What Is Integrated Dental Marketing?
Email has been around longer than the internet itself — but its dental marketing effectiveness continues to grow!
Here’s how to integrate a smart email strategy for your dental practice into your overall marketing efforts. It will help you retain and motivate patients to schedule and accept treatment.
Why Is Integrated Dental Marketing Important?
With so many new and sophisticated apps and social media platforms, the humble email sometimes gets pushed aside as an old and obsolete marketing tool. Nothing could be further from the truth!
A strategic approach to emailing your current patients should be a cornerstone of your dental practice’s digital marketing plan.
Here are a 6 reasons why an integrated dental marketing plan should include email:
1. Virtually Everyone Uses Email, and Checks It Often
Over 90 percent of adult internet users in the U.S. regularly use email! And it’s not just the older age groups — over 75 percent of teens report checking their email frequently as well.
With the rise of mobile devices, we carry our email inboxes in our pockets all day, and often check them the moment we get a notification.
How can an integrated dental marketing campaign improve practice growth?
When you send valuable, engaging content to your patient email list, there’s a higher chance of them actually seeing it than if you were to send it through just about any other medium.
Your patient email list is a direct channel to the people who care about your practice and team, and would recommend you to family and friends. Email can be a big part of strengthening your relationships with your patients.
2. Email Offers Better Organic Reach Than Social Media
Speaking of getting through to the people who can help you grow your business, you’ve probably noticed it’s getting harder to do that on social media.
All major social media platforms are now using algorithms to determine which posts to show users, and unless you promote your practice’s posts, your content is only reaching a small fraction of your follower base.
Social media marketing studies estimate that on Facebook, un-boosted posts from business pages only reach about 2 percent of their fans!
While connecting with patients and prospective patients on social media is certainly worth the effort, sending an email to a well-tended patient email list allows you to reach upwards of 90% of those people, unobstructed by content algorithms.
3. Emails Motivate People to Act
Dental digital marketing tools have different strengths.
Social media is good at establishing an online presence, building a brand and connecting with people on a personal level.
Online reviews grow your practice’s visibility, reputation, and are a strong social proof statement. Reviews help to increase phone calls and convert patients to scheduling appointments.
Email is an excellent vehicle for telling patients and prospective patients about products, upcoming events, promotions, and educational material that can improve the overall health of their lives.
Your patients expect emails to be a little more “salesy”. Whereas on social media too much promotional content could cause someone to click the unfollow button.
A quick email telling your patients about a whitening deal or referral bonus could be just the thing to motivate them to take action.
4. Email Offers Outstanding ROI
Gone are the days of needing to spend thousands of dollars on mass mailers to promote your practice — email marketing gives you the tools to create and send high-quality content to thousands of addresses at little to no cost.
If you’re looking to improve your dental marketing ROI, here is one simple way to do it.
Drop your marketing costs by moving your efforts to less expensive dental marketing services through bundling. You can also substitute traditional marketing campaigns with digital dental marketing campaigns that you can do for free. Email is one strategy of substitution.
Where a practice will spend thousands of dollars on a print mail campaign, or a bill board, they can send an email for next to nothing.
Need an email provider? MailChimp is a great option for dental practices.
Email Engagement Statistics Are Easily Measurable
Most of the dental patient management systems now-a-days have email integration. If you’re not familiar with what your PMS system offers, give them a call. Development on PMS software systems has picked up in the last couple of years and there is probably a solution available and no additional cost.
I recommend that you use an independent solution like MailChimp. Mailchimp is super easy to use because there has been a decade or more of development on the service. They do email marketing better than about anyone.
Another option would be Constant Contact. With either of these two option any dental practice marketing manager can easily manage their email campaign efforts.
Mailchimp and almost all email marketing services will show you exactly how many people are receiving, opening, and interacting with your emails.
Email statistics are an easy way to see what’s popular with your patients and prospective patients, and what motivates them to action.
5.) Integrated Email Marketing and Blogging Go Hand In Hand
Have you ever sat in on a dental practice marketing meeting and someone is tasked with writing a blog post and another person is tasked with writing an email? I hope this never happens to you.
Integrating email and blogging is a super simple and frankly obvious way to manage a dental practices blogging and email marketing.
You do this by doing the following:
- Identify a marketing topic or initiative.
- Write a 500 word blog post about it.
- Copy the title and first paragraph of your blog post.
- Paste the title and first paragraph into your email server.
- Add a link to “Read The Full Article Here”
- Push the send button.
You’ve essentially killed two birds with one stone. Or maybe fixed two teeth with one… ugh… that doesn’t work.
But you get the idea. Only write one thing and publish it in multiple places. Blogging is something that every dentist should be doing.
Another Great Way To Integrate Your Dental Marketing
Why not take the blog article that you wrote above and post the same content to your Facebook page?
If you snapped a quick photo and added it to the post, you’d have a pretty awesome dental post idea, wouldn’t you. An image and a information piece of content to back it up.
6. Content-Rich Emails Build Your Other Social Media Pages
Another idea would be to leverage your social media posts.
All you have to do is create a monthly email newsletter that features one or two of your best posts from each page, and invite readers to stay in touch by following.
Showcase your team’s personality and practice culture, and invite fans to participate in campaigns and contests!
Your patient email list is one of your greatest opportunities for integrated dental marketing, and only using it to send appointment reminders ignores so much of its potential.
About the Author: Adrian Lefler is a dental digital marketing expert and one of the founding members of My Social Practice. My Social Practice is a dental marketing services company located in Salt Lake City, Utah. Adrian is passionate about helping dental practices grow through digital marketing. If you’d like to book Adrian or one of the other members of My Social Practice’s speaking team, you can do that HERE. Interested in learning more about the benefits of SEO for dental practices or our agile dental website development service, you can learn more here.
