How much does it cost to acquire a new functional medicine client? It can be as little as 0.51 cents to $240.00 depending on the service.

What does it take to have a successful marketing campaign? It takes planning, training your team, knowing what outcome you are looking to achieve, and a digital presence.

Do not miss these highlights:

02:49 Why is it so important to understand what it costs to bring a client into your practice? 

04:37 Lifelong clients provide the best value to your practice - How to keep them?

11:01 Avoid driving your ads for the client to fill out a form, drive them to call your office instead. You don't need to have a built-in scheduling link.

12:39 How to make cancellation or no show rate extremely low.

14:19 The importance of tracking your financial data as well as tracking your clinical data. 

16:55 Another way of tracking your progress is through what's called a CRM.

18:33 The first milestone that you want to try to accomplish is a 3% conversion rate and then grow from there.

20:26 Don't just run ads and think it's enough - You need to provide a lot of value to the channels and make a connection with a person.

22:16 In your ads, social posts, and YouTube videos use normal everyday language or in layman's terms - Speak to them in a way that describes what and how they're feeling in their language.

24:19 Reviews are incredibly important - Get a video testimonial or a video review whenever you possibly can.

25:34 When you drive people to your practice via a phone call, the person answering the phone needs to be the one that can answer the questions and schedule the appointment.

29:53 It's important to rank organically in the search engine - The higher you rank, the lower the cost of conversion to bring a client in.

Resources Mentioned

Join Us in the FMBI Mastermind Group on Facebook.  You can find the Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/5461914567153276/

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Transcript for Episode #30:

0:01
You're listening to the Functional Medicine Business Podcast featuring Dr. Deb, one of the most creative functional medicine business practitioners in her industry. She shares the wisdom and knowledge that she has gained over 25 years of functional medicine, a pioneer in functional medicine, scheduling, leadership and Practice Management. Dr. Deb has a wealth of knowledge and he's eager to share to help functional medicine become more productive, and for the practitioners and patients to live better lives. Our podcast shares the good and the bad of our industry. Because Dr. Deb knows the pain you live every day building a functional medicine practice with practical tools of how to manage money, taxes and patient care, she will discuss it all with you.

0:54
Welcome back to Functional MBI Podcast. Today I want to talk about client acquisition for functional medicine practitioners. Today's show is about the cost of acquisition. Now don't go running away just yet. It's not boring and even if you're a small business, this would work for you. Every business needs to know what it costs them to acquire a client. For most medical marketing services, the cost per client will fluctuate between $8 and $106 to get a new client into your practice, this is really a broad range. And I can tell you that this range can change even more. I've obtained clients in my practice for as little as 51 cents. Yes, you heard me right 51 cents. Now, we're not talking about how much you pay per click but how many times does someone have to land on your website, social page, or watch your video before they pick up the phone and call your office to schedule an appointment and actually show up for that appointment. We're talking about what the average cost to convert someone into scheduling an appointment, not just showing up on your website.

2:17
This is crucial to every small business. But especially crucial to anyone in the Functional Medicine world. You should have a plan to measure what acquiring a client means to your business. And it's a booked client, it's a client that actually shows up. So if you don't have a plan in mind, I want you to hop over to another episode I did with Zora Chase and she talks all about tracking your business success with marketing.

2:49
So, why is it so important to understand what it costs to bring a client in to your practice? Well, first off, you can't afford to spend $234 for a patient lead for a general visit for just a general physical or a meet and greet, you would lose money with that client. But if you have a high ticket service, such as a procedure that costs $4,000, that would make sense then to pay $234 to obtain that client, because the cost of acquiring that client is much less than the cost of the procedure for the clinic. So the first thing you want to do is set a budget or a limit of how much you want to spend to obtain a client for each service in your office. Now for some people, it's 10%. For some people, it's less than that the best way to get clients into your practice might be for a general visit. And then you could upsell them in the office on other high ticket services. I like this method because I can acquire a client for a lot less money. But yet I can have that client do other services in my practice that are more expensive. Now certainly if the client doesn't need that expensive procedure, you're not going to recommend it to them. But either way, it's a win because you obtained a client for a lot less money. And now it's your job to make sure that you hang on to that client for years and years to come. So that your return on investment compounds over the longevity of that client being your patient or being your client.

4:37
Now, lifelong clients provide the best value to your practice because you pay for them once and they come back over and over again. So in order to have a lifelong client, you need to make that client happy. You need to treat them well. And you need to make them feel like they're special. Now these Have the clients that you really want in your practice, and you really want to take care of them. Because these are your clients that are going to share your information with others. This is known as word of mouth marketing. And it's the best advertising you can ask for. It's like a walking testimonial. So you want to treat these clients really well, and reward them for bringing clients to you. Now, some providers are stingy about rewarding these clients. But I would tell you, don't be that way, go out of your way to reward these clients for bringing you new clients, because you obtained that client for free, basically. But you would not have obtained that client, if you didn't make this first patient happy with your service. So there's lots of ways that you can reward them, you can give them a discount on other services that you offer in your practice supplements or ancillary services that they don't typically do. You could buy them a gift card for someplace that they really like, I encourage people to keep the business in house, give them a discount on something they don't currently do with you, because they may love it and if they love it, you've just gotten another new client in your practice for a different service. And since this client loved you so much before and told people about you, they're going to tell people about this service as well. So make sure you really treat these clients well.

6:40
Now, when you look at the cost per click, that may be between 50 cents, or sometimes as much as $200. But the average is two to $2 to $14. Depending on the type of ad that you're running in your industry. If there's competition, what keywords are you trying to rank for. And if it's a call only ad or a text ad, sometimes those ads can get a little bit more pricey. Now, if you market something that doesn't have a lot of competition, but it's something people are looking for, you can get even lower costs per click. Now remember, a cost per click is not the acquisition of a client, the cost per click is death just that somebody clicked on your website. Whether or not they decided to proceed with you or not, is sometimes unknown. It should be trackable, and you want it to be trackable. If your agency that you're working for doesn't know how to track that, or they're not tracking, where people go on your website, how long they stay, what do they look at, you're missing out on a lot of great marketing information that could help you dial in your marketing and save you a ton of money and actually bring you clients that you want to work with that need your service. So the average conversion rate is generally between 2.4 and 7.6%. Google's average is 1%. Click through rate and 1% conversion rate. So when you start seeing averages like this, increasing, that's where you know, you're starting to speak