Not many dental practice owners read up on digital marketing trends on a daily basis. It is not surprising then when they consider email to be dead. It was pronounced dead a long time ago! In the age of online forums, social media and video blogging, sending personalized emails made no sense! But come to think of it, it is the most intimate way to connect with your potential patients. It is like sitting with them in their living room, having a warm cup of tea and explaining to them that why visiting a dentist is important, how you understand their apprehensions and how you will go the extra mile to make them comfortable and provide them the dental care they need.
The power of email is being realised and applied in businesses of all shapes and sizes. So if you haven’t been following digital marketing trends lately, then we have all the required information right here to help you create a stellar and unique email marketing campaign. Let’s get to it!
What Does an Effective Email Marketing Strategy Looks Like
Email is important, but how do you get through to a viewer who receives over a hundred emails a day? Needless to say, you need a lot more than just an automated and generic template to make an impact. You need to stand out amongst the dozens of other emails fighting for attention. And how do you do that? The answer is as simple as it is complicated – you need to be real, you need to be you!
There is just no other way! You need to let your audience see the real you, you need to be warm and vulnerable, you need to be approachable.
Many a time, businesses are so busy being perfect, they forget how uninspiring perfection really is! They want human interaction. They want to know that you understand their fears about going to the dentist, their desires to have a beautiful smile and their need for someone to hold their hand and walk them through the process.
It is no secret that going to the dentist doesn’t top most people’s favorite activity in the world, and by being caring and warm, you can make the whole process a lot easier and relaxing. And emails provide the ultimate vehicle to achieve just that.
By sending informative, personalized and interesting emails to their inbox, you get the opportunity to build a relationship with your existing and potential patients.
The Dreaded Unsubscribe Button!
There will be people who will unsubscribe. Don’t take it personally. For the most part it has nothing to do with you. Don’t lose heart and definitely don’t give up on the rest of your mail list. Just be prepared to deal with the fact that there will be people who don’t want to receive those emails and that is totally alright! It is the nature of business. If anything, ask yourself what you can do to make the content more engaging, without losing sleep over it.
Nurture Your Leads
Email campaigns are similar to going to the gym – we all know workout is healthy, but without motivation, purpose and planning, you really wouldn’t know what you are working towards. Similarly, before you can start hitting your list with blogs, articles and funny videos, you need to have a plan. You need to know your why’s and how’s. And if your why is to promote your services and make sales, then you may want to stop for a second!
Many marketers make the mistake of making their emails sales-y. They want those leads to convert to sales the moment they open their emails. Well, hate to break it to you but that’s not going to happen. There is a higher chance of them unsubscribing than there is of them making a sale just by receiving an email.
Your objective should be to build trust rather than make a sale. Your objective should be to nurture your leads in order to build a relationship of warmth and trust. You need to be very strategic about what you are sending to the inbox. You need to lay the ground work, connect the dots to your primary goal or objective of a specific email campaign. You need to plan months ahead and send relative content in order to build trust and nudge them slowly towards stepping into your practice.
Types of Email Campaigns
There are many different types of email campaigns. You need to consider your annual calendar to prepare and plan out your email campaigns in advance. There are no hard and fast rules about following specific types of campaigns. But campaigns are an ongoing way of remaining ever present and relevant in the back of the mind of your patient. You shouldn’t just be sending emails promoting seasonal deals and then vanish into thin air until the start of the following season.
There are so many types of email campaigns that can be offer oriented and seasonal. These could include Christmas, New Year – New You, Halloween, Summer, Spring, Back to School, Get Ready for Your Formal, Lift Your Spirits, etc. You could also have email campaigns targeting birthdays and follow ups after any procedures conducted with existing patients. Another popular campaign is one which includes surveys and quizzes. These are a great way to encourage engagement and get valuable feedback from patients. Quizzes are a great way to get potential patients to think about their oral health. You can ask them to self-assess their current oral health and identify what their secret dental wish may be. However, be sure to keep them short and simple to follow.
You could combine some of these ideas together or skip a few, depending on your personal preference, your email audience and your campaign objectives. You may even like to split your email list into segments and offer a different campaign which may be only relevant to different parts of your email list at a particular time of the year.
The fact is email marketing is anything but dead. It remains one of the most powerful marketing tools available! Just think about it. Email is powerful enough for huge brands to offer major discounts just to get potential customers to subscribe to their email list.
But getting someone to subscribe isn’t the tough part, keeping them engaged is where you need to do the hard work. So invest your thoughts and efforts into what possibilities email marketing may hold for you. Statistics show that 50% to 80% of revenue comes from email. Those are big numbers with huge potential. And you definitely don’t want to miss out on any of it!
P.S. Whenever you’re ready …. here are 4 ways I can help you grow your dental practice:
- Grab a free chapter from my book “Retention – How to Plug the #1 Profit Leak in Your Dental Practice”
The book is the definitive guide to patient retention and how to use internal marketing to grow your practice – Click Here
2. Join the Savvy Dentist community and connect with dentists who are scaling their practice too
It’s our Facebook group where clever dentists learn to become commercially smart so that they have more patients, more profit and less stress. – Click Here
3. Attend a Practice Max Intensive live event
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4. Work with me and my team privately
If you’d like to work directly with me and my team to take your profit from 6 figures to 7 figures …. just send me a message with the word “Private”… tell me a little about your practice and what you would like to work on together, and I’ll get you all the details! – Click here