Here are 10 ways of Email Marketing for Dentists and Dental Practices
Interactions with your patients can be very limited. They are limited in the sense that they will only come to see you for scheduled visits. However, this does not mean that you can’t have interactions or build a relationship with them outside of these appointments.
It can be easy to overlook the importance of keeping in touch with patients when you only see them every six months. However, with the use of Email Marketing, Dentists can fill in the void in between those visits and build trust and relationships with their patients.
In doing so, they are able to create a community of patients that are loyal and responsive to the Dental Practice.
1. Building a Subscriber List
To be able to make use of Email Marketing, Dentists will need to first need to create ways to contact your Patients and build a list of contacts to whom you can start sending emails. An easy way to get in contact with these people is through the use of WebForms. WebForms allow patients to enter their contact details so that they are able to receive content from your Dental Practice via email.
These forms can then be placed across various channels online, in places where your customer comes into contact with your practice. Examples of these channels include your website, blogs and social media networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram).
It is important to note that to be able to gain a large audience, your channels should link with each other. This is because not everyone is the same and each person has their preferred channel on which they like to communicate.
What makes these forms effective is if patients and customers are given the option to opt-in to receive emails rather than being surprised with a bombardment of unsolicited emails. This helps your emails to avoid ending up being filtered into your patients’ spam folder where it serves no value.
2. Maintain Relationships with Current Patients
Now that you are able to contact your patients, you are given an opportunity to really build trust and a relationship with them. To keep these patients, you need to keep in frequent contact with them and establish a regular, personal connection.
It isn’t enough to just collect Patients’ Emails and wait for them to contact you for any inquiries, it would be better for your Dental Practice to instead reach out to your customers and provide them with the relevant information.
While it is important to make it a routine when sending Emails to your Patients, you must also ensure that you are not overwhelming your subscribers with the number of emails that you send. One way you can find out if you are sending emails out too frequently is by asking the very people you are sending them to. Asking your Patients for any feedback can make them feel valued and that their opinions matter.
3. Personalising Your Emails
There is nothing patients like more than feeling valued. Making patients feel like they matter can help to further build their trust in your Dental Practice as a brand.
This will help to build on that one to one relationship with the customer which is the goal of Email Marketing, and for Dentists, there is no better way to make this happen than through providing patients with a personalised experience.
Personalising emails can help the patients feel more connected to your practice, making them feel valued and appreciated. This can help to build lasting relationships with them and help them become loyal to your brand in the long-run.
Simple things such as addressing them by their name instead of ‘Sir’ or ‘Madam’, sending Birthday Greetings or Seasonal Greetings can make a huge difference to how they feel about your practice and can leave a lasting impression.
Moreover, it can be important to also convey the appropriate tone that reflects your practice when addressing your patients as this can also leave an imprint as to how your practice handles their patients.
Using previous information that you have obtained about the patient such as previous appointments and the treatments they received can also add to the effectiveness of this technique as they feel more of a relationship and history with the practice.
4. Targeted Emails
Similar to personalising your emails, targeted emails can help in
building relationships by segmenting your patients and by sending different segments different pieces of content. This ensures that each patient receives emails with content that is relevant to them and that they are interested in.
For example, patients over the age of 70 may not be interested in receiving information or offers about braces and would much more likely to be interested in dental implants. Offering content that is relevant to your patients will make them feel as if the practice pays attention to them, building on that relationship and trust.
Irrelevant content could have an adverse effect, as patients may just choose to ignore the email altogether and mark it as spam. If a recipient of the email marks it as spam, it means that they do not see any value of the email to them and this could reflect negatively on the practice.
5. Educate Your Patients
Through Email Marketing, Dentists are also able to educate your subscribers. This could be done by linking content from your blogs to the emails that you send. You can personalise this further by targeting specific patients and aligning them to blog posts that are relevant to them by providing information that you think they could get the most value from.
The kind of information you could direct them to includes anything and everything that you have posted on your blog, meaning you have full control over what content to share and what knowledge to impart with.
Through these blog posts, you are able to show off your expertise, knowledge and experience in your field. Providing a link to your blog in your email can help to offer a friendly reminder to your patients that you are a trusted practice capable of delivering high-quality treatment.
6. Keep Patients Up to Date
Emailing patients news about the practice or of any special offers and discounts may be the most traditional way for Dentists to use email marketing but it is not to be discounted. Although it can be seen as a more ‘salesman-like’ approach, this can be a very helpful and proven way of making conversions and engagements happen.
Providing updates on anything new happening at your practice such as new services and treatments can help to garner interest and attention around these topics and will help to keep patients informed.
This maintains the relationship with them and could even influence them into making a purchase. Newsletters are a good way of doing this and can be very helpful in providing valuable information in a familiar format that is concise and easy to read.
7. Increased Web Traffic
As explained in point one, it is important to create links between all forms of media to ensure that you are able to reach a wide range of viewers across multiple platforms. Additionally, with the use of email marketing, Dentists can include within the emails that they send, numerous links back to their website, their blog and also social media networks, thus helping you improve your Dental SEO.
Doing this encourages more patients to look at your sites and exposes them to more content. The more information the patients and potential customers are given about the company, the more likely they are to trust in the credibility and professionalism of the practice and thus will be more inclined to become more engaged and converted, leading to more loyal and responsive patients.
8. Optimise for Alternative Devices
Nowadays, with technology progressing so rapidly and with such readily available state-of-the-art smartphones and tablets, we have more access to information now than ever before. With information on the internet being so vast and easily accessible on multiple devices, it may be a good idea to optimise your content for all these platforms.
In the case of email marketing, well over half of emails are opened on mobile phones. Therefore, it would make sense to have emails optimised for these people that prefer to access their emails from their smartphone or tablet.
Patients will be more likely to open an email that is optimised for their mobile as it will make it easier to read the contents of the email. It is important to consider the screen size of a smartphone and tablet as it is a lot different to the screen size of a desktop PC. This makes sure that the contents are clear and visible and not cut off around the screen.
9. Encourage a Call-to-Action
In order to create a relationship with your audience and then build trust, your practice should provide various calls-to-action. Calls-to-action are pieces of content intended to induce the viewer to perform a specific act or take a form of instruction. In essence, it is a technique that can make your patients become more responsive and engaged with your practice.
Using it in your emails to ask them to check your website, read an article from your blog, book an appointment or try out a new product are just a few examples of how you can use calls-to-action.
Calls-to-action can be a very useful technique in not only helping customers along the purchase process but also can be helpful in attracting new customers and drawing in new patients to your practice. An example of this is by having a referral system in place alongside the emails that you send.
You could do this by implementing a reward scheme that rewards people for referring new patients to sign up for email marketing. Asking patients to also leave reviews or using testimonials can also be an effective way in not just getting feedback but also gaining trust from potential patients as seeing positive reviews can reinforce your credibility.
10. Easy to Monitor Progress
Email marketing has also allowed companies to offer email marketing services. Email marketing software services enable you to create automated emails, manage your contacts, segment them into groups and track the performance of your email campaigns.
Some free services include MailChimp, ReachMail and Benchmark. Which offer a free email marketing service with the basic features. However, if your practice has a dedicated marketing team and you have the resources, you can go a step further and look towards using paid software such as: Infusionsoft, HubSpot and MyEmma.
These offer much more powerful analytics to monitor and track how many of your patients actually open your emails, click through on the links that you leave, seeing how many people actually receive your emails and seeing your patients’ conversion rates.
Being able to monitor the progress of your email marketing allows you to make changes and tweaks if, when and where you see necessary. This ensures that you are getting the most that you possibly can from using email as a dental marketing strategy.
Want to take your practice email marketing game to the next level?
Here is your ULTIMATE guide on getting started with Email Newsletter for your Dental Practice. Enjoy!
