"There is no money in contact lenses"
As ODs, we have been conditioned to think there is no money in contact lenses. This could not be further from the truth. The average practice brings in 33% of their revenue from contact lenses. The feeling of "no money in contacts" is from the leaking 20-30% from patients who don't order or re-order from you. Learning how to sell contacts in volume is the key success to making money in contact lenses.
Investing time in Business education
Yes we went to optometry school and not business school, but take this a step further. We invested years in our education, learned the Krebs cycle, and as a doctor know that learning never ends once you have your degree. Learning ways to improve your business is the same thing as taking another CE course on dry eye. Learning a few KPI’s and tracking them can and will give you the financial freedom you are secretly hoping or wishing for!
How to think differently to make more revenue
One reason you might think this is you are looking at your margin on what you make per box. Stop doing that right now! Step away and look at the volume you have in your practice. Before Dr. Contact Lens there was no tool to see or go market to contact lens patients. If you see 1,000 patients a year, roughly 200-300 of them will order elsewhere. This has been reported time and time again in market research and our own data looking at the average ECP practice.
Contact lens patients are more valuable to a practice than a glasses only patient by 2.5x.
Contact lens patients come back more frequently for eye health exams, and make larger purchases by buying sunglasses or back up glasses. Don’t let other companies beat you at YOUR game. If you sold to ALL of your patients, on average you'd make an additional $200,000 in revenue.
Check out your leaking sales with our ROI calculator
How to sell to everyone
Back to this business thing. Learning and understanding some true KPI’s about your business can put you light years ahead of your competition. What if, in one click, you could see which patients in your practice are due to reorder, which patients are due to come back and see you, which patients are stuck in trial lens mode and which patients never ordered from you. Now is the time to take advantage of technology and be proactive instead of reactive when you receive a contact lens verification and beat them to the punch.
Someone asking for their script?
Give them a FTC compliant digital copy of their RX inside of your contact lens store. The patient will be able to use insurance benefits and order in 1 click. They now have no reason to go elsewhere. No where else will require zero data entry, offer free shipping AND insurance benefits. THIS IS HOW YOU WIN!
Staff efficiency
Did you know it can take a staff member 10-15 minutes to place and deal with a single contact lens order for a patient?Now what happens when that patient does not come back to pick up their lenses they needed yesterday… you have to return them. This means more time and more money you did not capture. The other issue by ordering lenses the old way through a distributor site is there is no tracking behind that order. Meaning you do not know when that patient is due to reorder or when they are due to come back and see you. By direct shipping everything to the patient and ordering through your Dr. Contact Lens portal you are allowing your staff to do more profitable tasks in your office. Wouldn’t you rather have your staff spend their time on tasks that can make you 300 dollars, like calling patients who are past due to come see you versus placing a contact lens order for 1-30 pack that made you 7 dollars. By using a complete system you are also creating a digital track for that patient which will send them automatic reminders and allow them to login to your site and order in one click.
Pricing
When was the last time you updated your contact lens prices or actually analyzed your profit margin? Through our research we analyzed over 50 practices prices and it was shocking. In these offices they were under charging for 30% of their lenses and over charging for 30% so when you average that out it equates to what the big online retailers are charging. So why are we nickeling and diming our patients for 1-5 dollars more per box? By staying in line and focusing on customer experience you can beat tour competition every time. Which leads us to our next area is focus:
Volume
If you see on average 1000 contact lens patients a year, your capture rate is 70% (national average is 67%) and your annual supply rate is 50% (national average is 26%) this means that 700 patients ordered something from you and 350 ordered a year supply.
Math on your volume
This means 300 patients walked with their script to go elsewhere and 350 ordered less than a year supply. So in six months you are hoping they will call your office (during business hours) to reorder. 30% of the time this does not happen because there are no reorder reminders or you are asking your patient to remember your website to place their order. Be honest, no one is going to remember your website address at 11pm on Saturday night which is another reason the big guys are stealing your patients and putting your patients eye health at risk. With our customer relationship management (CRM) tool you can drive and see where all of your patients are in the system and market to them which will get them reordering from you and coming back to see you. By not having a system in place you are letting 200k walk out your door.
We must change if we want to grow...
Change is hard for both staff and physicians but it is the only way forward. You can only improve on what you are able to track. Healthcare is business and our patients are being looked at as consumers and not patients. We can continue to stay at the center of that healthcare business by bringing technology into our practices or we can be cut out. The option is yours. Take action, be proactive, keep patients ordering from you and coming back to see you for their eye health exams and start to see your revenue go through the roof. Start today before it is too late!