Look to the Numbers: Playing Moneyball to Enhance Veterinary Practices

When people have a tough, thought-provoking decision to make, the idea of “following your gut” will sometimes be the tiebreaker to an otherwise difficult choice. Whether it’s just a way of choosing a side without doing any legwork or finding a way to make a quick decision without any hesitation, intuition will often be the ultimate factor when taking a stance. But what if your gut goes against “conventional” thinking, and more importantly, what if your instincts clash with concrete evidence? In this day and age of technology and resources, it would be naive to not look at statistics to guide your decision-making process. For veterinary hospitals, there is an abundance of data that can be crunched to evaluate everything from the success of coupons and special offers to the effectiveness of front desk associates in getting clients to make appointments. Veterinary marketing is a prime example of looking to the numbers to determine the success of a specific campaign. Let’s use an e-newsletter with a call to action as an example: a hospital has decided to use an email campaign that mentions an outbreak of CIV in the area, complete with a link to make an appointment for the vaccine. As this is sent out to prospective clients, and as the CIV outbreak grows, they may decide to make a new push and promote the vaccine through Facebook and snail mail as well. While it may seem “big brother-ish,” it’s important to note that each of the marketing tactics that were previously referenced all have their own crucial metric of tracking their performance, which is beneficial. Did you know that at iVET360, for every call to action offered for any of our clients, whether it is an appointment being made online, a link being clicked, a phone being called or even a newsletter being opened, we track and analyze all of these numbers? By looking at this data, we can determine the success—and shortcomings—of any campaign. The challenge that occurs for small business owners in the veterinary field is that they are going to trust intuition over data, especially if they do not have the resources to track every single click, call or visit—leaving them with only their gut when making a decision. It’s hard to argue about the success of a campaign when you just look to the statistics, which may contradict what you are observing. The reliable thing about the numbers is that they have no emotions and they have nothing on the line—they’re there for us to use. We are not campaigning for you to be a robotic entity that looks to stats over anything else. Rather, we are championing the importance of data as a supplement to any decision-making process. At iVET360, we have an entire staff team dedicated to the practice of analytics, which we have effectively used to help clients with their decision-making processes. This department has one obsessive goal in mind: to look to the data first, in order to provide detailed statistics to each of our clients—if this data doesn’t provide a clear-cut answer to any decision, at least it can be used in conjunction with their intuitions. If you’re interested in a crash course on how exactly we use statistics to better our clients, reach out to us—our data heads eat, sleep and breathe analytics, and can guide you through our services which include monthly budget reviews, revenue optimization, expense analysis and much more.