Dr Paul Cardon

Seven years ago my office was averaging a shade over 17 new patients a month without any marketing other than the phone directory and $300/month in pay per click online ads. The problem was, we were losing 19 patients a month after I opted out of the provider network for the plan covering our largest group of insured patients.

I began studying marketing and experimenting with direct mail and writing my own copy. We started with a sequence of long form sales letters and a rented list. It was exciting to find what kind of results we could achieve, but it was pretty time consuming. I was starting from scratch and learning from my own mistakes, and it was obvious that developing consistently productive marketing would require a lot of work for many years to come. On top of that, I started to work on a regular newsletter from my office to our patients that added to the workload.

After a over a year of creating content on my own, I found Jerry Jones Direct. I was ready to hire out my direct mail and newsletter work, but I wanted to work with someone who had a proven track record of applying direct response marketing principles. I could tell Jerry’s body of work was grounded in proven direct response tactics, and he already had years of experience putting those tactics to use in his dental practice. He was way farther down the road I was in the early stages of traveling and knew what it would take me many years to learn if I was persistent.

We used to average 15 to 20 new patients a month before working with Jerry’s team of talented people. After the first marketing piece they did for us, we got over 45 new patients and realized we needed to expand our capacity quickly. We went from 4 days a week of hygiene to our current 8 days a week as we continued to fill our schedule and put “butts in ops.” Even with the closure of our hygiene section for 2 and a half months since last March, we still averaged 33 new patients a month during the past 12 months.

With our monthly newsletter, now in our 6th year of publishing, we try to maintain top-of-mind awareness of and loyalty to our brand with our active patient base. There’s no point paying to attract new patients unless we retain more than we lose, and the newsletter has proven a great patient retention tool for us. Jerry’s team does a great job producing our newsletter with as much or as little input from us as we care to provide. Every month like clockwork they reach out to me for input and incorporate it into the newsletter. Every week I hear from patients who’ve read the newsletter, and every month we get some new patients referred by current patients—the best source of any we’d hope for.

It’s easy for me to calculate the return on my marketing investment with the tracking of inbound calls to our office that Jerry’s team provides, so there’s no mystery about ROI. Our results have given me the confidence that we can be as busy at work as we want to be with the ability to generate demand for services almost at will through our marketing with Jerry Jones Direct.