There are a few things that we’re very passionate about here at Veterinary Practice Partners. Our office candy bowl, snuggle time with our office dogs, and our practices’ reminder postcards… to name a few. We hope by now we don’t need to tell you the importance of your reminder protocol in terms of driving revenue. So today we’re going to focus on why it’s so important not to ignore the direct mail portion of your reminder process.
There is a bit of a movement happening right now in the veterinary space to abolish the reminder postcard. “They’re expensive! They’re hard to measure! They’re labor intensive!” – the arguments are many, but we’re here to tell you to please, whatever you do, ignore those arguments.
If we asked you the compliance rate on collecting client email addresses in your practice, would you be able to ballpark it? Is it 50%? 30%? Whatever it is – it’s not 100%. Data never is.
Let’s break this down:
- Average percentage of deliverable email addresses per client base: 65%
- Standard reminder email open rate: around 40%
Ready for a good old-fashioned word problem?
If only 65% of Springfield Animal Hospital’s clients have email addresses in the Practice Management System, AND 60% of those that do aren’t even opening their email reminders, how many clients are left not seeing reminders about their pets’ health?
A whopping 75%. By removing direct mail communication with your clients, you are potentially severing a line of communication with 75% of them. With no reminder communication getting through about their pets’ health, what’s the likelihood they’ll remember their pet needs a well check? We’ll let you do that math on your own…
So, yes, reminder postcards can feel like a dated, expensive marketing exercise, but the numbers don’t lie. Until the veterinary space fully adopts text reminders (which we don’t expect for another 5 years or so) we would be foolish to abandon these efforts.
Now if you’ll excuse us, we have some office dogs that need some snuggles.
