At Crystal Clear Digital Marketing, an essential part of our job is helping you market your practice and services successfully in order to receive phone calls and online forms. But do you know what to do with the calls and forms you receive? Generating these opportunities is great for your practice, but that’s not what is going to make it successful. Sustaining your business also involves a little bit of math and three letters: LTV.
Lifetime Value of Patients
As a doctor or medical practitioner, you evaluate patients from a clinical standpoint and glean valuable information about their health and medical conditions. But the overall success of your medical practice also depends on evaluating them from a business standpoint; specifically, calculating their lifetime value. Lifetime value (LTV) is a math equation that may seem daunting, but simply defined it is only this: the amount of profit that you generate from your patients during the duration of your relationship with them.
Why LTV Matters
Unlike other businesses that are product-based and sell their services one time, many of your treatments are sold in packages and sessions, such as dermal fillers and laser hair removal. Therefore, determining your ROI for marketing and business practices requires a different set of numbers in order to successfully keep the lights on with money left over.
Determining the LTV of patients takes a little bit of time, but it’s not difficult. Typically, you need these individual sets of numbers:
- How much profit you make from recurring services
- How many times a year the average patient books a service
- How many people they are likely to refer to your practice
- Your average profit margin
The multiplication of these four numbers together will give you the LTV for each patient. It may sound like a lot of time to spend with a calculator, but doctors and medical practitioners, knowing these numbers is crucial for the continued growth of your practice because if you know how much profit a patient can provide for you, then you also know how much you can afford to spend to find more patients.
Making Money on Purpose
It’s a process that works in a circle: by investing in solid digital marketing and business strategies, those online forms and phone calls will come. When you know how to use those calls and forms to calculate LTV, you know how much you can spend on further developing your digital marketing and business strategies. At Crystal Clear, we not only help you get noticed in the digital realm, but we can also successfully consult you in having your business practices properly aligned.
Medical practices that cannot confidently calculate their LTV and ROI often make money by accident, which is not a business model you want to aspire to. If you’re ready to walk among those that make money on purpose, contact Crystal Clear today to find out more about calculating LTV and ROI. We look forward to hearing from you!