Marketing agency retainer or pay per appointment: which fits a fertility clinic?
A retainer pays for an agency's work, pay per appointment pays for a patient in your consultation room.
What do you pay for?
- Retainer: a monthly fee plus the ad budget, whatever comes of it.
- Pay per appointment: a fixed fee for each patient who shows up and is qualified.
Who pays for a no-show?
With a retainer you do, and about 23% of medical appointments are missed (Dantas et al., Health Policy, 2018).
Who calls the patients?
Ask where the agency's work stops: if it ends at the enquiry form, your team makes the calls.
Which one fits your clinic?
- A retainer, if you want your own ad account and website to grow and have staff to call every enquiry.
- Pay per appointment, if you have open consultation slots and want the cost tied to patients you saw.
You can run both: an agency at home, pay per appointment for patients from abroad.
What should you ask before you sign?
- What do I pay for: hours, bookings, or patients who showed up?
- Who calls the patients, and in which language?
- Is the same patient sent to other clinics?
- What happens when a patient does not match my criteria?
Want appointments that show up and match your criteria?
See if your clinic qualifies →Sources
- Dantas LF, Fleck JL, Cyrino Oliveira FL, Hamacher S. No-shows in appointment scheduling, a systematic literature review. Health Policy, 2018. doi.org/10.1016/j.healthpol.2018.02.002