What is Pay Per Call Dental Marketing?
Pay per call marketing is a type of performance marketing where the client pays for every inbound phone call that meets a certain criteria . Pay per call can be considered a variation of Pay per lead marketing.
How is Pay Per Call Different from Pay Per Lead or Pay Per Show?
The main differences between Pay per call, Pay per lead, and Pay per show are where in the buyer seller relationship the risk is being held. Pay per show is the lowest risk proposition for a lead buyer, in this case the dental practice, as they are only paying for patients that show to the office. In this case, the marketing agency bears all the risk, not only of effectively spending their advertising budget, but they also bear the risk of the dental practice’s conversion process. It is common in these arrangements for the marketing agency to establish minimum performance standards for the dental practice in order to ensure they don’t go unprofitable, for example out of X calls that are sent, no more than Y% can go unanswered.
In pay per lead, the risk of advertising dollars is still held by the marketing agency, but the conversion risk is transferred to the dental clinic. The dental clinic pays for the leads, whether they convert them or not.
In pay per call, the dental office holds the risk of both qualifying and converting the leads. Generally, pay per call programs work on the basis of the client paying for every call over an X number of seconds. The idea behind this is that the dental practice should be able to qualify the caller in that allotted time. If the practice doesn’t have a solid process for qualifying callers, or has long hold times, they could end up paying for unqualified leads.
What are the pros of pay per lead marketing?
The pros of pay per call marketing are that practices can bring their costs of patient acquisition to very low levels, since the cost of inbound calls is often lower than the cost of buying qualified leads. Calls are more likely to convert than form leads, and many pay per call brokers are equipped to handle rapid scaling; which means they can offer flexibility for when you would like to turn the volume up on your campaigns.
What are the cons of pay per call marketing?
The main cons of pay per call is that the dental practice holds all of the risk in qualifying and converting the calls into patients. It is important to have a solid process for qualifying the leads in a short period of time, but it is also equally important to understand the call buying terms of the broker you are buying from. Are you obligated to pay for calls that come in afterhours? Does your staff answer the phone during lunch hours? All these and other terms are very important to understand as they can make or break your campaign.
Who are the Major Players in Dental Pay Per Call?
There are various small brokers in the Dental Pay per Call market, but the space is by far dominated by Futuredontics. Futuredontics owns the brand 1-800-Dentist, which many may remember from their tv commercials in the 1990s. If you are interested in pay per call, contact us for more information.
How do I Protect my Downside with Pay Per Call?
As mentioned above, in Pay per call, the call buyer holds the risk of qualifying the leads and converting them. In order to minimize the risk to you, the best thing to do is to figure out the fastest way to disqualify leads and end the call. For example, many prospective patients will not visit a denitst outside of their insurance network or further than 15 miles from their house. A sophisticated call buyer would get the caller’s approximate location and insurance information within the first 60 seconds of the call so that they can qualify or disqualify the lead accordingly.
Is Pay Per Call a Good Fit for my Practice?
Pay per call is a good fit for practices that are confident in their call answering processes, lead qualification scripts, and conversion rates of leads into appointments and patients. Practices that are professionalized and know their numbers can achieve very low patient acquisition costs with pay per call. Practices that are still figuring out their processes; however, should stay away from Pay per call as it is a very fast way to lose money if controls are not put in place.