We don’t visit any store or restaurant these days without first doing a little cursory research online. We look to see if there’s a website and of course, check out reviews. As a dentist, having little to no reviews can hurt if a practice a town over is swimming in four and five-star reviews. How do you get your patients to leave reviews?
Ask and You Shall Receive
Sometimes the simplest way is the best: ask! When your patients check out after a visit at the office, have a member of your staff ask them if they would mind leaving a review on your Google or Facebook page. While not always successful as one would hope, we’ve had quite a few clients have great success with asking face-to-face if someone would mind talking about their experience.
Have a Cup of Coffee on Us
To help encourage reviews, we’ve started the “Have a Cup of Coffee on Us” campaign. We provide a special graphic for your office that you can leave in the reception area. The sign says that in exchange for a review, the patient can receive a five-dollar gift card to Starbucks. Now, we’ve seen other practices offer drawings, where leaving their experience nets them a ticket in a drawing to potentially win a big prize. But we’ve found that people tend to prefer the smaller, but guaranteed, reward over the potential, but larger, one.
Make Leaving a Review Easy
Now, you can ask and offer incentives, but if the actual process is complicated for a patient, then you’ll get nowhere. To help, make sure there’s a link to your Google and Facebook pages on your website. People should be able to click on an icon and be taken right to these pages making the process easy. Also, no matter how tempted you may be, don’t have staff put up fake reviews, as Google can tell the real article from a fake and this can hurt your SEO.
Do you have questions about asking patients for reviews? Looking for new ways to improve your online marketing strategy? Then contact us today and let us help! Send an email to MDPM Consulting at info@mdpmconsulting.com, or give us a call at 972-781-8861!