Today, Iâm going to do what those stupid ads doâyou know the ones, they claim to be able to make you 10X profit out of nothing. Except Iâm really going to show you how to do it, just by simply changing your online booking system and, more importantly, Iâm going to tell you which one you should use and why.
This is more important than you think!
Your booking system is the MOST important consideration for any clinic in 2024/25. Forget about the cost of your lease, your consumables bill, your tax; these pale into insignificance when you compare them to the losses youâre making by potentially using the wrong booking platform.
Practice Management systemsâĻ
Iâve purposefully not used those words in this article; Iâm referring to just booking systems. I recognise thereâs a big difference between the two; indeed, some products donât even offer real practice management. There are some fantastic practice management systems, but theyâre about as useful at online booking as I am at making TikTok dance videos. Good practice management software is obviously important, but itâs less important when you donât have any patients to manage.
Okay, so how am I losing money?
A good booking system can make thousands of pounds of difference to your monthly revenue. Letâs do the sums to really get this point across. Iâll begin by making some lowball assumptions. Iâm going to assume the average lifetime value of your patients (how much the average patient spends with you over their lifetime) is ÂŖ250. You can adjust this to your liking. Iâm on the low side judging by most of our clientsâ numbers, and itâs probably over ÂŖ500.
Iâm also going to assume that the average clinic gets 200 new potential patients to their booking system each month. Again, a very conservative estimate, and you can adjust; even small clinics will see far in excess of this number.
A good booking system can generate you a 20% conversion rate. That is, if 100 people hit your booking system, 20 will book an appointment. That means that if 200 people hit your booking system and itâs decent, then youâll get 40 patients. This would mean a revenue of 40 X ÂŖ250 (lifetime value), which equals ÂŖ10k in new patient revenue.
However, imagine your booking system gets you a 5% conversion rate (i.e. only 5 people out of every 100 book). This would mean that from 200 patient visits to your booking system, youâd get 10 patients. Using the same formula as above, this would mean that youâd generate ÂŖ2.5k.
Thatâs a difference of ÂŖ6.5k just in terms of straight-up revenue. But even if youâre a smaller clinic and it only makes a difference of two patients, thatâs ÂŖ500 and ÂŖ6k a year!!! If youâre a larger clinic, it could be 10/20 patients. The numbers are eye-watering. Ten patients is ÂŖ2,500 a month, so ÂŖ30k a year. Thatâs a good few holidays!
Essentially, the wrong booking system can make the difference between being a highly profitable clinic or struggling along trying to make ends meet. For all those clinic owners running about giving themselves palpitations about retention rates on their clinicians, you could probably put a couple of extra years onto your lives by just switching a piece of software!
There are of course variables such as pricing, your reputation, the level of competition, your availability, and so on, but even so, the conversion rate will still apply.
But thatâs not all...
There are also other factors to consider. We often see that those with the worst booking systems are also those that have to spend extraordinary amounts on their marketing just to stay busy. Furthermore, youâre not going to get the same level of word of mouth, and youâre also losing patients to competitors who make the booking process seamless, which in turn makes you less competitive and improves their brand and reputation. I know clinic owners that put more thought into their logo than their booking system, which is crazy when you think about it!
Letâs do the one thing thatâs really stupid!
So youâre struggling to get patient numbers through or you have a few gaps, and you want to fill them. You might be one of the many that then say, âI know, Iâll do social media marketing.â
Weâve seen this trendâclinics, because they have a shoddy website and booking process, because the customer experience is so bad, they turn to running Facebook and Instagram ads to generate revenue. And where do they turn? You know where. Those marketing agencies promising you a gazillion pounds with their âunique patient acquisition generator system.â And what happens next? You end up running ads for free appointments.
So now youâre spending money, doing free appointments just because your onboarding process is poor.
So why not just move to a new system?
I donât believe you!
Sometimes people just donât believe us! For anyone that doesnât think their booking system is really all that important, think about your own purchasing behaviour. If it took you 15 minutes to book a restaurant appointment or buy a pair of trainers, would you?
This is why companies spend hundreds of millions on their purchasing systems. Why do you think Amazon has a âBuy nowâ button? Why do you think Shopify has invested so much money in their new payment platform? Ease of use and speed of purchase are crucial to every business selling products or services online.
Who are you to tell me whatâs good and whatâs not?
Good question. Letâs talk about data and why weâre qualified to have an opinion. Most of you understand the scientific method, so I wonât go into depth on it. As the largest MSK marketing agency in the UK, we work with hundreds of clients and have more data points than anyone else on the planet.
For example, hereâs a look at our Google Ads spend:
When you spend close to ÂŖ6m and have more than 4.5 million clicks, you get access to some pretty decent data. We track everything, so we know conversion rates, drop-offs, and bookings made against pretty much every (if not every) system on the market. Not only this, but we also have millions of data points on how patients use websites because we design them, we run SEO, weâre experts in patient behaviour, and the numbers donât lie.
Imagine you saw 5m patients. That would be a pretty good data set, wouldnât it?
So we know what weâre talking about!
Conversion tracking
Okay, I know this is boring, but itâs important. Iâll keep this as non-technical as possible. One of the key elements for any system is to know where a patient converts from. For example, letâs say you spend ÂŖ100 on an ad. With great booking systems, we can see exactly how many patients you got from your ad spend, which ad they came from, and also how much those people spent.
In other words, spend ÂŖ100 on back pain ads, get five patients with revenue at ÂŖ500. This way you can work out your ROI. ÂŖ5 for every ÂŖ1 spent. We wrote an article a while back on evidence-based practice requiring evidence-based marketing.
If your system doesnât allow you to track these things, then you canât possibly be running your business in an optimal way. And youâd be amazed how few systems allow this. Quite honestly, if yours doesnât, it should probably go in the bin. Itâs like trying to treat patients without being able to see or hear. You just canât do it, and nor can you really run a business properly under the same conditions.
How impartial are you?
Before we do the big reveal, itâs really important to say a few things.
HMDG nor I have never taken money in return for recommendations of a product. We are independent and agnostic. As you can imagine, given our customer list, plenty of people try, but the answer is a big fat no. I also couldnât care less which system wins or doesnât. I wish everyone won because it would make my job a lot less stressful.
Furthermore, no one knows about or has paid for this article, and Iâm writing it on a whim. So before anyone asks, ITâS NOT SPONSORED. Why am I spending my time writing it? Because Iâm sick and tired of people losing money hand over fist because they get swayed by slick marketing from system suppliers or fancy UIs (basically how a system looks). Iâm also bored by the lies our customers get told and the team at HMDG having to tell new customers that theyâve made a mistake and then spending precious hours explaining why. Iâm also personally put out because I spend hours a week talking about bloody booking systems. Finally, clinic owners are clinic owners. They do not understand UI, UX, CRO, conversion tracking or any of the other things that are crucial when choosing a product. Theyâre not supposed to, but it does mean that often they choose an inferior product.
Okay, so what is the best system?
Cliniko. This is our number one choice by a country mile. If I were to open a clinic tomorrow, you couldnât pay me to use any other product. In fact, itâs so important that if someone wanted me to invest in a clinic, using Cliniko would be a condition of any investment. It has ridiculously high conversion rates, patients love it, itâs simple, itâs optimised for speed of appointment making, and when a new client joins us, the team all have a smile on their faces if theyâre using Cliniko. This tells you a lot! Weâre an MSK marketing agency, and weâre here to make people money. We know that our job is much easier when clients use Cliniko; they donât just make more money, they save it as well. Weâve yet to find a clinic using it where we donât have easy success.
For those that skimmed through and got to this part of the article, no, we havenât been paid to say this, and Cliniko doesnât even know weâre writing it. Although hopefully, theyâll send me some branded freebies like Cliniko socks, which I can give to the kids because lost socks are costing me a fortune. Iâll update this article if they do. đ
However, do I think Cliniko is perfect? No, I absolutely do not. There are many missing features; Iâm not a big fan of their self-service support; I donât think theyâre the most customer-friendly business Iâve ever seen either. Iâd love to see Healthcode implemented, classes and group management, better reporting, the storing of credit cards just to name a few. However, they do offer an open API, so itâs easy for third parties to complement it, whether thatâs products like Cliniq apps or Dataplayer.
So, if youâre not using Cliniko, the chances are, youâre losing patients and money.
I also want to give a shout-out to Nookal. For us, theyâre in second place behind Cliniko. They actually have a great overall product, definitely more advanced in many areas with far greater functionality than Cliniko. Theyâre also very responsive to us when we make suggestions, and as a team, I really like them. The team behind a product is often forgotten, but it shouldnât be. Theyâre who make the product run, develop it, and communicate with customers, and no matter how good a productâs features, a bad team will ruin it.
Theyâve worked hard on improving their online booking, and itâs certainly much better today than a year ago. Theyâre growing fast, are really customer-focused, and Cliniko definitely needs to watch out! Their customer service is also fantastic.
However, I do wish theyâd get rid of their absolutely ridiculous migration fee, which is close to ÂŖ1k. Itâs great they offer a migration service, but loading customers with a hefty upfront fee is not a good look and almost stops me from wanting to put them in second place. Youâll make plenty of money over time and be far more accessible by taking a hit. We spend far more time onboarding a client than they do, and we donât charge. For them, margins once a customer is onboard are fantastic, and this just strikes me as short-termism and a lack of understanding as to how this industry works.
Finally, Practice Hub. This is a pretty cool little company. Culturally theyâre great, and they do have pretty fast development. Iâm not a fan of where theyâre spending their dev timeâmobile apps, for example (if they focused on UI and UX, itâd be money far better spent, IMO), and their conversion rates and usability for marketing is actually very poor. However, many companies weâve come across in the space will outright lie to clients, fob us off, be completely unresponsive to both us and customers, and will develop their products very little because they care more about saving money than making a better product. To be fair to PH, theyâve definitely shown themselves to be different. We chatted recently, and they essentially said, âWe have faults, we can see them, help us and watch what happens with our next release.â I really like that in a company. So although not a product I would use just yet (although I can see it for some use cases), I think theyâre definitely one to watch, and weâll be keeping a close eye. Itâs also worth mentioning that (if theyâre reading) theyâre very chiro-focused but, quite honestly, they should be much more open to the whole MSK market.
So there you have it!
But my system isnât on the list, and itâs amazing!
No, it probably isnât. If it was, itâd be on the list above. Is there a small chance that thereâs a system we donât know? Sure, but itâs unlikely.
I donât use Cliniko, and Iâm doing amazingly well
Absolutely, and that speaks volumes about how well you run your business in spite of being hampered by your tech. Iâm not saying you canât be doing brilliantly; Iâm saying youâd be more efficient and making more money switching systems. We have one client who, for various reasons, canât move systems, and theyâre making a small fortune. But theyâre also answering an ungodly amount of calls because people just donât want to book online! Imagine how much it costs to hire people to answer calls! Donât forget to add that to the monthly cost of your booking system.
Iâm annoyed, and youâre wrong!
I know, confirmation bias is a crazy thing, as are the number of people that are so emotionally tied to their booking system they wonât even accept real-world data. Suffice it to say, weâre not wrong. Iâm also not writing this to annoy you or to put people out; we genuinely care about clinic owners and their businesses and want them to make as much money as possible.
Can you review my system/other systems?
We considered doing an in-depth review of 10+ systems; we even did some mystery shopping! Youâd be amazed at how some canât even get back to you with pricing! This would then have been much more of a review piece, but we decided against it for a few reasons.
First, just use Cliniko. I donât want to start talking about an amazing feature of product X when the product as a whole is a mess that no one should even dream of using. I also think a fair few arenât doing all that well financially and doubt theyâll be around in the next 24/48 months.
Second, although this is opinion backed up by a lot of data, some of them are going to get litigious. Weâre far too busy to deal with vendors wanting to silence criticism through the courts rather than spending their money on improving their products.
Finally, I donât actually think itâs beneficial. This isnât like comparing a Chattanooga Shockwave to Venn or Swiss Dollarcast where they all have strengths in certain areas (although letâs be honest, itâs the same product with a different badge); booking systems are so different that if you had Cliniko and then Nookal in one and two, everything else starts at number 20 on the list. Why compare a Ferrari and a scooter?
Hopefully, you found this useful, and it goes without saying weâre amazing, so itâs about time you got in touch to work with us. So do!
