Eye care marketing for multi-office optometry and ophthalmology groups

Most groups in this market are integrated. Optometrists see the panel, ophthalmologists operate, and the referral between them happens inside the same organisation, on the same schedule, against the same income statement. Splitting that into an optometry page and an ophthalmology page would force you to read one that describes half your business.

The constraints differ by side and the diagnosis does not. Optometry is a retail attach problem sitting on top of a clinical one. The surgical side is a pipeline problem — the cataract cohort inside an ageing panel is a compounding asset that most groups do not track as one. Both are decided by the same things: whether the recall file is worked, whether the handoff between OD and MD is instrumented, and whether anyone is reading revenue per exam rather than exam count.

If your group is purely one or the other, this page still applies. It is written for the organisation, not for the credential.

These two findings arrive together often enough to be treated as one. Exam count has not moved for a year or more; meanwhile the practice management system holds thousands of patients past due for a recall, and nobody can say when any of them was last contacted.

The temptation is to buy new patients. It is almost always the more expensive answer. A lapsed patient has already chosen you once, has a record on file, and converts at a rate no cold acquisition channel reaches — and the reason they have not returned is usually that nothing asked them to, or that the reminder went to an address collected in 2018.

So we read the recall file before the ad account: how many are due, how many are reachable, what a reactivation actually costs, and how recall discipline differs office to office. In a group with real panel depth, the gap between the best and worst office on that single measure is often larger than any campaign we could run.