The Value of Dental Membership Programs

When you go to your favorite coffee shop, you pull out your frequent customer card. When you go to the bookstore, you use your discount membership. When you shop at a bulk discount retailer like Costco or Sam’s Club, you take your membership card with you. But what about your dental office? Is the membership club a strategy you could integrate into your practice?

Jordon Comstock joined me for an episode of the Progressive Dentist Podcast to discuss dental memberships and the value they can offer to dental practices. Jordon knows quite a bit about the subject; he is the Founder and CEO of BoomCloud, a software platform that helps dental practices create, organize, automate and manage in-house membership programs to help reduce their dependence on dental insurance. Jordon and his team specialize in helping dental practices create worthwhile and easy-to-maintain memberships.

During our conversation, Jordon shared the many benefits dental practices can receive from offering an in-house membership plan, and he discussed the importance of automation and systems to streamline as many areas of your practice as possible. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Jordon Comstock and find new ideas and strategies that you can implement in your practice.

Being a Member Has Its Rewards

Membership programs like the kind Jordon and the team at BoomCloud specialize in can be very rewarding to a dental practice, on multiple levels. First, offering a membership helps to eliminate the hassle of dealing with insurance. Secondly, membership programs can be a great information tool to help you track and better market to your patients. Third, they help create patient loyalty; if a patient has a membership with your office then it’s much less likely they will move to a different dental practice for their care since they get discounts and services with you that they wouldn’t get at a new practice.

And then there’s the cash flow. By setting up a dental membership and enabling automatic renewals, you are creating the steady, guaranteed incoming cash flow that you can use for many purposes in the growth and operation of your practice. The importance and utility of this cash flow cannot be overstated, as it is a flexible and consistent source of funds.

Setting the Price, and Automating Everything

During our conversation, Jordon stressed the importance of pricing your membership program correctly. The break-even cost for the average dental practice who offers a membership program is around $110 per year, variable by where your practice is located. As Jordon explained, if you can charge more than $110 per year for your membership then you should make a profit. So, if your membership was priced at $300 per year, you’d be making almost three times your cost.

Once you have a membership plan in place, it’s important to then automate its operations as much as possible. Jordan gave the example of a practice he has worked with that had created a membership program and was tracking and implementing everything manually, and they had managed to get around one hundred subscribers. However, once they turned to BoomCloud to automate the membership process, they were quickly able to increase that number to around 1,800. That’s a truly impressive figure that demonstrates how technology and automation can be powerful growth tools, not just for dental membership programs but for any aspect of your practice.

I hope you were able to learn a great deal about dental memberships from my conversation with Jordon Comstock. If you’d like to learn more about BoomCloud or get a free digital copy of their ebook, How to Create & Grow a Dental Membership Program, you can visit their website at www.boomcloudapps.com. And, as always, I encourage you to visit www.theprogressivedentist.com for more informative podcast episodes with other remarkable guests who can help you make and keep more money.