How to use Referral Sources to grow your clinic!

However you try to grow your business, Cliniko can help you document and report upon how you get people through the door!

How do you grow your business?

Strong referral streams are important to making sure that you can deliver your awesome services to as many people as possible: whether that be from word of mouth referrals from your patients and colleagues, or a more aggressive advertising strategy that your clinic has decided to pursue. Either way, you need to know who has arrived to your clinic and how they got there. Referral Sources in Cliniko allow you to document and report upon where your foot traffic is coming from, so that you can focus on expanding your patient base!

Why do I need to keep track of my sources?

Because you shouldn’t be spending money on things if you have no idea how well they’re working! A key idea in marketing is making the most of your dollars, so you need to know how well your dollars are being spent. Keeping track of how people have made it to your clinic will help you figure out how to budget effectively!

Let’s say, you’ve spent a lot of money, you’ve printed out a whole bunch of flyers and you’ve employed a pamphlet delivery company to get these into every letterbox across the city. It costs a lot of dollars to get your name out there, so you want to make sure your flyers are doing their job. But you’ve also dropped the same flyers off at the local cafe, the local GP office, and pinned to the noticeboard down at the supermarket.

In order to make sure that your money is being spent wisely, you’ll want to know how successful each individual version of your flyer marketing is. This is where documenting and reporting upon your sources in Cliniko works perfectly!

How can Cliniko help?

Cliniko can help by being the place where you document the details on where your patients are coming from. We make it easy to customise your account to your clinic’s needs, add the details to the patient’s file, and then report on all of your referral streams!

Word of Mouth

Assuming all is going swell in your business, there’s a good chance that word-of-mouth is one of your best ways of getting new business. Cliniko does a great job of helping you track this. When logged into your Cliniko account, head to the Settings > Referral Sources area. You’ll see we already have “Patients” and “Contacts” in there for you. These options will help you establish the connections between who comes into your clinic and who told them that you’re the place to be! But we don’t stop there, as we make it easy to track any of your potential referrers.

Tracking all the things!

This is where the fun begins: if you click the “Add Referral Source” option, then you can start getting into the nitty-gritty. Let’s use our example from above, and see how your flyer drop campaign is going. You can create a referral source called “Flyers”, but you have to distinguish between the following different avenues you’ve pursued:

• Letterbox drop.
• Local Cafe.
• Local GP.
• Supermarket noticeboard.

You will want to know which advertisement is working the best for your clinic, and this is where our sub-categories function becomes super useful! Here’s an example of how you can set that one up:

You can have as many sub-categories as you like, so if you have a tonne of different referral source streams, you can accurately document them!

Apply it to a patient!

You can add in the referral source at any time you like! Generally, it would be dependent on when you ask your new patient how they found you. All you have to do is head to their patient details page, edit their details, then add in the source, and save! You can even add in a note regarding the source:

Create your reports!

Over in our Reports ares, under the Marketing sub-heading, we have a nifty little report on your referral sources and how many people have been referred to you:

You can see that in the month of September, a lot of people came through Word Of Mouth, either through Contacts or Patients! From there, you can drill down even further, so that you can report on the sub-categories or patient and contact names:

Go further!

Cliniko has a lot of data for your clinic available, and you’ll be able to make the reports you need via our Data Exports function. With some spreadsheet magic, you could find out which referrer has provided you with the most revenue, or discover which referral sources do better in certain suburbs. There’s a whole load you can do if you know some basic spreadsheet formulas and functions, and our support team can always advise you on how to make the most out of all the data you have available at your fingertips!

Grow! Grow! Grow!

You do an awesome job at making sure that you take care of the people that walk through your door and, with our Referral Sources feature, Cliniko can help you make sure that you are spending your advertising dollars wisely, so that you take care of as many people as want. Don’t forget how our Patient Recalls feature can help keep your patients coming back to you, too!