The primary concern of any elective medicine practice is "filling the funnel" - or getting the right number of calls to equate to the right number of appointments - for the right number of procedures each month.  While watching the success behind buying groups like Groupon and Living Social, we speculated that we could use the popularity of those programs to drive new patients more inexpensively than we could drive new patients with advertising dollars. With the average  elective new patient acquisition cost coming in at around $275, giving away services instead of spending dollars made some sense.  We selected a low cost laser procedure that could be sold on a loss-leader basis with a very low entry cost of $99 for 6 sessions. While we would only collect about $60 on the sale after the buying group took their cut, we would have the opportunity to "sell other services" during the 6 visits. The program added several thousand new patients into our funnel, and equated sum total almost $1,000,000 in revenue during the first year.

One of our clients had transitioned their practice to provide a new service. While the practice had long been estlabished, we decided to focus on growing a healthy referral base into a machine like system. By implementing a guerrilla style marketing approach to garner referrals, we were able to increase the number of referrals by 400% in the first 3 months. The 4-prong approach included 1)introductions, 2)acknowledgements, 3)reinforcements and 4)communications. Over the following years, the number of referrals grew to a point of contributing almost 50% of the monthly new patients, thereby reducing advertising costs while increasing market share.