketing avenues you're using at the time, you always have your database of leads that you haven't gotten yet. And even people that have been patients of yours, you can always go back to that and see when's the last time, you know, so and so has come into the office. There's always options, options for getting people into the office. Whenever marketing is slow, you know, the slower times is like, you know, December or in the, in the middle of summer. Those are the slower times for ads. Right. So in those times you lean on your resources and you lean on your overflow from other months. That's my.

Yeah, that's great. And this is a service that we actually offer. It's an additional service that we offer here at Caro Candy. One of the, our clients been with us for that office has probably been with us for, well, five years now. So this is before COVID We moved to this area during COVID and he was already a client of ours. We were patients of his. We became patients of him of his. But one of their CAs, she was in charge of following up with all the leads. She actually left, went to work for a family business and we contacted her and said, hey, you were really, really good at doing the follow up for Dr. Dr. Jeremy. Would you be interested in doing that for our clients? So we kind of poached her from her parents, but she was already trained in following up with leads and getting them scheduled and so now she's like over that department for us and we can actually do all the follow up for you. So if you're a client, we can generate all the leads and then even have her go through and follow up with all these people for you, get them scheduled, get them prepaid. It's a great service and the clients are, are using it. Absolutely love it because it frees up their team to work on the stuff that you hired them to do anyway. They're doing all their normal front desk stuff and we can handle all that backend stuff for you. So for more information on that, just reach out to just go to Kairocandy.com and schedule an appointment, you know, a call with anybody on our team. If you're a current client and you're interested, reach out to your account rep, let them know you're interested in the done for you service. And yeah, reach out to Matt and then we can get you set up on that. It works fantastic, it's extremely valuable and then you don't have to worry about all this. We will do all of it for you. So anyway, thank you so much for sharing your time with us today. Hopefully you found this valuable. If you did share it with some other chiropractors that you think would benefit, have your team listen to it and then we will see you on another episode to the Chiropendy podcast. See ya. Awesome.