New patient specials that attract the right patients

Nearly every practice has run the same one. Exam, cleaning, and radiographs for a low flat price. The phone rings, the schedule fills, and six months later almost none of those people are still patients.

That is not a marketing failure. It is the offer doing exactly what it was designed to do, which was attract people who chose you because you were cheapest that week.

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. Dental and medical boards regulate how fees and discounts may be advertised, those requirements differ from state to state, and the wording of any offer should be confirmed with your own counsel and your board before it is published.

What is a new patient special actually for?

Removing the reason someone has not booked, which is usually uncertainty rather than price.

Ask why a person with a symptom waits four months to call. Some of it is money. More of it is not knowing what will happen, not knowing what it will cost, and expecting to be sold something in the chair.

The largest dental dataset available supports the distinction. Patient Prism's Dental Patient Access Report, published 2 July 2026, categorized 1,163,398 booking opportunities from 11,552,668 calls across 8,280 locations in 2025. Financial barriers accounted for 34.4% of the reasons patients did not book, and inside that group insurance outweighed price by more than eleven to one. The largest cluster of all was consideration and timing at 45.2%.

Read that against your offer. If price is the smaller half of the smaller cluster, an offer built purely on price is aimed at the narrowest slice of the people you are losing. An offer aimed at uncertainty is aimed at the biggest one. Grade the source honestly: Patient Prism sells call intelligence software and the categories are its own taxonomy, so treat the ordering as reliable and the decimals as indicative.

An offer aimed at uncertainty looks different. A consultation with a written treatment plan and a price before anything is scheduled. A second opinion visit for someone holding a large quote from another office. A first visit with a stated ceiling on what happens that day.

The best offers cost you a chair hour and buy you a relationship. The worst ones cost you margin and buy you a transaction.

Match the offer to what you want more of. A practice wanting implant cases and a practice wanting families need different offers, and the family offer will not fill the implant chair.

How should the offer be worded?

Precisely, with the boundaries stated, in plain language.

Six things belong in it: what is included, what is not, who it applies to, what it costs, when it expires, and what happens next. Missing any of them creates a conversation at the front desk that starts with disappointment.

A few rules earned the hard way.

• Never state what a patient's plan will cover. You can say whether you are in network with a named carrier and offer to verify their benefits. Anything beyond that is a guess that becomes a complaint at the desk.
• Do not promise a clinical result. An offer describes a visit, not an outcome. Outcome claims belong to your clinical leadership and your board.
• Check your state's advertising rules before you publish a price. Boards regulate how fees, free services and discounts may be advertised, and the requirements differ by state in ways that are not intuitive. Your board or your counsel answers that question, not your marketing.
• Put an end date on it. An offer that has run unchanged for three years is a price, and it lowers what patients think your work is worth.

Make sure your team can say the same words. An offer the front desk explains differently from the website is worse than no offer.

What happens when the offer and a review ask meet?

They must never meet, and this is the single most expensive mistake practices make with a special.

Google bans it flatly. The Maps user generated content policy allows merchants to solicit or encourage genuine reviews without offering incentives to do so or attempting to influence the rating or the contents of the review. A discount, a free whitening, an entry into a drawing, all of it is inside that clause.

The federal rules reach the same conduct from two directions. Under the FTC Rule on Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, 16 CFR Part 465, effective 21 October 2024, section 465.4 bans providing incentives in exchange for, or conditioned expressly or by implication, on a review expressing a particular sentiment. Those three words carry the weight, because almost nobody says the quiet part out loud and the rule does not require them to. The definition of purchasing a review in the same rule expressly includes contest entries and discounts.

Then the Endorsement Guides at 16 CFR Part 255 add the disclosure layer. Section 255.5 treats a material connection as disclosable regardless of whether the advertiser requires an endorsement in return, and names the possibility of being paid, of winning a prize as exactly such a connection. So even an unconditioned giveaway creates something the reviewer has to disclose, inside the review, unavoidably, without a click, under the rule's own clear and conspicuous standard. Which defeats the purpose, and Google removes it anyway.

The practical answer for a practice is short: no incentive to a patient for a review, ever. Not a raffle, not a gift card, not a discount, not a donation to charity. Keep the offer and the review ask on separate pieces of paper and in separate conversations. Ask everybody for a review, the same way, with no sentiment screen.

One more provision belongs in the same paragraph, because it catches the well meaning version. Section 465.5 attaches liability for an omission: not instructing prospective reviewers to disclose clearly and conspicuously their relationship to the business. An owner who asks staff or family to "leave us a review" and says nothing about disclosure is inside that provision. Confirm the details with counsel.

Where should the offer live?

On the pages where the decision happens, not only on a specials page nobody visits.

Put it on the relevant service page, close to where a patient is already reading about the procedure. That means you need service pages, and a dental practice needs individual service pages for exactly this reason: one combined services page has nowhere to put a specific offer.

Put it on your Google Business Profile, where it is visible before anyone visits the site, and keep that version identical to the website version, because the mismatch will be noticed at the desk.

Set your expectations for what the profile version does, though. In Whitespark's 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors survey, in which 47 local search experts scored 187 factors, quantity of Google Posts scored 43 and keywords in the profile description scored 41, both near the bottom of the whole list. Posting the offer is a communication decision, not a ranking one. The same survey added a set of new negative and suspension risk factors for 2026, two of which are directly relevant here: keyword stuffing Google Posts, and the presence of AI generated text content on the profile. Write the offer yourself, once, in plain words.

Do not put it on the homepage as a banner and nowhere else. Homepage banners are the first thing regular visitors stop seeing.

And make sure the offer survives whatever else is going on. If you have changed names or ownership recently, offers are one of the things that quietly break, which is part of why practice rebrands need deliberate search continuity.

If the offer collects anything from a patient before the visit, the landing page is inside the HIPAA business associate chain. Under the definitions at 45 CFR section 160.103, any vendor creating, receiving, maintaining or transmitting protected health information on your behalf is a business associate needing an executed agreement, and the obligation flows to their subcontractors. Ask the form platform, the CRM and your agency in writing whether they will sign and who is downstream of them.

How do I know whether the offer is working?

What to do this week

Pull the last twelve months of patients who came in on your current offer and run the five step arithmetic. Write the second visit rate down with the date.

If that ratio is poor, stop the offer this week.

Write one replacement offer aimed at uncertainty instead of price, with all six elements stated: included, not included, who, cost, expiry, next step.

Read every place the offer appears and confirm nothing in it is tied to leaving a review, tagging you, or entering a drawing.

Send the wording to your counsel and check it against your state board's advertising rules.

Then read it out loud to whoever answers your phone. If they hesitate anywhere, rewrite that sentence, and publish it on the relevant service page and the profile at the same time.

Questions about the offer you are running now?

Email me at eric@seod.com with the exact wording of your current special, copied from wherever it is published. I will tell you which kind of patient it is likely to attract, which of the six elements are missing, and send back a rewritten version aimed at the patients you say you want.

I answer these myself. I will not touch fee advertising rules, because those belong to your state board and your attorney, but I can tell you where the wording is losing you the patient you wanted.

There is more on dental and med spa marketing in the library.