You hear all the time how important it is to have 5-star patient reviews on sites like Google, Yelp, Healthgrades and more.
But when it comes to actually getting patients to leave awesome reviews for you, you feel like banging your head against a wall.
How is it possible to have thousands of happy patients and only a handful of 5-star Google reviews?
I’ve been in medical marketing for more than a decade, creating solutions to big problems just like this one.
The “Review Problem” is one I’ve worked on for a few years now. After trying a dozen different methods to get patients to leave reviews, I’ve finally hit on a winner.
Today, I want to tell you about a way I discovered that you can take your existing reminder software – tools like DemandForce and SolutionReach (a.k.a. Smile Reminder) – and turn them into Google review engines for your practice.
The best part? It’s a completely automated solution. No need to print expensive ‘How to leave us a review’ cards (which don’t work anyway). You don’t even have to ask patients for reviews if you don’t want to.
Why are reviews so important anyway?
Before I get into the nuts and bolts of this solution that I’ve stumbled upon, let’s take a moment and review (ha!) why online reviews are more important now than ever before.
Reviews play a vital role in your practice branding today. They’re important for how people perceive you vs. your competition, and here’s why:
When people search on Google and go through the local listings in your city to find a dentist, a LASIK surgeon, a cosmetic surgeon and so on, your reviews are right there, up against the competition:
And the practices with the most reviews are typically the ones that get more engagement. Johnny Consumer is clicking the guy who has 90 positive reviews before the one with 4 reviews.
So the practice that has 10x more positive reviews than anyone else in town has a distinct advantage. That practice has many more opportunities to attract new leads and turn them into patients, and the search engines are helping to make it happen.
If that’s you, great! If not, you’re certainly losing valuable patients every week to your most-reviewed competitor.
Not only do reviews help attract patients, they also serve you in your search rankings in general.
Search engines are looking at many different factors these days when it comes to ranking you against your competitors, and reviews are one of those ranking factors. So good reviews can actually help you rank better in searches in your city.
5-Star Reviews help in many ways… as long as you can get them.
The challenge is that 99.9% of the general public don’t go leave 5-star reviews on their own, despite how great the experience was. And our research shows this is for 2 main reasons:
- It’s too complicated
- People forget to do it.
As silly as those two reasons seem, they are what’s standing between you and 500 5-star Google reviews. That’s it. If you can overcome those, you can open the floodgates.
I’m going to show you how to overcome both of these barriers, and we’ll use your current DemandForce or SolutionReach account as the mechanism to make it happen. These are tools you already have in place. Now you finally have a way to leverage them to take your review game to the next level.
What you really have if you have DemandForce or SolutionReach
DemandForce and SolutionReach are excellent appointment reminder solutions.
Not only that, but they also do a great job following up after with patients after the appointment to find out about the patient experience.
So if you have SolutionReach or DemandForce, you end up with a review page that looks like this:
This is a practice I randomly chose as an example of the frustration you experience in your own practice.
Anderson Family Dental is in a small Ohio town, and as you can see, they have 565 patient reviews on their SolutionReach page. Awesome right?
But here’s thing – Their Google listing tells a very different story:
**The problem is that none of the amazing reviews on SolutionReach are ever making it to Google or any other of the major, public-facing review sites.**
What a waste of a happy patient stories that could otherwise help you attract new patients and helping you grow your search rankings…. IF ONLY they were left in the right place.
Look at the graphic above. If Anderson Family Dental only had 50 5-star reviews, they would be leading the pack in their city.
Do you think they have 50 happy patients? We know they have at least 500 based on their DemandForce survey page!
It’s doable, it’s simply a matter of getting the right people to leave reviews in the right places.
What you really have with DemandForce or SolutionReach is a tool that’s awesome for gathering feedback, but horrible at sharing that feedback in meaningful ways online.
So what if, instead of directing people to leave reviews on DemandForce or SolutionReach itself, you used these systems as ‘air traffic controllers’ to send awesome reviews to Google, Yelp and so forth?
This was my “aha” moment – keep the mechanism that works (DemandForce or SolutionReach) but change the destination to solve the Review Problem.
So I set about developing a way to ‘hack the system’ and use DemandForce and SolutionReach to my advantage for these clients.
Now you can do precisely this, and it’s as simple as a one-time change to your follow-up emails that go through your reminder system.
Here’s How it Works
With every patient in your system, you can send them a post-appointment assessment email from SolutionReach or DemandForce. I call this the “How did we do?” email. It looks like this:
Now, you see the “Take the Survey” button?
When you click “Take the Survey” you are taken to the DemandForce or SolutionReach system to complete the survey.
What we’ve done is hacked the system so we can send this link to other sites.
Don’t worry, this is a ‘safe’ hack that won’t get you in trouble. It simply gives you the chance to send reviewers to Google, Facebook and Yelp.
But before we started testing this, we wanted to make sure we were overcoming the common obstacles people cite for leaving no reviews or leaving bad ones.
- It had to be fast. The surveys inside these systems can be long and arduous. If we’re asking people to leave reviews, the faster it is, the more likely they will comply.
- It had to be simple. Leaving reviews is overcomplicated. Trying to find the right listing, then the correct button to leave reviews. And each site has it’s own nuances, making the process even more complex. If we were going to ask people to leave reviews, it needed to be simple and straightforward as possible, even providing directions if necessary.
- It had to have a catch-all mechanism for bad reviews. If you’ve seen your SolutionReach and DemandForce reviews, you know that sometimes, you get 1-star reviews. But if someone had a 1-star experience, you want that going to your practice administrator to correct the problem, not going to Google to tell the entire world. So we needed a way to “catch” patients who had a bad experience so those messages didn’t get out onto the web.
- It needed to be easy to adjust to new sites as necessary. There are plenty of review sites out there, and depending on your specialty and geographic area, you may need more reviews on site A than site B. We needed a way to quickly siphon clicks to different review sites if a change was necessary.
So that’s what we did. We put together a digital “review engine” that has all of these qualities. It checks to make sure patients had a great experience, and if so, it redirects them to leave reviews on Google, Yelp, Healthgrades, pretty much wherever you want online.
Once you change the link in the survey email to the review engine link, voila! You’ve just turned your DemandForce or SolutionReach into a review generation machine.
See for yourself (in less than 60 seconds)
To see how this new ‘review engine’ works to help your patients get from “first click” to “finished review” in less than 60 seconds, watch the video below.
This is built around four best practices for getting the most reviews:
- Keep it Fast. The faster you can from the starting point to the actual review, the more likely people will follow through. This takes less than 5 clicks to get to the point where you’re leaving the actual review.
- Keep it simple. The simpler the process, the more likely people will follow through. This clicks directly to the Google review screen, and it even pre-populates a 5-star review in Google. Did you notice that? It literally types in ‘5-stars’ for the patient.
- Keep it immediate. Remember how people forget to leave reviews? It happens anytime there’s a delay between the ask and the action. Make sure when prompted, the patient can leave a review immediately (vs. asking now to leave a review when they get home).
- Keep it positive. Use a screening mechanism to keep bad reviews off the web. IF you clicked the ‘thumbs down’ button (as an unhappy patient would), you are prompted NOT to go leave a review online, but to email the practice. This reduces risk of bad reviews actually ending up on the web!
How well does it actually work?
Here’s feedback from a couple of clients who recently launched this “SolutionReach Hack” to get more reviews online.
(Client privacy is paramount, hence the use of initials below. I am happy to discuss these in greater detail with you privately. Medical marketing is highly competitive, and I handle my clients marketing activities – just as i would handle yours – with complete discretion.)
“Within days of adding the link in to our DemandForce emails, I could already see it creating more reviews. We started using the system with only my primary office, but I’m already adding my other location since it’s had such a positive impact!”
– J.F., North Texas Optometrist with 2 offices
These guys were averaging 2 Google reviews/month when we launched their ReviewGrab funnel, and about 30% of them were 2-stars or less. Within 60 days, they’re averaging 5 Google reviews/week, and 90+% of them are 5-stars.
“This thing has been working like a champ. Having SolutionReach blast the survey link out after all appointments has helped tremendously. Easily we’ve doubled the amount of Yelp and Google reviews since we’ve started.”
– G.P., Operations Director for 10-office ophthalmology practice in Central Texas
Similar story – this practice was averaging 1 Google review/month and has increased to 3 Google reviews/week. They were able to double their total number of reviews on virtually all of their target online properties – Google and Yelp – in less than 3 months.
Up until this point, this system is something we’ve only offered our full-service marketing clients to help solve their Review Problem.
These clients invest significant budgets each month for my team to manage and consult on all their marketing efforts.
But as word has started to spread about this Review Solution and how successful it is, I’ve received many requests from outside our core sphere of clients. So we’ve decided to offer this to a limited number of practices as a stand-alone product – The ReviewGrab Funnel.
Here’s what is included:
- Full ReviewGrab Funnel set-up, start to finish, just like you saw in the demo above
- A special review link to add to your SolutionReach or DemandForce sequence, which is exactly how the clients mentioned above and countless others have made dramatic increases to their reviews
- A texting option that allows you to text the review link to someone directly (However you choose to use it, helping patients leave reviews is always only a few clicks away.)
Besides these standard inclusions, I’m going to share some bonus assets you will get to fully maximize your reviews.
Because generating reviews is one thing, but you also want as many potential patients to see those reviews as possible. So I have some extras for you that are going to help you maximize the value of every review you get.
I’ll get into those in a minute…
Before that, let’s talk about what ReviewGrab is NOT
1. This is not a review generator that creates fake reviews out of thin air.
Google will slap you for fake reviews, possibly even blacklist you. Plus that’s not an ethical way to operate, so we just don’t even get into that.
ReviewGrab is a tool to ask real patients for real reviews in a way that will make them more likely to follow through, and it can operate 100% on autopilot.
If you can’t stand seeing your competitor down the street with 5x more reviews than you, even though you know you’re the better doctor – try this.
2. This is not any kind of push-button money miracle, guaranteeing you’ll make a ton of money from your online reviews. So let’s get that out of the way now.
That’s not how marketing works, as you know. But I need to write that as a disclaimer.
If you see the value in being THE PRACTICE in your market that has 10x more reviews than your competitor down the street….
If you get the psychology behind someone seeing your 300 reviews vs. Dr. Competitor’s 30 reviews and how that benefits you…
and you understand the many ways that can be impactful to your practice growth over the long-term…
then this is for you.
So who is it for:
A few types of practices do really well with ReviewGrab. See if any of these are you:
1. New Practices that want to achieve authority fast
Maybe you’re new in town, not well-known, and you want to quickly establish authority in the market. Reviews from new patients are the perfect way to do that.
And if you’re not yet at full capacity, and you’re spending extra time with patients and really making them feel cared for and special, they will be more than happy to leave you awesome reviews.
ReviewGrab works great in this scenario.
2. Established practices with a strong brand but lack the social reinforcement of great reviews
Maybe you’re an established practice with thousands of patients, but you still only have a dozen Google reviews. I see this all the time, and it’s because the practice hasn’t put an emphasis on reviews because they’re busy.
This is especially important if you’re marketing, and people end up finding you on the web but seeing that your competitor has more reviews than you have, and then you lose that lead.
ReviewGrab is useful for an established practice to help their online reviews reflect what they’re promoting in the community.
3. The type of doctor who wants to dominate his or her market in every way
Working in medical marketing for more than a decade now, there are a couple of schools of thought in terms of marketing domination.
Some doctors are fine doing their usual thing, seeing a comfortable number of patients a day, making a solid living doing it, without any emphasis on growth.
Then there are the ones who are more aggressive in their thinking. They want to grow, they want to serve more patients, they want to establish themselves as the obvious go-to practice in their areas.
Large or small, new or established, if this is you, one of the most visible ways to move toward market domination is through your patient reviews online.
4. Those who understand the importance of defending against bad reviews.
Regardless of how well you serve patients, bad reviews are going to happen. Either from unreasonable patients or from jealous competitors, someone is going to leave negative reviews.
In many instances, you have no recourse to have bad reviews removed. This is very difficult to do.
Your best defense is a good offense, and that means getting as many HAPPY patients to leave reviews as possible.
I have read the emails sent by honest patients who have canceled appointments because they went online and saw negative reviews.
You must protect yourself against losing patients to bad reviews, and more positive reviews are the way to go.
So if you’re in any of those boats, I hope you can see the value in this system.
Leveraging every single positive review (BONUS)
Since you’re still reading, you probably see the value in building up your reviews, and also in having a proven mechanism to make it happen on autopilot.
But getting the reviews is only part of the equation.
The second part is once you have the reviews, you want to leverage them in as many ways as possible. This is where the bonus assets come into play.
These include:
1. New Review Monitoring
We’ll set you up with our Review Monitoring daily email alerts.
This means you will get emails for new reviews that are posted on your online profiles – Google, Facebook, Yelp and more.
Rather than having to manually visit each of these sites to monitor your reviews, we’ll send them right to your inbox.
You’ll know when you receive new 5-star reviews across the web.
And if you do receive an unfortunate negative review, you will see it quickly and can respond in a timely manner.
This puts the power of reputation management in your hands.
2. Review Stream for Your Website
How awesome would it be to easily showcase all of your best reviews from all over the web, right on your website? You can, thanks to our Review Stream.
It automatically pulls your new 4-star and 5-star reviews and lists them on your website in a very attractive layout (see below). This alone is the kind of thing that other software companies charge hundreds of dollars a month for, and we’re giving it to you as a bonus.
3. Review Syndication to Social Media
Why not create positive reinforcement and build your authority by posting awesome reviews to your Facebook page?
With our Review Syndication, you can do just that. We’ll post new reviews – only the best ones – to your Facebook page automatically.
So to reiterate, you get Full ReviewGrab Text Funnel Set-up, The ability to add patients to the funnel via email or text, And the complete backend that guides patients through the review process to leave reviews where you need them most.
You also get additional bonuses – monitoring, review stream and social syndication – to make sure you get the most from your review funnel. Even if you’re already getting reviews, this will help you better leverage them.
How you can take advantage (time is of the essence)
Simplicity is one of the keys to success, so we’ve made this as easy as possible.
There is no software to buy, nothing to download and install on your computers, no need to invest expensive new hardware.
You will have no separate hosting fees, no requirement to buy software upgrades in the future, no dollars earmarked for technical support. You won’t even need to call your IT guy to get this up and running.
The entire process is turnkey for you, and you only pay a one-time set-up investment, followed by an easy payment of $249 per month. This covers everything I’ve described here – your customized review funnel to use as much as you want, along with all the bonuses I mentioned.
This covers your initial office location. Want to add more? That’s easy. It’s only an additional $50 per location per month.
This also includes category exclusivity in your area.
So if you join ReviewGrab and you’re a cosmetic dentist, you lock out every other cosmetic dentist in your area from using this. If you’re a LASIK surgeon, you’re the only LASIK practice in town who will have this unfair advantage. This is valid for the lifetime of your membership.
My promise to you
Just in case you’ve never worked with me, my promise to you is this:
I only want my clients investing in tools and strategies that work for them.
ReviewGrab, like any of my products, solves a real problem that it not being addressed in the market.
It’s easier and faster to get patients to leave you 5-star reviews.
If you disagree and don’t like that, or if you prefer to keep doing what you’re doing now, and getting the same results you’re seeing now, you can cancel any time. No contracts, no long-term commitments, just cancel and you will not be billed again.
A few things to remember:
- This is the lowest price we’re offering for ReviewGrab, during this public launch.
- You may be able to buy later, but it will be at a higher price and without the bonuses thrown in.
- We have a limited number of openings that we’re making available in our software at this time. Excellent service is my #1 priority, and that can’t happen if I open this up to too many people too fast.
- So we’re starting with 50 openings. Once those are filled, we’ll shut the doors for now and re-open later.
This is a unique opportunity as it’s a product and funnel that we put together for our clients, and we’re opening it up to a few select practices because we see just how beneficial it can be.
How to secure ReviewGrab for your specialty in your area
Click the link below to send me your info and reserve your zip code.
I or one of my team will give you a shout to do a quick demo and answer any questions you have.
If you want to move forward, we’ll get a few key pieces of information from you, and get you set up and ready to start within 1 business day. How’s that for service?
In conclusion, If you feel like you want all the benefits of ReviewGrab for your practice….
If you feel like it’s an important time to get more reviews for your practice, and you want a way to do it that’s easy, fun and actually works incredibly well well….
Trust your gut, give me a shout and let’s get started.
I hope this has been helpful to you, and I look forward to helping you get more reviews!
To your success,
Troy Cole
PS – Maybe you want to challenge yourself to double your reviews by end of year or to have the most reviews in your market within the next 12 months. I’m here to help.
And if you’re frustrated with how many reviews you’re getting now, it makes sense to jump on this offer.
After all, the price only goes up, and the bonus content makes it a no-brainer.
If you’re at all interested, now is the time to jump on this instead of waiting and paying more or risk a competitor joining and staking claim to your market.
PPS – If you still feel stuck, uncertain, and unsuccessful in your new patient reviews, give this a shot. You have nothing to lose.
You’re leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table if you don’t have your patients out there singing your praises and sharing their stories with the world online.
What will life be like 6 months from today if you don’t make a change now?
Don’t let Dr. Competitor down the street continue to steal new patient revenue from you, all over something as easily remedied as this.