9 Ways to Earn Your Patient’s Lifetime Value

I retract a previous post: building a subscriber list isn’t the foremost marketing tactic for growing an integrative medicine practice or brand. Unequivocally, that distinction belongs to securing customer loyalty, in turn, driving patient lifetime value.

According to Wikipedia, customer lifetime value—what we’ll refer to as patient lifetime value (PLV)—predicts net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer. Though extraordinarily important, it’s often overlooked by most integrative and functional medicine practices.

Acquisition vs. Retention for Lifetime Value

Fact: acquiring a new patient costs more than retaining one. However, greater emphasis, energy and resources are regularly placed on the former. Businesses collect and measure analytics to attract and land new customers; they develop smart frameworks for evaluating their return on marketing and promotion investments. Regrettably, most integrative and functional medicine practices fail to identify nevertheless weigh this important lead acquisition to sale conversion metric.

Let’s take a closer look at the even-more critical retention side: keeping current customers to build your patient panel organically over-time to maximize PLV.

The Lifeblood: Word-of-Mouth Referrals for Lifetime Value

Consider that quite a few in-demand, successful l integrative, functional and lifestyle medicine clinics don’t spend a dime on marketing and advertising to secure new patients. Seriously, they don’t need to! Their secret: stellar reputations fostering staunch customer loyalty generating invaluable referrals. They developed and maximized PLV over time!

Family, friend and social media recommendations were cited by 84 percent of responders as most influential and trustworthy, according to a 2013 Nielsen survey.

Here’s the key:

Satisfied Patients + Loyalty = Retention = Word-of-Mouth Referrals = Earned Patient Lifetime Value.

How exactly do we create PLV with loyal customers evangelizing our brand and generating precious word-of-mouth referrals?

Make sure your staff understands and consistently reinforces these often common sense yet fundamentally key tenets!

Click Here to Read all 9 Ways to Develop Lifetime Values with your Patients

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About Glenn Sabin and FON / Glenn is director of FON Consulting, a leading strategy and business development consultancy specializing in the integrative health and medicine sector. FON’s clients span from medical practices, hospitals and health systems, to nutraceutical, pharmaceutical, and media companies. Glenn brings economic and moral clarity to the misnomer that health creation and promotion cannot align with profitability.

Prior to launching FON in 2009, Glenn was the CEO of JazzTimes, Inc., an entertainment-based media and marketing agency headquartered in the Washington, DC metro area.  After a 25 year tenure, and achieving exponential revenue growth, Glenn exited JazzTimes, Inc. to launch FON.

The shift from entertainment media to integrative health. In 1991, Glenn Sabin was a 28-year-old newlywed diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), an incurable cancer. He created his own medically monitored and carefully researched lifestyle changes, including a whole foods predominantly plant-based diet. Glenn would conduct his own, informal, single patient clinical trial, which was chronicled by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and his personal oncologist Lee Nadler, MD, dean for clinical and translational medicine at Harvard Medical School. Glenn achieved a complete remission from CLL without conventional cancer treatment. His case is part of the medical literature.

Glenn is participating in, and advising Harvard’s Bioinformatics Department on its People-Powered Medicine NEER Study, an initiative investigating exceptional responders. He was the recipient of American College of Nutrition’s 2017 Communications and Media Award. In 2017 Glenn published his popular memoir, n of 1: One Man’s Harvard-Documented Remission of Incurable Cancer Using Only Natural Methods. www.fonconsulting.com, www.glennsabin.com