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February is pet dental month, are you and your practice ready? It is by no coincidence that February is pet dental month. Many practices slow down during the winter months although not as much as we have in the past.

With your expenses being the same and income down, guess what? Your profitability is affected. Thus target marketing, and pet dental month. In fact we normally recommend that you do a target market for senior wellness in October and November and dental target marketing in February and March.

The How To's:
In order to do an effective target market campaign, no matter what you are marketing, there must be four components: You must identify your target group, once identified you must then educate your target group about the services they need, then offer them a package of services to meet their needs and lastly, but most importantly you must provide them with an incentive to take advantage of what you are offering.

To apply these concepts to our dental target marketing program, the first thing we must do is identify our target group. I would suggest you start with all the dogs and cats over the age of four or five that have had services in the past 12 months but do not have a dental cleaning in their history. Naturally you can use your computer's search and sort capabilities to accomplish this. If the resulting number is too large you might want to increase the age of the patient. A good rule of thumb is that you should send out about 700-1,000 mailings per full time doctor.

Once you have identified your target group, the next step is to educate the target group, so how about writing up a letter explaining to people why they need to get their pet's teeth cleaned and the advantages of doing so. You might include a Dental Grading Chart and a handout on the advantages of dental cleaning, such as the one provided by CET. Once educated, the next step is to develop a package of services that will meet the patient's needs. This is the tricky part, and one that is most important.

I would suggest that you offer your clients a complimentary dental exam. This will be a technician appointment during which the technician will apply the blue disclosing dye to the pet's teeth. You can get the dye from Henry Schein or CET. If there is a significant tartar build up, this dye will turn red, which is a great "show and tell" and will inform the client that a dental cleaning is necessary. The client can then be informed that February is, of course, pet dental month and in celebration of that we are offering a complete dental package. This is where the incentive comes in. In the dental package we might offer a dental cleaning kit at no charge (tooth brush and toothpaste) or we might send the patient home with a complimentary bag of Hill's TD diet or offer the client a complimentary groom or day of boarding. As most of you know, I really try to avoid discounts because I feel that it sends the wrong message to clients. But the truth is, offering a discount on these dental services may be the most effective incentive that you can use. This is really not that bad, because your fixed costs will be the same and this is a slower time of the year. If you are going to give a discount it would be better to say that the normal cost of a dental cleaning is $150.00 However, during pet dental month we will be able to offer this service at $120.00 which is a $30.00 savings. This sounds much better than 20% off the normal cost of a dental cleaning.

Many practices are so successful at this target marketing that they need to extend the offer into March. This, of course, is a good problem to have. The bottom line is that if your practice slows down during the Fall and Winter months, you need to consider target marketing. It is a win/win situation for your practice, your clients and, most importantly, the patients we care for.

Mark Opperman, CVPM
President - VMC, Inc.

Let us hear from you - tell us what you'd like to see in future issues. You can contact us at vmc@vmc-inc.com