Sycle is a marketing system designed to increase your productivity, lead generation, lead conversion, patient retention and overall sales. Sycle is built to grow your business, not just watch it.
Sycle is an online real-time multi-location appointment scheduling and one-to-one marketing system. Sycle's point of difference is that it is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool that combines the power of the Internet and database management with traditional highly personalized automatic event-triggered direct mail. Send the right message at the right time. Sycle automatically maintains your customer relationships for you. All you have to do is business as usual.
Sycle includes a robust patient management and reporting system that allows you to securely maintain and manage one clinic or one hundred from anywhere at any time.
- Current decline in new patients makes patient retention critical to the success of audiology practices
- Majority of available patient management systems focus on retention of audiological data and fail to emphasize patient information's relevance to effective marketing and patient retention
- Industry-wide need for a system that is functional and easy to use. Fundamentals of patient retention often lack a systematic execution (often forgotten) or are ignored altogether
- Business owners/managers do not have easy and immediate access to the business information essential for running a successful practice
- Most other patient management software available today is stand alone, difficult to network and administer updates
Sycle is an online real-time appointment, patient management, patient retention, direct mail management and patient database management system.
At the click of a mouse, Sycle creates management and marketing reports specifically tailored for managing an audiological practice.
It tracks: Appointment history
Direct mail history
Hearing aid history
Marketing referrals
It sends: Automated time-sensitive and user initiated, highly customized, patient-by-patient direct mail offers and reminders
It creates: Daily appointment confirmation call lists
Management Reports
Marketing Reports
Sales Reports
Referral Reports
As you make appointments and record the outcomes, Sycle:
- Creates call lists for you to confirm appointments
- Sends highly personalized, event-driven letters to your patients, complete with your patient's name and address, on your clinic letterhead. For example: when a hearing aid is purchased, a thank you letter is automatically mailed; subsequent date-driven birthday cards and clean and check cards and warranty expiration letters are sent. These letters are printed and mailed for you
- Monitors which hearing aids have arrived and are ready to be delivered to patients
- Keeps track of how a patient found out about you: The Yellow Pages, direct mail, physician referrals, patient referrals or the newspaper, so you know how to spend your marketing dollars
- Creates up-to-the-minute Marketing, Management and Sales Reports
- Maintains a record of every hearing aid, every piece of direct mail, every appointment and every purchase ever made for all patients-all at your finger tips
- Increase sales to your current patient base
- Increase your number of new patients with proven prospect marketing
- View and make appointments online from anywhere in real time
- No software to load-you just need Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 and an internet connection
- Reduce time spent locating, updating and replacing records
- Ensure that marketing is not an afterthought-that materials actually get in the mail (the relationship with your customer base is maintained)
- Understand where new patients come from and how to reach them
- Referral tracking and reporting:
- Identify lead sources (The Yellow pages, the newspaper, patient referrals, manufacturer offers, etc.)
- Make better advertising spending decisions
- Tested and proven marketing creative is included - or you can use pieces you have created
- Send proven direct mail automatically
- You do not have to worry about creating, printing or organizing your database and mailing your patients
- Patient retention
- In most industries, it is six times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep a current one. Audiology industry analysts estimate that it costs fifty times more money to acquire a new customer than retain a current one.
- Know how your business is doing at any moment
- Built-in Management, Marketing and Sales Reports
- Easy migration
- All you need to be up and running is:
- A copy of your logo
- An electronic version of your database
- Highly personalized (beyond just a person's name) variable data direct mail can increase the open and action rate by up to 500%, versus regular direct mail
- Direct Mail and Referrals have consistently been the number one source of new patients for audiologists
- Increased response time - people respond faster to highly personalized direct mail
- Increased sales - people respond more often to highly personalized direct mail
The cost of sending a typical thank you letter, $2.71 vs. $0.89*
* Assuming an annual salary of $25,000, a thank you letter template that only needs to have the name and address changed, be printed out on company letterhead, stuffed, stamped and mailed
- $ 1.66 - Time: 8 minutes per letter to print, stuff, etc.
- $ .68 - Letterhead, envelope, ink cartridges, equipment wear and tear
- $ .37 - First class stamp
- $ 2.71 - Total cost per letter
- The unknowns include: Will it be done or forgotten? Will it be done correctly? Eight minutes is a very conservative number. Will it take longer? Was it correct the first time or did if have to be printed twice?
$0.89 = Total average cost to send a letter using Sycle
- Current Patient vs. New Patient
- A new customer in most industries typically costs six times more to acquire than keep
- Audiology industry analysts estimate that it costs fifty times more to acquire a new customer than to maintain a current one
- Maintaining current patients ensures against not losing them to competitors
- Patients "buy the audiologist", not the product. If you maintain a constant relationship with your patients, you will not lose them because of offers from your competitors
Industry analysts estimate the cost of acquisition to be over $400 per unit (this does not include current customer referrals)
- A typical Prospect Mailing is 10,000 pieces. Cost = $7500
- Assuming a .025% return on Prospecting Direct Mail = 25 appointments
- 40% close rate (50% is the standard, but sales to previous customers close at a much higher rate) = 10 people purchasing hearing aids
- Considering the industry average binaural rate of 70%, 10 people purchase two hearing aids
- Seven binaural purchasers equals 14 units plus three monaural purchasers = a total of 17 units
- $7500 divided by 17 units equals $441 marketing dollars per unit
Value of one patient"
- A typical patient will purchase four to five hearing aids throughout their lifetime
- A typical patient, on average, will refer at least one person who purchases four to five hearing aids throughout their lifetime
- Assume average hearing aid sale = $1,500 per unit
- The patient alone will spend $7,500
- The patient they refer will spend $7,500
- The total value of one current patient is $15,000
Using Sycle, we estimate that you will spend approximately $3/per current patient/per year in direct mail, not including prospecting
- Online training
- Online support
- Database migration
- Software updates
- Hosting
- Co-located redundant secure servers
- Database back-up
- Address correction and automatic updating of your database
- Total revenues
- Close rate
- Average selling price
- Binaural rate
- Sales by technology level
- Sales by type
- Sales by manufacturer
- Purchase report
- Daily call list
- Appointment/sale conversion by referral source
- Referral source tracking
- Direct mail history
- Appointment history
- Tested, not sold
- Prospect lists
- Current patient lists
- Your data is hosted by IBM in one of their secure facilities
- Highly secure redundant servers incorporate the latest 128-bit encryption technology
- If one server goes down, the load transfers to another server
- Database backup in three locations
- You can have your entire database sent to you at anytime
- Owner/administrator/provider/reception level security and passwords
Sycle.net was designed to be compliant with HIPAA regulations as they pertain to the security of patient records and how they are stored electronically. We have had our system tested and have enabled the highest levels of security, which, in some cases, surpass the current government regulations for security.
Sycle is comprised of a team that includes:
- A 20-year hearing industry veteran and co-founder of Sonus
- An advertising agency founder and creative director
- Clients include: Netscape, AOL, Autodesk, Fox, MTV, Sonus
- Information architects, engineers and programmers
- Websites include: NBC internet, Snap.com, SubZero and many others
- Graphic designers
- Clients include: Pentagram design, Netscape, AOL, Visa
- A 17 year Xerox variable data instant printing veteran
- MIT and Stanford PhD's
- IBM - data warehousing, security, and system maintenance
