The 1 Simple Strategy That Will Keep Your Patients From Going Across the Street

Andrea (00:04):
Well, hi there. I am Andrea Watkins, and if you're listening to this while juggling three patient calls, checking in a couple patients, taking a payment, selling skincare, and trying to catch your doctor in between procedures, you might be working in an aesthetic practice.

Blake (00:18):
And I'm Blake Lucus, and this is PracticeLand. This is not your doctor's podcast. Hey, everyone, and welcome back to PracticeLand. We're so glad you're here. Today, I am joined with Clark Cave, who's the founder of Model Rewards. Clark really stumbled backwards into solving a unique problem in aesthetics. But let's hear straight from you, Clark. Tell us maybe a little bit about yourself and your background.

Clark (00:45):
My name's Clark Cave. I'm a North Carolina native Go Panthers. No one says that. I'm a former Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Army. My background is in practice administration primarily. I've worked in everything from clinics in Germany to level one trauma centers in Texas, and stumbled into this through telemedicine, in fact.

Blake (01:14):
Wow.That has got to be one of the more interesting, I think, backstories that we've had for our guests on the show. So Clark, thank you so much for joining us. I can't wait to get into our discussion today. Also, of course, we have Eva Sheie here who's been with us a few times. Always a pleasure to have you on the show, Eva. Give us a quick introduction of yourself if there's a first time listener out there.

Eva (01:38):
Thank you. I am Eva Sheie. I am the founder and CEO of The Axis, and we make podcasts that help practices change behavior. And on this podcast, PracticeLand, we are here to help you change your patient's behavior for the better to reach your business goals. So all of that fits nicely together with what we're going to talk about today, which is how to use loyalty programs, which covers the second base that I love, which is spending less and doing more with the marketing that you do for the practice and reducing the burden for the staff on things that take a lot of time and make their lives hard.

Blake (02:17):
Fantastic. Well, we got a great topic today just talking about loyalty programs and how we can continue to drive word of mouth referrals. I think those are everyone's favorite. So I think we'll just dive right into some of these questions here.

Eva (02:30):
What's your favorite loyalty program, Blake?

Blake (02:32):
Oh, my favorite loyalty program is kind of a mix. I think it's probably between my Costco membership, which I love the cashback rewards that I get from that because I spend way too much money at Costco. Kirkland Gang Gang for those that are out there. And then the other one would probably be my venture card with Capital One.

Eva (02:56):
What's in your wallet?

Blake (02:58):
Yeah. Oh my gosh. But it has helped pay for a couple of trips with the family. We did a Disney cruise last year and I was able to redeem a ton of my points to make that a little bit less burdensome on the wallet. But yeah, it's-

Eva (03:15):
Impressive.

Blake (03:16):
Yeah, so that definitely helped. But those would probably be my two favorite.

Eva (03:21):
What's yours, Clark?

Clark (03:22):
Well, for me personally, Amex is definitely my top favorite. So I have one of the Amex Platinum rewards accounts, and I think probably the greatest perk is getting access to airport lounges if you're a member of that card. So I think everyone ... There might be too many people with Amex Platinums, but you still, if you get to Hartsfield Airport or whatever, it's an awesome experience. It's almost like, you know what? Let the regular people sit out and go to the restaurant, go to-

Blake (03:56):
There is something about that. Absolutely. I love that airport lounge. I used to travel a lot for work doing the sales gig. So I've done that many a times. And that was the greatest secret that my boss let me in on was, "You got to sign up for this. " Absolutely worth the cost of emission for that. I can't go back now.

Clark (04:18):
Seriously.

Blake (04:19):
Hold on a second, because you're not a fancy person, Clark, and I know this because I know you. Wasn't your Amex Platinum a perk from another? Isn't it sort of a meta perk that you have that perk in the first place?

Clark (04:34):
What do you mean?

Eva (04:35):
Well, didn't someone give you the Platinum card without you having to pay the giant fee?

Clark (04:40):
Being in the military, yeah. Anyone in the military is able to get the free platinum card. So it's an awesome perk. So basically everything's free.

Eva (04:47):
Stay in the military for 25 years and you get a free American Express card.

Clark (04:54):
But here's the ... I mean, they get you in, but they'll still get you with, what is it? 22% interest rates.

Blake (05:02):
Yeah, brutal, brutal. But I do feel you on that. They're starting to get a little crowded. I feel like there's more and more people. But what's crazy is the cost for that card is so high, but more people are signing up for it every day. What are some other examples? Eva, do you have one that's your favorite?

Eva (05:19):
Oh, I'm Nordstrom for life. Nordstrom is my ride or die. And since I have started thinking about loyalty programs, have noticed much more of my own behavior around why it works. And so if I find a pair of shoes somewhere else that I like, I'll go to Nordstrom and look it up to make sure that they don't have it. And if they do, then I'll buy it from Nordstrom instead. So it prevents me from spending money anywhere but Nordstrom. And I even make sure that I use my Nordstrom credit card when I go there for lunch because I got to get my points.

Blake (05:54):
Yeah, absolutely.

Eva (05:55):
And I buy all my makeup from Nordstrom and I wait for the ... There's a Triple Points event right now on beauty. So I stuck up on all my stuff that I'm almost out of when the Triple Points ... It just goes on and on and on and on.

Blake (06:08):
Yeah. When we think about these loyalty programs, and we all love them, and I think there's so many different points programs that are out there, so many airlines have them, so many credit cards have them. Why do you think these massive companies invest so much in these types of programs?

Clark (06:23):
First off, the example that I like to give, if we were to just take it back to the regular med spa example, if you have two med spas and they have identical outcomes and they're identical in every way, the services, the infrastructure, everything is completely identical, but one has a loyalty program and the other doesn't have a loyalty program. Which one wins over the course of five years?

Blake (06:48):
Oh, it's got to be the loyalty program.

Clark (06:49):
It's obviously, it's intuitive. So if you have two major companies, massive companies competing against one another, if you have two airlines competing against one another, and one of them starts a loyalty program, the other one obviously has to start a loyalty program because the gamification of the entire loyalty system and the incentive for customers to continue to feed into it is there's a secret sauce that's obviously been researched in psychology. And if you look across loyalty literature, it's pretty crazy because even what pans out in our own data is just, it's nuts how effective retention programs are or like loyalty programs are. But you can, I guess in a sentence, a competitor with a loyalty program is always going to win. So that's why they're so ubiquitous because if a gas station or if a sandwich shop or if a Nordstrom or a department store starts a loyalty program, everyone has to also create a loyalty program.

Blake (08:00):
Yeah, right. Everything points to that it works. I think the interesting thing, as you're talking about that, I'm thinking about conversations I've had with different medical practices like the owners or either marketing teams, and probably a lot of people listening right now, their practices spend so much money on patient acquisition, just bringing in new patients, but we all know how important loyalty is and getting patients to come back. And so how do you do both? Or what advice do we give those practice owners that are spending so much of, or almost all of their marketing dollars on getting a patient in the door and not spending anything on retaining them?

Eva (08:42):
We talk about this so much.

Clark (08:44):
Yeah. There's a lot of, I don't know if it's negativity or misunderstanding inside of the market, but we call what we do loyalty marketing. So we like to define direct marketing and loyalty marketing where we say direct marketing is that sales pipeline or that sales funnel to get a new patient in the door. And that's an absolutely vital requirement for any practice, but once the patient is in the door, how do you keep them there? And that's what we call loyalty marketing. So loyalty marketing, at least our three pillars in loyalty marketing or retention, word of mouth referrals and complimentary sales or basically influencing patients to buy other things within the practice and use other services within the practice. So essentially having those definitions in place, that's something that I don't see has really been there, but also understanding what key performance indicators a practice really has to focus on whether ... So new patients, that is absolutely important, but retention over time is even more important.

Eva (09:53):
I know you've both heard this from me before. Do you remember my story about when I took a slide of the marketing funnel and I put it in front of 12 plastic surgeons in one day. The job I had at that time was to do a mini presentation for 12 different surgeons, one at a time. And so I made this little deck, it was really to talk about podcasting, but the first slide was the marketing funnel. And I just asked them, "Have you ever seen this before?" And like 11 out of 12 said, no, I have no idea what this is. Had never seen a marketing funnel. So I think before we even scratch the surface of what loyalty marketing is and why it's important, you have to understand where most of them are coming from is they're not thinking about marketing in segments. They're just thinking about marketing as marketing is like one big thing you do and you call the marketing people and you say, "I don't have enough patients." And so if the person on the other end of the phone of the marketing company is only selling what is the old adage, if you only have a hammer, everything's a nail.

(11:09):
If the person you're talking to about marketing doesn't have a good fundamental understanding of how patient marketing gets done well across every stage of the funnel, then you're not going to get an answer that includes loyalty marketing.

Blake (11:22):
So when we're thinking about how we address retention or loyalty, what are some things maybe that you've seen that practices have been doing in the past? Are they literally sending out little paper thank you cards or what do practices do to try to hold onto patients?

Eva (11:40):
I think even that practice of calling the patient, the doctor calling the patient at night on the day of surgery, to me that falls into that loyalty because I think this is patient experience. You put loyalty in the patient experience space. And I have been wanting to ask you all week, Blake, you worked for Apple forever, which is really, I think, the pinnacle of the customer experience in the world. Steve Jobs was obsessed with experience, right?

Blake (12:10):
Yeah. Oh my gosh, absolutely.

Eva (12:12):
What did you learn from working at Apple around loyalty? Did they do anything to keep people?

Blake (12:19):
Well, obviously the product itself is a very sticky product and you can talk about the halo effect of iPhone and iPod and all those things back then. Focusing specifically on the stores as a product, I think it was drilled into us to provide a level of experience that you only get at certain places. And they brought in trainers from training curriculum from the Ritz-Carlton, for instance. And I think they give them some crazy budget to take care of guests in any situation. They're cleared, I think, up to two grand to take care of any type of request and make the experience above and beyond. But the famous example is when if you walk up and ask the janitor or question someone who's vacuuming the hall like, "Hey, how do I get to the pool or something?" They will physically stop what they're doing, take you to that.

(13:09):
And just the experience of that versus just saying, "Oh yeah, just down there, turn left and then you're good." And then going back to whatever you're doing is those little things. And so I think what we did in the stores was we spent so much time trying to understand who we were talking to and what was important to them and what it was they wanted to use this product for. And then position the specific things that this machine could do, which obviously you can do a million different things, sky's the limit type of thing, but then focusing specifically on, you said this, and if I understand that correctly, this is really going to have an amazing impact on your life and your day to day and make things like this huge positive experience and directly correlating that. And so there was a lot of training on just how to properly ask questions and how to properly listen, like the active listening and then verifying what I heard is what you said and all those types of things. So I can talk about that for hours and we can go on a long candidate, but-

Eva (14:08):
How could you pull that through then to the way your PatientFi team helps practices with PatientFi?

Blake (14:15):
Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I think one of the most important relationships we have at PatientFi, obviously we value every borrower and every patient relationship that we have that we're working with and we hold that in the highest esteem. But I think too, the relationship that we have with our providers is special. I think we were born out of medical practices. Many of us came from that space. A lot of our founders were in that space or worked very closely. Our board of directors are all coming from that as well. So I think our marketing team I think has done an amazing job of building out rewards program, like a rewards program, our loyalty program and perks and a lot of amazing things to keep the practice on board and want to use us. And I think they absolutely love it. So whether it's the easiest thing is like team lunches and things like that and earning that.

(15:05):
But then there's, I know that we've given away Birkenbags and all kinds of amazing gifts and things like that. Yeah, Louis Vuitton was on there a couple of times. So there's some high ticket items there as well. And then there's always something at the end of the year, like a holiday program that we do that is always very exciting and practices love it. And so there's stuff for the staff, but then then there's also things for the owner. And I think there's a distinction there too that we've made. So these programs aren't just for one or the other. I think a lot of times these loyalty programs lean towards maybe the owner so much. And this is not your doctor's podcast. So I'll say that the perks for the staff are there as well. And I think they do an amazing job making sure that the staff are thanked because they're really, it's the coordinators and the practice managers that are talking about PatientFi, making sure that they are getting the love is super important for us.

(15:59):
And anytime you sign up for PatientFi, you're immediately entered into our premier partners program and just by using us, you're going to start to see perks coming back. So I think kudos to our marketing team. They've done an amazing job building that out. Clark, we're talking about these loyalty programs. What are some challenges that you're seeing as you've experienced working with these medical providers that are trying to get these going?

Clark (16:26):
I think the biggest challenge is not really fully appreciating the role of loyalty in a practice and the role of loyalty to develop, to use some military parlance to understand your strategy and tactics. So if your strategy over the course of, let's say the next year or the next five years is to grow your practice and expand your practice, not having an understanding of the key performance indicator retention and not having a basically steady retention in place makes it really, really hard to plan for anything, especially if you're just trying to get new patients in the door and that's your metric of success, you can't really forecast into the future. So what a loyalty program really does, it gives you a medium and it gives you a tool to stabilize your retention rate and then say, let's say, I want to increase retention by 5% over the next year, it gives you the ability to deploy tactics to increase that retention rate, to get people to come back.

(17:34):
And probably the most effective thing you can do, and you don't need a tool to do this necessarily, it's just very hard to do it manually, but giving patients points, points, they may seem they're kind of ubiquitous and it's just whatever, "Hey, let's give points." But there's something very, very beautiful that takes place when you give patients points. And this is kind of wild because there's a ton of psychology behind this, but if you've ever heard of the term prospect theory, it's the theory that if you losing something, you have a far closer emotional tie to losing something than to gaining something of equal value. So it's twice as emotional to lose, let's say, $10 than it is to gain $10. So there's this beautiful thing that can take place. When you give a patient points, so with our program, for instance, you sign up for our loyalty program and immediately you'll have 10 or 25 points, which are equal to $10 or $25 in practice credit.

(18:39):
So now you have this thing where you've just kind of invented it out of thin air, but the patient has something to lose at your practice now. So that's one of the tactics, but it's very highly effective tactic, but these are small tactics you can deploy in the overall strategy to retain patients over time. And I have to throw this out there. Did you ever watch The Office?

Blake (19:04):
Oh, absolutely.

Clark (19:05):
Okay. Do you remember when the temp was quizzing Michael Scott on business questions? I think it was during the fire episode where they lit the bagel on fire.

Blake (19:17):
Oh yeah.

Clark (19:18):
So he's out there, he's like, "Ask me any question." And the temp says, "Is it cheaper to get a new client or to keep an existing client?" And Michael Scott says, "It's the same. They're equal." He says, "It is 10 times more expensive to sign a new client than to keep an existing client."

Blake (19:34):
That's so true. That's awesome. Yeah.

Eva (19:39):
How do you measure the retention rate in a typical practice? What numbers are you going to look at if you're trying to do that?

Clark (19:48):
Personally, I look at retention over one, two, and three years. So when you look back in time, you see how many, and an appointment is N plus one. So if a patient comes in one time and then they don't return, that affects the numerator and then the patients that continue to return. So three is the magic number for us. According to a study of a major toxin industry, if you can get a patient in three times, you have a much higher likelihood of keeping them for life, but measuring how many patients have only come in one time or how many patients have only come in two times. It is a little bit complex.

Eva (20:28):
But you can't measure the thing that I like to complain about, which is I've been going to the same practice for 11 years and I'm acutely aware that they never say thank you and they don't care if I stay or go, or at least that's my impression because there's never been a single signal to me as a patient that they want me to return. They don't even ask me if I want to schedule my next appointment. They do zero to try to bring me back. And so if I met an injector on the street today and she showed me 15 before and after photos, I'd be like, "Sign me up. I'm gone." That's how vulnerable I am to switching. So what would prevent me from switching in a practice or in an example like the one I just gave you?

Clark (21:18):
Nothing, especially if you're earning toxin points and you have multiple different toxin service points and you can take those elsewhere. And then I can even tell you something, I know you live in Austin, so if you had a best friend that was going to another practice and they said, "You should come to my practice and I'll get points if you refer me to your practice." There's almost nothing that would keep you at that practice.

Eva (21:48):
Well, now I'm trying to figure out if I know somebody who ...

Blake (21:51):
Yeah. Immediately thinking like, "Oh yeah, that's a great idea. I should do that."

Clark (21:55):
Exactly.

Eva (21:57):
I'm very motivated to wwitch right now.

Blake (21:59):
Mentally, you're already gone.

Clark (22:01):
So also, I'll circle back what points do. The other beautiful thing points do is create a switching cost, and that's what Eva's referring to. So not only with the prospect theory, the fear of losing those points and then the fear of going and getting those services elsewhere and not collecting points on top of those points, that's the switching barrier. That is the switching cost where I'm going to lose this money if I don't go back and spend it. And yeah, I mean, Eva has a great example about REI and she's had it ... Do you want to give that example?

Eva (22:41):
Sure. Yeah. I think I became an REI co-op member in 1990, and it's 2026. And I know in the back of my mind that I have $72 in points and I don't have anything to buy, but I go to REI website at least twice a year like, "What can I get? " And it's just sitting there like an open loop that I cannot close until I figure out what to do with those points.

Blake (23:12):
Yeah, absolutely. I think about that all the time too, just about the different points programs, especially if they expire. If I get an email saying, "Hey, your points are about to expire," I'm immediately going to that site to try to figure out, okay, how do I spend my points?

Eva (23:25):
Don't want to lose your $12 or your $4.30 or whatever it is.

Blake (23:30):
Absolutely. And even with airlines points, I'm always kind of like, "Hey, I got so many 20,000, 100,000 points with these guys. Where can I go? " And I start planning out a trip in my mind. How can I redeem these and what's a cool spot? And then ultimately that leads to, "Oh, well, I don't have enough, but I could buy a couple more or I could cash that in and they do points and cash now and all that. " So I literally start planning it all out and then before I know it, plan the next vacation just because I was like, "Oh, I had 25,000 points with Southwest or whoever it was. " And that's how they get you. It's like, oh my gosh, how sticky is that for a consumer?

Clark (24:10):
Blake, you just nailed it and you hit it. It's such an interesting thing. I always like to compare it to, you ever go to Arcades where you get a bunch of tickets and then you see all the things that you can get now that you have all these tickets. And so loyalty programs, they create this gamification. And if you start, "Hey, I've collected a bunch of points and then I have these discounts off future services." But what really happens, and this is the literature and our data especially, it irons us out. If you're saving something, you're going to spend now even more, especially in aesthetic industries, just like you said, yeah, you're going to fly, you're going to get this saving on this ticket, but you're also going to spend more money overall maybe on that trip or in the hotel and ...

Blake (25:07):
Absolutely. Or pay for upgrades or whatever it may be.

Clark (25:11):
Exactly.

Blake (25:11):
There's some other perk. It's like, "Well, I saved on the ticket. I might as well get the nicer seat."

Clark (25:15):
It's basically free now, right?

Blake (25:17):
Yeah, it's free now. It's like, "Oh, my ticket only really only costs $70 for that extra leg room," or whatever it is they get you on. So the things that you've called out, the three is the magic number, it immediately made me think about how true that is, not just in aesthetics, but any industry. I think there's so many industries that use that same concept, I think of even just hospitality or restaurants. There's some crazy statistic, if you go to a restaurant three times and have a good experience, you're one, a customer for life, and then how many referrals that you're going to bring in as well. And so you're shooting for that third visit. So it's like, how do I get that person to the third visit? How do you get them happy through each one of those and incentivize them to keep coming back? And then now this is going to be one of those patients that's going to stick around for a really long time.

Clark (26:08):
And you also bring up an additional point, which I think is super fascinating. We do model the idea, it is loyalty marketing, but what we call, we model patient behavior. We model it the way we want to see it. And you can use this a tool, a loyalty tool to model the patient behavior, but also knowing that these are your KPIs, especially among the staff, it also models staff behavior because these are the results that you want to achieve. So how does a staff have to behave in order to get the patient to come in three times or in order to be worthy of word of mouth referrals? How can you incentivize or influence patients to do that? And you can't do it if you're not getting good outcomes or not giving good services, obviously.

Blake (26:59):
Yeah, absolutely. And I think too-

Eva (27:01):
This is the whole point of PracticeLand is really, we're trying to help the people who work at the front desk, the coordinators, the administrators and the marketers change their own patient's behavior with systems and with tactics and with strategies instead of constantly putting the burden on the staff member to remember to ask this question every time or to remember to have the patient do this thing and that the teams are so overwhelmed and overburdened with all these things they have to do that they really struggle. I think our hearts on this show are always for making their lives easier.

Blake (27:39):
Yeah. Yeah. Anything you can do to remove that extra step or that extra task or bury it or combine it into whatever flow that you currently have, making it easy.

Eva (27:51):
So we had this, Clark and I had this long discussion this morning about the mechanism of saying thank you. Let me see if I can articulate it right. It's the best practice when somebody leaves a talks appointment to say, "Would you like to book your next appointment?" And I don't know the numbers for how many people always say yes there, but I know we've been hammering the front desk on this behavior change forever. And I have to wonder, and I'm going to try it, is if you said, "Would you like to earn 50 points toward your next appointment?" Would you be more likely to say yes than would you like to schedule your next appointment to come spend money with us and flip that into, "We would like to give you $50 to come back for your next appointment. I have a feeling one is going to work better than the other."

Blake (28:49):
Oh my gosh. Yeah. The conversion rate on that would be insane. I have to imagine give you 50 points if that equals $50. Yeah, sure, absolutely. I'll book that right now.

Eva (29:00):
The same thinking around incentivizing behavior change. We want to incentivize them correctly to come back for their next appointment. How do you think about incentivizing people to refer their friends? Where are referrals, word of mouth referrals happening right now?

Clark (29:18):
I can only speak on our behalf, but what tends to happen, and this is where I think a lot of practices really struggle because it's pretty much standard throughout the industry to do some fifty fifty. Yo tell a friend, they get $50 credit, you get $50 credit if they come in, but this is very, very hard to manage. I've heard of practices, multi-site practices using Google Sheets to try to track these things. And then I've heard other practices say, "Oh yeah, we have a referral program. We give cards away. We give the little cards that they can give their friends." And it's like, okay, I

Eva (30:00):
I've done that. I've made the cards.

Clark (30:04):
Yeah. Yeah, right. But what's the ROI on something like that? So the story I always like to tell because my wife plays Mahjong with her friends and inevitably during one of these Mahjong meetings, I hear her and her girlfriends are very, very loud, but something about aesthetic services comes up. So something about, oh, someone did microneedling or someone tried one of these things out. And then that is what we call the golden moment where the referral should take place. It's all organic and it's super simple. But if you're out at Mahjong, maybe you don't have your purse nearby or maybe you're like, "Oh, wait, I got a card or does my practice have a referral program?" All of these things when there's loud gameplaying, maybe there's drinks, it has to be absolutely super, duper simple. So not having a system in place where you can say, "Here's where I go, use my referral code and I get something and then you can get something." If a practice decides to do that, not having something like that in place, you just have no idea the opportunity cost.

(31:19):
You don't know what you're missing out on. Obviously it's a counterfactual, but how many $22,000 rhinoplasties or $30,000 mommy makeovers were not converted because of referral because someone said, "I'll text you later."

Eva (31:36):
Well, I can tell you that if they remember your name, which at my age, I don't even remember the names that well anymore unless I write them down, but that becomes a branded search. So if you say, "I got my rhinoplasty from this doctor," then your friend, if they remember you, Google's your name, hits your Google ad, which gets tagged to branded, and then your pay-per-click agency takes credit for that where it was really word of mouth. You don't know that that was word of mouth. They might still do both of those things. And in fact, I think they will Google you anyway because they want to prove to themselves, they want to do their own research and find out, yes, my friend did make a good referral and they'll look at everything, your website, your Instagram, your whatever. I don't even want to say TikTok because I'm trying to encourage people not to spend a lot of time there.

Blake (32:32):
Aren't we all?

Eva (32:33):
If you know that that originated with a word of mouth referral and that was trackable by the mechanism clerks talking about, which is just a simple button that sends a text.

Blake (32:44):
Shares it.

Eva (32:45):
Which how many times a day do you do that now? Somebody says, "Oh, I really like that sweater you're wearing." And you're like, "I just got it yesterday. I'll send you a link." I do this constantly and then it's out of my head.

Blake (32:58):
And same thing for me. I know of products and things like that that I've referred to people because I get a $50 credit, pays for my subscription for whatever this thing is. And now it's free for me, which is fantastic. And I've done that a handful of times with ... There's this one program I use for my family finances and brings everything together. I do use Monarch, actually. That's so funny. And yeah, that's the one. I was going to send you guys my referral code here just a second.

Eva (33:25):
Nope, too late.

Blake (33:27):
But yeah, shoot, I got to find somebody else.

Eva (33:31):
We'll put Blake's referral code for Monarch in the show notes.

Blake (33:34):
That'll be the link.

Clark (33:35):
Do it. Put it in the link.

Blake (33:36):
Like and subscribe. It'll be down in the link. Yeah.

Clark (33:40):
I also like to tell ... This is also one of the other intuitive questions I can ask any practice and say, who makes the best patients? And it's always word of mouth referrals because there's just this general, not unearned necessarily, but an embedded trust in a practice that you won't find with a new patient because, "Hey, my friend told me to do this. I've also seen your outcomes and I want those same things." So they tend to make the most loyal patients. So if you can get a referred patient and there's a higher chance of them coming back over time and then they're just better and more fun. And I mean, that's probably what you want for the staff members anyway. If your staff said, yes, our practice is completely word of mouth, then you probably have a pretty happy staff, I would imagine.

Blake (34:30):
Oh my gosh. Yeah, absolutely.

Eva (34:32):
Isn't this the thread you pulled on that's got you started on the whole loyalty app project in the first place, Clark? Yes. Tell us that story.

Clark (34:41):
So I started telemedicine in the Army around 2017. I started telemedicine to the home inside of the Defense Health Agency. So I was the first person to connect doctors and patients virtually. And believe it or not, it was very unpopular at the time. Even my chief of behavioral health was like, "This'll never work." Which is hysterical looking back. She was kind of angry at me. She's like, "No, when I do psychology, when I actually was a psychiatrist, I have to be in the same room with my patient. What could go wrong?" And it's funny how nowadays all behavioral health takes place online. But at the time I was like, "You know what? I want to get out of the military and start a business." So I went to this practice in Northern Virginia and I was like, "Hey guys, what if I could connect you and your patients virtually?" And the doctor's like, "Absolutely not.

(35:37):
No, I already have too much engagement with my patients, but you seem like a cool guy, so why don't you hang out and find some efficiencies or something?" And I was like, "Okay." I knew nothing. I knew less than nothing because I thought I was cool because I started telemedicine. So I went through their patient intake forms because I didn't know what else to do, and that's where I did notice. I said, "It looks like anywhere between seven to eight out of 10 of the patients were referred by the same person named a friend."That gets a laugh like 30%. It's so dumb. A friend. Yeah. And I was like, hold on, this is a huge practice. They have a bustling med spa and they have their own OR and a four surgeon practice. These friends are referring millions of dollars a year in revenue and you're not capturing it.

(36:30):
So if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. So I was like, okay, there's something here and that's basically what launched the ... How do we get more of this and how do we measure more of these word of mouth referrals?

Blake (36:45):
Tell me a little bit about Dark Social. If just to change gears a little bit, what is Dark Social or how would you explain that to someone that has no idea what that is?

Clark (36:54):
So Dark Social, most women I would chat with, I'm not sure about most men. I don't know how much time you spend on social media, Blake, but most women, I'll just use my wife as an example, are members of many, many group chats, whether they're on Facebook, they're on Instagram, even community chats where people in the neighborhood chit chat and they talk about where do you go get your nails? Where do you get your roofing done? What restaurants? Anything under the sun where you have word of mouth recommendations from authentic people. And no matter how many millions of dollars you would want to spend on marketing, you cannot access these locations with marketing dollars. That's why it's called Dark Social. So these are the locations where if someone says, "I would like med spa services or plastic surgery services, does anyone have a recommendation?" The ability to access those and give your practices link along with a word of mouth referral, it's golden because once you hear referrals, you almost generally don't even do your own research in some cases. They're just like, "Hey, if that person's doing it, I'm going to this place." You're like, "Got it. " So this is where Dark Social is, I mean, it is a gold mine if you can access it.

Eva (38:16):
I once referred somebody to my hairdresser in a secret group, and the secret group is so secret that someone else has to vouch for you to get into it. And so somebody in that group was like, "I need a hairdresser that can both do blonde and has a certain political philosophy," because they were so tired of their hairdresser ranting about things they didn't want to talk about or agree with. And that had actually weirdly had just happened to me too. And I broke up with my old hairdresser because she would not keep her mouth shut. And I just wanted to talk about chickens or fashion or something.

Blake (38:53):
Chickens, I love that.

Eva (38:55):
She had chickens. It was very Austin to have chickens. And so the funny part was I was at my hair appointment and my hairdresser said, "See that lady over there? She's the one that came from the secret group." And so I actually knew that it worked because she happened to be there at the same time as me, which was really funny.

Blake (39:16):
Yeah. It's really interesting that how do you tap into these secret groups? How do you get into it where there are people talking about you? That seems like a-

Eva (39:26):
You can't get in rhere as a phony either. You can't go in there and shill because people can tell and they will throw you out.

Blake (39:32):
Yeah. It's got to be organic. It's got to be real. It's got to be valuable.

Eva (39:36):
I read plastic surgery questions and recommendations for Austin constantly because I want to know who people are referring in dark social. And it's never who I think that they're going to refer. It's always just, they're always a little bit out there, the referrals.

Blake (39:55):
Yeah. Interesting.

Eva (39:57):
Which actually tells you something else. If you aren't seeing a ton of marketing from someone from a surgeon or a med spa, the people who advertise a ton, they aren't necessarily the best surgeon, right?

Blake (40:12):
Right. They just are spending the most money.

Eva (40:14):
So often what I see is someone I've never heard of is the referral, and that's because they're quietly in their office for two or three decades doing great work. And over time, that referral base goes like this because they're doing great work. So just to bring it full circle, Blake, you were saying Apple's product stood on its own, and that was most of the reason that people were loyal was the product itself, and that's where it starts.

Blake (40:41):
Yeah, absolutely. Thinking about maybe practices that have tried to do some of these loyalty programs before, and maybe it didn't work. Clark, what would maybe be advice that you might give someone like that?

Clark (40:54):
Loyalty programs are very, very hard. They're very hard to do organically. There's a lot that goes into it. I'll just say designing a loyalty program has been harder than probably one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life, just because there's so many different considerations that you have to take. So it's doable, but if you're a small practice and you're trying to do some of these things manually and you have any turnover in staff or you have multiple sites where you have to get some level of standardization, it's really, really difficult to do. Having a software medium, I mean, I think there's other tools out there, but having a software medium that is able to perform all the functions in a very, very simple way that incentivizes the staff as well, which is the most important thing if you're developing software, by the way. If your managers tell your front desk staff, "Hey, we got a new software."

Blake (42:02):
Oh, great.

Eva (42:03):
Oh, no.

Clark (42:04):
Okay. It's like, let's get the tar and feathers out. So what you do has to also excite the staff. And that's a really, really important thing because if your staff aren't bought in, then it's not going to survive. So-

Eva (42:20):
I would say if it doesn't make their life easier-

Clark (42:23):
If it doesn't make their life easier.

Eva (42:25):
They're out from the get- go, you have no shot. It has to actually remove work, not make work.

Blake (42:30):
Just to add to that, I think that the coordinators, I hear the stories about what really drives them or the passion behind why they do what they do or why they work in these spaces in aesthetic or plastic surgery is to be a part of that journey, to really provide help for their patients. They care deeply about their patients and the experience and getting them to a place where they have stronger self-esteem, they're excited and to see that transformation and be a part of that. And like you kind of mentioned, just you get more out of those repeat patients and if you can keep them coming back and then little by little in the aesthetic space, you see those changes and you see this person become more confident and you were a driving force of that, why not use every tool at your disposal to be able to bring that patient through that process to make sure that your product, the thing that you're providing is what they're able to get and you're having that confidence in your own product, whether it's your surgeon or whatever it is, knowing that they can provide what the patient's looking for is ... I think for a lot of coordinators, it's the reason why they're in this space.

Clark (43:35):
So I love that you mentioned that, especially with the patient experience, because this is also extremely important. When you take into considerate recency bias, so this is their last touchpoint with you. The last touchpoint a patient has inside of your practice is checkout. And if you take into consideration the median salary in the United States, checking out with a thousand dollar bill or a $2,000 bill, it hurts. Most people, they sit there, I've witnessed stories like, "How am I going to tell my husband about this? " Obviously, having patient financing options, those are great, but still this is the last touchpoint you're going to have with the practice. So you're leaving almost with not necessarily the most positive experience. So this is where we like to say, "Yes, you've spent this amount of money, but here's what you're going to get. Here's what we're giving back to you.

(44:34):
We're grateful that you did this. So we're going to give you some more points to book your next appointment, or you're going to earn points on today's services and you're going to earn a bunch of points that you can come back and spend and come to the arcade counter and get your big pencil."

Eva (44:51):
Blake, is this still true that if you use a PatientFi payment plan, that you don't have to start paying until 30 days later?

Blake (44:59):
Yeah. I mean, for our financing program, absolutely. There's no upfront payment that's due today.

Eva (45:04):
So you could stack getting your points for next time with delaying the pain of the payment by a month if you did PatientFi and a loyalty program like Model Rewards together at the same time.

Blake (45:18):
Well, it's a great way to soften that moment where that can be absolutely when you have a $2,000 bill or hire or whatever it is, that could be a little painful for most, I think. What a great way to soften that and keep the patient coming back.

Eva (45:32):
I think the only thing I would add is if you don't have a loyalty program or an official one at any point or at this point and you're thinking about doing this, you have to ask yourself if it works, and I mean functionally, how does it function for my patient? So whatever you end up looking at, try it from the perspective of a patient. And my advice comes from my own experience as a patient where I got invited to one and not the same practice as the one that has never said thank you in 12 years. And I promise I'm not bitter. But another, the one where I have been going for weight loss, they invited me to this app and three years later I still can't get in and it still doesn't work. And one day it even sent me a birthday reward. And when I went to claim the birthday reward, it said, "Sorry, you can't claim this. You're not in the office." Awesome.

Blake (46:37):
Great.

Eva (46:38):
So on the theme of creating good or bad feelings with technology, I would say that one continues to disappoint me over and over and over on behalf of the practice. I recognize it's the app and it's not the practice, but still.

Clark (46:54):
Yeah.

Eva (46:55):
Before we wrap it up, Clark, how do we find you? How can we see what you're working on and take it for a spin ourselves? Will you tell us where to go?

Clark (47:05):
Yeah, Absolutely. So I'm on TikTok. I'm just kidding. I was joking. Yeah, just modelrewards.com. If you do model rewards book a demo, we can set up a demo in no time and show you, walk you through how our loyalty program, if you choose, would work in your practice.

Eva (47:25):
Is a demo with you?

Clark (47:26):
Yes.

Blake (47:27):
Awesome.

Eva (47:28):
Dad jokes included?

Clark (47:31):
I will include the dad jokes, but that's extra. So you'll have to-

Blake (47:34):
Those are special requests. Awesome. Well, Clark, thank you so much for being on the show today. Everyone listening in on PracticeLand, thank you again for joining. Stay fabulous and we'll see you next time. Got a wild customer service story or a sticky patient situation? Send us a message or voicemail. If your tale makes it into our "She did what?" segment, we'll send a thank you gift you'll actually love. Promise, no cheap swag here.

Andrea (48:06):
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