You must have both a client and team incentive. Let’s talk about the client incentive first.
So what’s our client incentive? Client incentive can be a free appointment. We don’t ever do this actually for a referral, but I just wanted to mention it. It is an option, and would it make sense financially? You’re darn right it would, but I don’t do this.
Or you can say 50% off your next appointment or you can say there’s a free massage or you can simply just send a thank you card.
Now my disclaimer with this is that in some parts of the world sometimes you can offer an incentive for a referral. But even if you can’t incentivize someone to refer, you must always thank them.
One of the things we did was just to put a lotto ticket in their referral thank you card. And here’s the thing, there’s such a high perceived value for it, but it’s just a piece of paper that’s worth virtually nothing – $2 or whatever it is. But it’s just a cool little thing that we like to do.
Just do whatever feels right for you.
Again, it goes back to a lifetime value. It doesn’t really matter what your lifetime value is, but if your lifetime value is $800, $1000, $2000 and you don’t take the time to say thank you, you will lose out.
By the way, I’m not immune to this. There have been times when we were not doing it religiously and it was a real wake-up call for me.
The marketplace will always tell you exactly whether you did a good job or a bad job.
If you’re not serving that marketplace, if somebody gave you a referral and you’re not recognising it, think of the laws of Yin and Yang and Karma and all those things, if you won’t at least show your appreciation for that, the universe is probably not going to give you much more.
There’s an old saying that you cannot have more until you appreciate what is. So, every single time someone is referred, we send a little card to whoever referred them.
So, if all you get from this is you start doing that, you will get more referrals.
If someone does anything good for you, try to say thank you. When you do something nice for someone else you want a thank you. If that’s all you did send a thank you for the referral, it would be fantastic.
This philosophy also goes for appreciating and surprising new patients. We’ve recently started sending every single new patient a welcome pack in the post. It’s been a fantastic initiative we have introduced and it has decreased our no-show rate and given us an opportunity to position ourselves the way we want to before they walk in. There’s a little spine keyring in there, a welcome letter that has been strategically chosen as it has a Q&A section in it that specifically deals with the common objections I believe that a lot of new patients may have prior to walking in the door or stopping them from taking up care.
