How to Run a Dental Open Day That Fills

A dental open day works when enough of the right people turn up. Everything else — the clinician’s time, the nurse rota, the coffee — only matters after that.

There is plenty of good advice about the day itself: how to structure a consultation, who should be in the room, what to do with somebody who says they need to think about it. Far less is written about the six weeks beforehand, which is when the appointments are actually won or lost.

This is a guide to that part.

Run a Dental Open Day for One Treatment

An implant day and an Invisalign day are different events. They need different words, different consultation lengths and a different person walking through the door.

If you promote both at once, every advert and every page has to describe both. What comes out is something like “come and talk to us about your smile”, which gives nobody a specific reason to give up a Saturday.

Pick the treatment you have the diary space to deliver, and build the day around it.

Start Six Weeks Out

Most practices start promoting about ten days before. That is enough notice to attend something, but not enough to decide something.

Somebody considering implants needs to raise it at home, get a rough idea of the cost, and find a Saturday they are free. Those are the patients an open day exists to reach, and they need more than a week.

Six weeks also gives you time to react. If nothing is booked after a fortnight, you can change the offer, the targeting or the page and still fill the day. A ten-day campaign is over by the time you know it is not working.

Say What People Get for Coming

“Join us for our open day” describes an event. It does not answer the reader’s actual question, which is what happens if they turn up.

Most practices already know the answer. Something like:

• A consultation with the clinician. Not a look in reception — time with the person who would do the treatment.
• A scan or assessment. Whatever you would normally charge for, included on the day.
• Costs and timescales in writing. The two things people are most reluctant to ring up and ask about.
• An offer that ends. A reduction for people who book on the day, or within thirty days of it.

Put an end date on it. “For anyone who attends on the day” is a deadline that does not sound like pressure. Without one, there is no reason to act this week rather than next month.

Send People to a Page, Not a Social Post

This is where most dental open day promotion falls down, and it is the part other guides tend to skip.

A social post sinks down the feed within a day, has no address you can advertise to, and leaves the person you have just convinced to go hunting for a phone number. A page has one job and stays where it is. The adverts, the email and the poster in reception all point at it.

Four things make the difference:

• One page for one day. Not your treatments page with a banner added. Everything on it should be about this Saturday.
• The offer and the date above the fold. People decide whether to keep reading in about two seconds. Lead with what they get, not with your practice name.
• An answer on cost. Cost is the question in their head. A price range, or simply “the consultation is free”, removes the reason to close the tab.
• Your own branding. A page that looks like a template gets read like one, and patients who do not recognise the practice do not trust the offer.

Keep the Booking Form to Four Fields

You can lose half the people you have already convinced at the booking form, and most of the ones we see ask for far too much.

In published testing, cutting a form from eleven fields to four increased submissions by 160%. Five fields against nine gave a 34% increase. Every field is one more thing to think about, and thinking is where a Saturday morning stops feeling worth it.

Ask for a name, a phone number, an email address and which slot they want. You do not need their address, their date of birth or their current dentist. You can ask when they arrive.

One exception is worth considering. Asking which treatment someone is interested in can stop a consultation slot going to somebody who was never going to proceed, which matters on a day with eight slots. It costs you some volume, so decide it deliberately rather than letting the field creep in.

A booking form works at eleven at night with nobody in the building. A phone number does not.

Reach Beyond Your Own Patient List

Email your patients first. It is the cheapest thing you will do and it converts best, because they already trust you and some have been putting off this exact conversation.

But your Instagram followers, your Facebook page and your patient list are not three audiences. They are one audience: people who already come to you. A dental open day that only reaches them fills gaps in the diary rather than adding new patients, and it runs out of people.

Reaching further means paying for it, and the two main options are not equivalent.

Paid social puts your day in front of people who were not looking for it. The creative has to do all the work of stopping someone mid-scroll, and most of the audience is not in the market.

Search puts it in front of people typing “dental implants near me” this week. That is a much smaller audience, but they have already told you what they want. For a specific treatment, in a specific town, within six weeks, search is usually the better fit.

The Day Itself, and the Month After It

Give consultations a set shape, with a treatment coordinator and a clinician doing different jobs. That half of the problem is well covered elsewhere.

The part most practices skip is the follow-up. People who came and did not book are usually still deciding, not lost. A planned sequence of calls and emails over the following weeks converts a good share of them, and costs nothing but time.

So judge the day on how many people had started treatment ninety days later, not on how many booked on the Saturday.

Where We Come In

An open day is a marketing problem with a deadline on it, and the deadline is what makes it unforgiving. The page has to exist before you promote it, the ads have to run for the full six weeks, and the follow-up has to be planned before the day rather than improvised after it.

That is the work we do for practices on a monthly package, alongside the rest of their marketing. If you are running one, tell us what you are planning and we will say what we would do first.