ROMI
ROMI (return on marketing investment) measures how far the income from patients brought in by marketing exceeds what that marketing cost. It shows which channels are worth growing and which should be cut back.
≈ return on marketing investment · marketing roi · marketing return
How to calculate ROMI in a clinic
In words: take the income from patients who came through a channel, subtract what you spent on that channel, divide the result by the same spend and express it as a percentage. Above zero, the channel pays for itself. Below zero, the clinic is paying for those patients out of its own pocket.
It is more honest to use gross profit rather than revenue: revenue minus the direct cost of treatment (materials, lab work, clinician pay). Otherwise a channel can look profitable while the clinic is actually losing money on it.
Why ROMI is often calculated wrongly
- No link between the ad and the payment. If the patient's source is not recorded in the CRM and calls are not tracked with call tracking and UTM tags, ROMI is guesswork.
- Only the first visit is counted. Clinic patients often pay for treatment in stages and come back. Look at income over a longer period, or at LTV.
- Switching off a channel that ‘doesn't work’. Sometimes a channel brings in enough enquiries, but they are lost at the front desk: slow replies, missed calls, no call-back. That is not an advertising problem; it is a handling problem.
Before you change the ad budget, trace the patient's path from enquiry to payment for each channel. If the front desk is losing some patients, fixing that process raises ROMI across every channel at once. You can check your own front desk with the self-check.