These businesses recovered $125,000 in stored value — where’s yours hiding?

Picture this.

A retired dentist in his 70s likes to go to Florida in his large motor home.

He goes to a new town each year. And when he arrives, the first thing he does is… find the name and addresses of all the local dentists.

Then, he sits down and he writes a letter to each of them.

The letter says something like this:

“Here’s the deal. I am going to be in town for three weeks. Let me look at your patient files and I will conduct a marketing campaign to all your patients who haven’t been to see you in two years or more. I will pay for everything. You don’t do anything. And we can split the first-visit revenue.”

And guess what?

By doing this, he generates a tidy $250,000 a year…

… from just four campaigns.

That means each dental practice makes, on average, an extra $125,000 in revenue from the reactivated patients. And that’s just from the first visits.

This is a real story I heard Dan Kennedy share at an AWAI event.

And there’s a marketing lesson in there.

Now, why was the dentist turned marketer so successful?

Because the dentists had enormous stored value in their patient files, and they were doing a poor job of extracting it.

Left to their own devices, they would send inactive patients a postcard with a big tooth on to tell them to come in for a checkup.

If that didn’t work, they gave the list of patients to their reception staff and asked them to follow up. Which of course, they didn’t.

All the marketer did was create a five-step campaign to reactivate these patients. And, I’m guessing he could take 90% of his platform and replicate it with other dentists.

So, where are you storing, or where are your clients storing, their untapped value?