Everyone loves compliments—especially when they are true. Compliments are even better when they are shared publicly and used to boost your credibility. In the same way that compliments can do a lot for a person, dental patient reviews can play a big role in the growth and success of your dental practice.
This article will explore how your dental patient reviews can help you get closer to your business and marketing goals. We’ll also outline ten ways you can ask patients for reviews. By the end of this article, you should have a great idea of how to leverage reviews to grow your dental practice.
Why You Should Ask Your Dental Patients for Reviews
Your patient reviews do way more than just stoke your ego. They are an essential part of several dental marketing strategies and when used the right way, they can be the difference between a growing dental practice and a stagnant one.
So, let’s explore four reasons dental patient reviews matter.
1. Boost Your Online Visibility
Patients can share reviews in different ways and formats. Most times, the format in which a review is given depends on the way that you ask for them. Later, in this article, we will discuss formats for asking for reviews. But if you choose to ask patients to share their reviews online, you’ll be positioning your dental practice for increased online visibility.
Dental review websites, social media platforms, and search engines are designed to reward businesses with more, positive reviews online. The more reviews your dental practice has on your Google My Business Profile, Yelp, or even Twitter, the more likely other internet users will see them. This can go a long way to raising awareness about your dental services and expertise.
2. Attract Patient Leads
The more prospective patients find and read your current patients’ reviews online, the more visitors you’ll get on your dental practice’s website. The more visitors your website has, the more patient leads you can attract and convert. If it sounds like a numbers game, that’s because it is. If you want to attract more patients to your practice, you need more people to learn about what you do and reviews can do just that for you.
3. Build Credibility
Awareness without credibility will not result in increased revenue. It’s not enough for people to know who you are, they also need to know how good you are and then trust you. And with a third of all patients relying on reviews to choose their dentist, your patient reviews can incredibly boost your credibility and reputation.
Online reviews are particularly very useful for boosting your practice’s credibility. If shared on the right platforms, so many prospective patients will see these kinds of reviews. From there, these patients can be directed to your dental website where they can learn even more about your services and be more convinced about your work.
4. Gather Feedback
The marketing benefits of reviews are essential, and they should be enough for you to consider prioritizing them. But beyond those benefits, your patients’ reviews can help you improve as a dentist or be better as a dental team.
In the same way that you have some disgruntled patients, you will receive a negative review now and then. And sometimes, such reviews can be just what you need to make important changes that’ll benefit your business. But it’s not just negative reviews that can be helpful. Positive reviews are also great because they help you understand what you’re doing well and how you should keep doing it to attract more patients.
More so, reviews—negative or positive—allow you to hear from the horse’s mouth to understand what your patients’ pain points are and how they genuinely feel about your dental practice. Sometimes, with online reviews, you can discover sentiments and ideas that patients may not have otherwise revealed to you in person or face to face. Whatever you do, be sure to take all reviews into account, draw insights from them and take actions to improve your practice.
10 Ways to Ask for Dental Patient Reviews
Hopefully, by now, you understand how your dental patient reviews can be beneficial to you, your dental practice, and your team. If you want more awareness, patient leads, credibility and feedback, you can get that with a steady stream of patients reviews. So, how can you go about asking patients for their reviews?
Let’s explore ten unique ways to ask for dental patient reviews.
- Ask While Patients Are Still In the Office
The best time to make a request to someone is when you have their attention. And if that someone is a patient, then the best time is when they are in your office or at your dental practice.
If a patient stops by to book or have an appointment or even just to say hi—if that ever happens—you should use that opportunity to make your request. When they are in that environment, patients will find it easier to conceptualize their thoughts and opinions about you and your practice.
- Ask via Post-Appointment Surveys
Post-appointment surveys are also known as patient satisfaction surveys. It’s a good idea to share surveys with patients right after an appointment or interaction with you or your team. In this survey, you can explicitly ask for reviews or feedback, or you ask questions that can help you piece together your patients’ thoughts and opinions about your practice.
For ideas on how to write a post-appointment survey, check out the dental manual clinic’s patient satisfaction survey.
- Ask via Targeted, Personalized Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing campaigns are great for reaching patients right where they are. You can send targeted, personalized emails to your patients to encourage them to leave a review online. You can do this right after an appointment in a follow-up email or as part of a regular newsletter.
Regardless of how you choose to send your review request in an email, make sure that you use a suggestive tone and let patients know how reviews can be helpful to your relationship with them.
For example, you could write, “Your feedback is important to us and helps us serve you better. We would love to hear your thoughts on your recent appointment. Please share your review here.” — and then point them to a dental review website.
- Ask via Text Messages
Much like emails, text messages reach patients through a channel that they are very familiar with and often use—their mobile devices. If you’re going to use this route, you should do so right after an appointment. Patients are more likely to act on your text messages right after an appointment than at any other time.
- Ask on Social Media
If you’re currently using social media to connect with your patients or share images and updates, then there’s no reason you can’t ask them for reviews on those platforms. Again, you should point them to websites outside of social media to leave their reviews. If you’re just starting out with social media, you should spend some time growing your audience and followership before asking for reviews.
- Ask on your Dental Practice’s Website
Similar to the way you ask patients for reviews when they are in your physical office or location, you should ask them for reviews when they visit your dental practice’s website. There should be a section on your homepage that does this. It’s best for this request to be placed on a page that’s visitors will likely see, hence why we suggest adding it to your homepage. Also, preferably, you should include a couple of reviews by your current patients, and then right below those reviews, you can ask visitors to share their reviews too.
- Ask via Direct Mail
We talk a lot about digital tools for dental marketing, communication, and business development, but many traditional tools still give dentists good results. Direct mail is one of them, and it is handy, primarily if your clientele consists of people in older generations.
But even if you have younger patients, you should consider sending them mail once in a while. Sometimes, the feeling of holding a message from someone else beats the experience of just reading it off a screen. It can make your dental communication seem more personal and meaningful. So, give it a try.
- Ask Patients to Share their thoughts on Dental Review Sites
We’ve mentioned dental review sites a bit in this article, but it’s worth emphasizing. If you’re asking for online reviews, you should encourage patients to share them on platforms like Google My Business, ZocDoc, Yelp, Healthgrades, etc. These sites have a better domain authority (i.e., online credibility) and are great for visibility and referrals.
- Ask Thoughtfully
Everything you know, or have been taught, about bedside manners should still apply when you’re asking patients for reviews. You don’t have to ask every patient for reviews. Some patients’ health conditions may be too grave, and it might seem selfish for you to ask them for personal or business favors while they are nursing a challenging issue.
More so, do not overwhelm patients with requests. Ask a couple of times over a reasonable period. And if you’re giving incentives for patients, essential dental services should never be part of those incentives.
- Ask using Connect the Doc
Finally, you are likely better off getting a tool to do all this work for you and do it the right way.
So, if you want to automate the asking process and get patients to share their reviews on top dental reviews sites automatically, you can use Connect the Doc reviews tool to do that. This tool ensures nothing slips through the cracks in your patient review generation process and boosts your chances of getting the right reviews from the right patients.
There’s always more you can learn about yourself, work, team, practice, and patients. Reviews can lead you on a path to discovery and improvement. But if you’re finding it challenging to get the reviews you need, draw insights from them or take the right actions on them, you should speak to one of Connect the Doc’s dental marketing specialists today.
Interested in working with us?
See firsthand how Connect the Doc can fill your pipeline with new patients.
