Using the Patient Birthday report to drive appointments

The birthday report is a great little report that is often ignored but using it can be a great way to drive extra appointments from clients who might only come to the practice for their annual checkup.

Recognising a client's birthday is important because they love to self-indulge around these special occasions and you can gain some customer loyalty from a warm, personalised birthday message. These tactics are invaluable for winning over customers for a lifetime.

So how do you go about this? Simple - email them. In the past we've talked about how you can use email marketing and you use a similar tactic here.

Birthday emails are one of the most effective type of emails you can send. Not convinced? Consider these statistics from Experian:

• Birthday emails have a 481% higher transaction rate than promotional emails.

• Birthday emails generate 342% higher revenue per email than promotional emais.

• Birthday emails have 179% higher unique click rates than promotional emails.

Basically - birthday emails are a much better promotional tool than your average marketing email.

How to do it

In most practices you will need to nominate someone to do this on a weekly basis. It shouldn't take more than a few minutes as unlike most patient reports this one doesn't generate hundreds of patient details. Your marketing manager or practice manager should be happy to do it - after all, it helps drive business.

In the patient report, click the day(s) you want to send the email for

which will generate the birthday list:

Once that is done, hit the export button to generate a CSV.

Once you have that, you can use the same procedure to set up the birthday list as we did in the patient segmentation article (Here is the link again in case you need it).

However, the are some important things to consider...

Personalisation matters!

Did you know that emails with subject lines that include first name personalisation have higher open rates than emails that do not?

It's because these subject lines tend to grab attention and stand out in a spam-filled inbox.

For example a subject line you could use: "Rob! Have a happy birthday - have a free whitening on us"

Which leads us to...

Call-to-action

What are you actually offering in this birthday message? A call to action with a good offer will be better received than a simple birthday greeting message.

As this is a birthday greeting and not an annual checkup reminder you could use it to offer some of your cosmetic products at a discount - whitening, straightening etc.

Design and Message

The number one tip is to keep the message short - a greeting, a quick paragraph that the can glance over and you're done.

So how do you design it? Well, this is the great thing about birthday greetings - there are literally millions of templates around the internet but Mailchimp also has a few that you can personalise.