Email Marketing Strategy and Tips for Successful Dental Practices

Automated mailing software allows dental practices to form bonds and connections with their patients that simply weren’t possible in analog times.

If you still haven’t caught on, email campaigns are extremely cost effective and have a 4200% ROI. That is to say, for every dollar spent on an email campaign, you get 42 back. Still, need convincing?

This article will clarify the benefits of email marketing for dentistry, as well as provide useful tips on what to and not to do.

Does an email campaign warrant the effort?

Absolutely it does.

It’s a cost effective way to reach out to and build relationships with your patients outside the office. Patient retention and patient acquisition are key to the prosperity of your business.

Email campaigns are an outlet to brag about your achievements and strengthen your dental reputation. A well-kept reputation is incredibly important for a healthcare provider, as word-of-mouth is still a major part of your practice’s success.

They can be the best driving force to bring more traffic to your website, increase conversions, and bag appointments. There are a lot of tools and metrics to help you keep tabs on the source of the traffic your website gets, as well as track conversions and appointment tallies.

Define clear goals

Like any enterprise worth taking on, email campaigns should have clearly defined goals and targets from the get go.

Take the time to define your goals carefully and, preferably, with professional assistance, as well as time to refine them in accordance with incoming data.

Here’s a list of what goals you should set your sights on:

Increasing appointments

Boosting traffic on your website

Garnering more positive reviews

Improving your referral rate

Brand your emails correctly

Emails are an extension, if not a crucial part, of your visual identity. Just plain text with some poorly formatted color changes and bold patches will not do the trick.

It’s not just a frivolous fashion statement - research has shown that consistent brand presentation increases revenue by up to 23 percent!

Make sure you use a consistent color palette that matches your company scheme. Optimize your signature, so it not only looks professional but can garner new leads as well. Make sure to include all your social media links.

Get the formatting right

A consistent formatting scheme for your email campaign will make your emails instantly recognizable and make your business look much more professional. An ugly font and an inconsistent typeface scheme makes you look amateurish at best.

If you overdo your formatting, add too many bright colors, use annoying fonts, you can actually do the opposite of instilling confidence in your practice.

Hiring a professional for a one off to really get the formatting right is an excellent move, and you shouldn’t shy away from it.

Mobile is king

Who sits down in front of a desktop computer and reads emails these days? We’ve all got supermachines in our pockets, and people tend to use those exclusively. In fact, more than half of email campaigns are read on a phone or tablet.

If you neglect this fact and your emails look janky and malformed on mobile devices, you can kiss those conversions goodbye.

Make your emails ‘funducational’

Provide useful insights on oral hygiene to your patients. This gives your email campaign additional value.

If you’re fresh out of ideas, you can give them the old ‘Proper brushing technique’ sugar-me-do. ‘Don’t ignore bleeding gums!’, ‘Floss regularly,’ and similar life lessons have been drilled into people’s subconscious from their childhood years straight into deep old age. For a good reason, too, they are all valid points.

However, if you really want to engage your patient base, you can find thousands of interesting, dental-related topics, factoids, and tidbits online. Create a compelling story, something that will pique their interests and capture their imaginations.

For example, you can send an email explaining how the oldest tooth fillings found were over 13,000 years old and that it used bitumen, the same stuff roads are made of. Then you can inform your mailing list that you, fortunately, use much safer materials.

HIPAA compliance is paramount

Of course, you want to share the results of a procedure you’re particularly proud of.

Don’t get carried away with your dental success stories and accidentally share some photographs that can get you in trouble for spreading personal information.

Make sure the photos you share don’t have names, dental records, or any personally identifiable details. Also, inform your mailing list recipients of what kinds of emails they can expect.

The importance of a good welcoming email

The first impression is the most important if you don’t want it to be the last impression.

The onboarding email for your new patients should be short, sweet, to the point. It should include a nice picture of you and the staff and inform the recipient of what kind of content they can expect from your email feed and a promise of a spam-free future.

Set up an email appointment confirmation system

Request a single click from your patients to confirm upcoming appointments.

It shows you care about your patient's time, and it sets up an alleyway for useful communication in case of any hiccups.

Software can be set up to automate this procedure fairly easily.

Email campaigns are an excellent tool for patient reactivation

Retention rates are extremely important for a dental practice. You want to keep your patients for life, if possible.

But just because you can’t win ‘em all and you lose some patients, that doesn’t have to be farewell forever.

Set up a campaign to inform your old patients about new procedures and new equipment you’ve acquired. Remind them of the painless times they’ve had at your office and invite them back to give you another chance. You’ve got nothing to lose and patients to gain.

How was your visit?

Don’t be too pushy, but an email following up on a recent visit can make the patient feel cared for and listened to.

Give them a chance to give you honest feedback. Many people who have genuine advice are too shy to say them face to face, so this can be a powerful way to get helpful insights into how to enhance your practice.

Emails full of praise from a satisfied patient are precious entries in the ‘Customer review’ section of your website.

Be consistent

If you’ve promised a monthly newsletter, make sure you deliver. Each skipped month is a tarnish on your reputation - why would you say you’d send out monthly emails and only send one every four months? Unprofessional.

Use data tracking tools

If you decide on not hiring a dental marketing agency and go your own way, make sure you use the tools at your disposal.

Google analytics alone can provide you with valuable data concerning your patients’ behavior and stance toward your campaign and online presence.

Conclusion

It’s understandable if all of this seems daunting and intimidating. After all, you’re a dentist, not a digital marketer.

The good news is there are professionals that can handle this work for you. Even with the agency fees, email marketing campaigns for dentists are one of the easiest and well researched ways to improve patient satisfaction, build a community, maintain your reputation, and, of course, increase the overall appointment quantity and revenue of your practice.