Goodbye DIY: Here’s Why You Should Use a Software Platform to Support Your Membership Plan

So, you’ve made the big decision. You are going to establish a dental membership plan for your practice. Go you! Or, perhaps you’ve had one for a little while. But now, you're finding it overwhelming to keep up with or aren’t seeing the return you’d hoped. Either way, we’ve got a suggestion for you.

You might think that managing your membership plan in-house (even if that means hiring a new office team member) makes the most sense. We’ve got four big reasons why a third-party software platform to support your membership plan is the smarter move.

1. You Can Get Started Faster With a Software Platform

This one is clearly for those who haven’t already established a dental membership plan. If that is the case for you, consider everything on the mental list you’ve been writing since you decided to go for it.

As a dentist, you already have a ton on your plate. You’re focused on patient care, finances, marketing and development, managing your team, and the 273 other things you need to be concerned with when running a practice.

That probably means that you’ll have to tackle the process of establishing a membership program one small step at a time, here and there. It will look like this: After you’ve made the decision, you hold a meeting to explain it to your team. You tell them you’re going to work with someone on the office team to outline a process for signing patients up. But then, the appointment book is pretty full, that team member takes a little PTO, and before you know it, it’s been another few weeks. In all likelihood, this will happen over and over, and it will be months or maybe even a year before your dental membership plan takes off.

Not to mention, the process for signing patients up is far from your only concern.

You’ll need to determine the precise details of the plans you’re going to offer, outline these in official documents, and translate them into marketing materials that must be produced from scratch. Before you can do that latter part, you’ll have to decide exactly how you want to market your dental membership plans. You need to know how you’ll keep track of which patients are signed up and which aren’t, and how you’ll communicate exclusively to the subscribed patients when something pertains only to them. You need to know how you’re going to track and confirm renewals. The list goes on and on.

There is nothing wrong with taking things slow and steady, especially given how much else you, as a dentist, are responsible for. But the entire time you were working on launch, you could have been growing your plan (and making more money).

Here at DentalHQ, we can get your practice’s dental membership plan up and running in 8 minutes. Yes, we’re serious. You’ll be able to start signing up patients, building up your membership plan, and leveling up your practice pronto!

You can schedule a demo to see how that works, but let’s move into our next reason you should use a third-party software platform to help run your membership program.

2. Managing Your Membership Plan with a Third-Party Software Platform Will Be Easier for Your Team

Another hurdle you could run into when planning the launch of your membership plan program is resistance from your team. They want the practice to grow and thrive just as much as you do, but they also know that the new plan you’re so excited about will result in more work for them.

We recommend outlining how the reduced need to deal with insurance companies will actually save them time and stress for every patient that signs up with the dental membership plan. The gist of your argument: It might be extra work up front but will make everything simpler later. (For more on the team training topic, read this blog post.)

But you could also assure your team (and honestly, yourself) by enlisting some expert help. From member sign-up to payment processing, a platform like DentalHQ will make setting up and managing your plan a breeze. Don’t worry, you’re still setting the fees. But we can help you with everything else. Not to mention, our platform keeps your members organized in a system and even enables you to send mass emails to them. Time … saved!

3. A Membership Plan Software Platform Will Make You More Money

While it might not seem entirely obvious at first, enlisting the help of a third-party software platform will actually make you more money. Here’s why:

When you establish a shiny new feature like dental membership plans, your success will depend somewhat on momentum. You want to release the details, announce it on your website, and get patients signed up right away. The marketing related to it should be immediate and feel connected to the launch.

Applying a somewhat speedy pace to each step in the process is important because it keeps everything feeling relevant and consistent. If you create a concept for dental membership plans with your team, but then everyone gets busy and you don’t actually build out the marketing for another month, some of the ideas and excitement driving your approach have now been forgotten. Momentum matters.

When you work with a third-party software platform, the process is made quicker—and therefore easier—in myriad ways. Patients are implemented quickly into a system, marketing materials are produced and organized in a user-friendly platform. It saves you and your team time, and that makes the whole launch and subsequent operation smoother.

Now you have more bandwidth to do great dentistry and talk up your cool new plan.

All of this is likely to result in a greater number of sign-ups at launch than you might otherwise have seen, and that is a successful dental membership plan.

4. Your Focus Can Be Where It Should

Our mantra around here is, “We take care of the plan; you take care of the patients.” We are the experts at marketing and managing dental membership plans. We know the ins and outs of this one particular thing very well. That means we are equipped to make the process of establishing and managing a membership plan easier for you. And that means that you will have more time to devote to the reason you got into the profession in the first place: bettering people’s lives by improving their oral health.

If you’d like to learn more about how we can help, reach out to speak with our Client Success Team at hq@dentalhq.com.

But before you do, let’s recap.

Why should you use a third-party software platform to help run your membership plan program?

1. You Can Get Started Faster With a Software Platform
2. Managing Your Plan with a Third-Party Software Platform Will Be Easier for Your Team
3. You’ll Make More Money
4. Your Focus Can Be Where It Should

Yea … that sounds pretty great to us!

And if all of this talk about making the experience of running a membership plan has got you pondering just how the program creates a better experience for your patients, we’ve got some content on that too: How Dental Membership Plans Create a Better Patient Experience