Connie Hopper shares her advice on how to ensure you get the most out of your open day…
Holding an open day in your practice can be a great way of engaging with potential new patients and strengthening relationships with existing ones. It can also boost the business’ bottom line by growing your patient list, and therefore profits, or increasing uptake of a particular treatment or service that you’re highlighting during the event.
Below are five top tips on how to make sure you maximise the opportunities an open day can bring…
Know what you want to achieve – before you can plan your event properly you need to know who you are targeting, e.g. new patients, existing ones, etc, and what outcome you are looking for. It could be that you want to highlight a new treatment you’re offering or sign up x number of new patients. But, you need to identify why you are having the event to know what you want to include in the day, and to be able to measure whether it was a success, and therefore worth the time and cost.
Assign roles across the team – your event should have one person who is responsible for the overall organisation, which does not necessarily have to be the practice manager – it could be a team member who has a flair in this area or previous experience. They can then plan the event in advance, allocate budget, delegate actions to other members of the team and set meetings to ensure you’re on track. Even with one person in overall charge, it’s important they delegate tasks so that the event doesn’t become too much of a burden and involves the whole team, ensuring they become more invested in helping it succeed.
Plan and target your promotion – people are busy, so you need to tell them about your event well in advance to stand the best chance of securing a good attendance. How exactly you market your open day will depend on who you are trying to target, as per the tip above. If it’s existing patients then staff talking about it during their appointments, putting up posters in the waiting room or mentioning it in your practice newsletter are all good approaches. If it’s new patients, then external advertising in the local press, a competition on social media, invite a friend initiative or a banner outside the practice might work best.
Include those ‘little extras’ – there are simple things you can do to make your event that little bit more special than the usual visit to a practice. For example, just providing drinks and nibbles, having fresh flowers, or providing little gift bags for guests will make them feel like they have had more of an experience, which they will be more likely to tell others about, helping to spread your reputation. If you’re looking to attract new patients, going the extra mile in this way will give them an idea of the level of customer service they can expect from your practice.
Say thank you afterwards – for those attendees whom you have permission to contact, make sure to follow up in some way after the event. This could be a phone call, a card in the post or an email to thank them for coming, and perhaps offer them an incentive exclusive to attendees, such as a discount on a particular treatment or a free consultation, etc. This will make your attendees feel valued, adds another personal touch and, might just persuade anyone who didn’t sign up to the practice or take up a treatment during the event to do so.
Holding an event like an open day, takes time, effort, money and organisation, but it can more than deliver return on investment. Using the advice above you can begin to break down the steps needed to plan your own event and enjoy the benefits to your practice.
