When growing a business, exploring marketing channels is a great way to increase visibility and expand your customer reach. Email marketing for dentists is the perfect opportunity to elevate your dental practice and get more clients through the click of a message.
Email marketing remains one of the strongest marketing channels. With a return on investment (ROI) of 3,800%, it is a powerful marketing strategy for your dental practice if used right. It even dominates social media marketing!
Let’s say your dental practice charges $2,000+ for implants. Even if you get just one patient from email marketing, it is incredibly worth it.
Now, how do you begin to implement email marketing in your dental practice?
This comprehensive guide will cover everything you need to know about email marketing for dentists and will answer the following questions:
- How can email marketing be beneficial to my dental practice?
- What are the best practices to keep my clients engaged?
- What types of emails do I send?
- Which email marketing services best fit my current needs and goals?
If you don’t have enough time to focus on email marketing, our experts are ready to help you.
Benefits of Email Marketing for Dentists
There are approximately 4 billion email users worldwide. With this valuable statistic, you can see that this is a tremendous opportunity to leverage email marketing in taking your business to the next level. Email marketing offers a wide range of benefits, from increasing website traffic to developing meaningful relationships with customers.
Cost-Effective
As mentioned earlier, email marketing holds an ROI of 3,800%. With a high ROI, you know that your marketing efforts will have results.
This method of dental marketing will definitely be worth the investment.
Compared to paid advertising, email marketing is more cost-effective and has the potential to yield better results. Although you may have to subscribe to an email marketing service, it is a low price to pay for the results you’re going to get.
You can send a single mass email to a large list of contacts. Each person is a chance for a conversion. As I will mention later in the article, building an email list will drastically improve your conversion rate if done right.
Especially as a dental practice owner, reaching hundreds or thousands of potential clients with a single email is one of the best bangs for your buck.
Build Your Reputation in the Dental Field
In any industry, it is critical to establish trust between the business and the customers. This is particularly true in the healthcare industry. It is important that when potential clients are looking for healthcare providers in dentistry, they find a trustworthy and credible one.
Email marketing can help you build trust with existing and new patients by positioning yourself as a knowledgeable figure in the dental industry. It helps your dental practice build credibility and reputation the right way.
Some email ideas to show that you are an expert in the dental field are:
- Share meaningful content that showcases your expertise and knowledge in the dental industry
- Write a blog post sharing the best oral health tips
This is a great and easy way to start building your reputation and cementing yourself as a credible source in the dental industry. In doing so, you are also differentiating yourself from the local competitors.
In summary, dental email marketing can increase your reputation and trust with patients. As a result, their loyalty will bring more visits to your dental office.
Maintain and Create Relationships with New and Current Patients
Similar to the previous point, trust is the foundation of long-lasting relationships. Email marketing can help you develop a deeper connection with patients that read your emails. As a result, they are more inclined to trust your dental service and come back to book future appointments.
Creating engaging emails shows that you prioritize your patients and their needs. They become more confident that they are valued and that you have their best interests in mind.
The message you send in the email is important to maintain that connection between you and the patient.
Building consumer trust and rapport is significant in strengthening your patient relationships. Their loyalty is invaluable in taking your dental practice to the next level.
Increase Website Traffic
This one is straightforward.
An email marketing campaign can drive more web traffic regularly. The more traffic your website receives, the higher the chance customers will come to your dental office. Also, regular traffic may help you rank higher on search engines, bringing even more visibility to your website.
If you want to discuss more ways to increase your website traffic, book a free appointment with us.
Email Marketing for Dentists – How to Get Started
With the abundant amount of information, it can be overwhelming to figure out where to start with your dental email marketing plan. This section will provide you with a step-by-step guide on how to start email marketing for your dental practice.
Identify a Marketing Goal for Your Practice
With any successful marketing plan or strategy, it is important to have a marketing goal.
What are your goals with email marketing?
- Book more appointments
- Increase dental office visits
- Increase traffic to your website
- Get more clients
- Get more 5 star reviews
Depending on your goals, your marketing strategy or plan will shift toward accomplishing them. Having goals in mind allows you to see the bigger picture and align your efforts to meet those goals.
Identify Your Target Audience
To use the full potential of email marketing, you need to understand who your target audience is.
Who are my current patients? What problems or needs do they have in common? What qualities do they have? What time are they active in their emails?
Asking yourself these types of questions will help you get a good understanding of your target audience for your email campaign. Think about your clients’ demographics, values, and goals. Having a clear understanding of them will help your dental email marketing plan succeed.
Since different groups of people have different problems and traits, you need to make sure to create audience segments that tailor your messages accordingly. This will increase the effectiveness of email marketing for dental clinics because your emails are targeted toward a group of people with similar interests.
Having a different message in your emails dependent on the client can help the audience feel like you are catering to their needs.
For instance, if you are a pediatric dentist, your email marketing content will aim to develop trust with parents and their kids.
Build a List with an Email Marketing Service
Before sending emails to your current and potential clients, you need to compile your email list. A way to do this is to have them sign up through a software program.
Yes, you can manually send out emails to each client. However, this isn’t efficient, and you are wasting precious time. So, you need an email marketing service to streamline this process.
Here are a few email marketing services that will make it easier to send, build, and manage your emails from subject line to content.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is often the first email newsletter tool that comes to mind. Rightfully so, their clean aesthetic and marketing integration set them apart from other newsletter software options. However, their pricing can be expensive, with the premium version costing $299 per month.
Sendinblue
Another email newsletter service is Sendinblue. It is an all-in-one marketing platform with automated email marketing. Compared to Mailchimp, it is significantly cheaper for a high volume single email campaign.
Sendfox
Sendfox is another recommended email marketing software with a clean interface and customizable email options. It offers a lifetime plan of a $50 fee instead of the regular monthly subscription. If you are planning to grow your dental business long-term, then this is the cheapest option available.
Make sure to purchase Sendfox through the AppSumo website for an exclusive deal. This can be found here.
Create Patient Reactivation Campaigns
Losing past patients can be detrimental to the success of your dental practice. However, you can utilize email marketing to win them back.
They represent an opportunity to increase customer growth. Since former clients have experienced your dental services and how your dentists operate, it is easier to encourage them to visit your dental office again.
This is even better than social media marketing in the sense that you can target patients individually to keep them in the loop of your services.
A key point is to understand why your patients left in the first place. This will help you retain your patient size and reduce the chances of another patient leaving. Some common reasons as to why they might have stopped coming are:
- Other dentists offered a competitive price for the same quality services.
- Your practice did not meet the expectations of clients.
- Another dentist offered a premium unique service.
- Your patients no longer trusted your dental practice.
Working on improving these points can incentivize old patients to come back. This is the chance for you to offer them irresistible deals. Try different email content ideas like special promotions and targeted messages.
Leverage Your List To Get Hundreds of 5-Star Reviews
To reiterate, building trust and reputation is key in developing relationships with current and prospective patients. Patient reviews are great sources to increase a positive reputation. Fortunately, email marketing offers an easy and convenient way to obtain good patient reviews.
In your weekly or monthly patient newsletter, you can include a section asking patients to leave 5-star reviews for your dental practice or share their experience getting dental work done. This is a simple, yet effective way to get testimonials and social proof. As a result, you will attract and keep new patients and increase dental office visits.
Send Quality Content to Email Subscribers
To maximize the likelihood of clients clicking on your emails, you want to create quality content that people would want to interact with.
A quality message that employs the right marketing tactics will generate real results.
However, you do want to keep in mind that as a dentist, you should still keep it professional and relevant to your patients. You don’t want to prevent patients from scheduling an appointment due to irrelevant content.
Some email content for your dental practice can be:
- Educational posts about advancements in the dental industry
- Seasonal greetings
- Announcements of special promotions and deals
- Dental tips for clean teeth
- Celebrating a patient’s birthday or milestone
- Sharing the company’s achievements
- Linking to any relevant social media accounts
All of these are examples of how you can keep your email marketing content interactive and engaging. Email subscribers will feel that there is value in joining your email list and community.
But remember to keep the content relevant.
If you want more email content ideas, we are available for a free video consultation.
Dental Email Marketing – Best Practices
Once you have built an email list, it is time to send out your first email. Here are a few strategies to keep in mind when drafting your email.
Personalize Your Emails
Besides keeping your email short and concise, you want to personalize your content so that the readers know they are important. You want to address them and their needs directly. With email marketing services, you can personalize the subject line and body to include their names.
Do make sure to keep the subject line engaging.
Instead of using a generic greeting like “Dear Patient,” you can use a friendly greeting like “Hi Emma.” By making readers feel like they are being cared for, personalization can help improve patient retention. This will also make the readers more likely to click on and read the message.
Avoid Spam Emails
The last thing you want to do is to frustrate your clients by sending too many emails. If they think you are spamming them with emails, they may unsubscribe from your email list. This is the worst-case scenario because their final interaction with your dental practice is negative and most likely, they will not return to your dental office.
You wouldn’t want an email for appointment scheduling to go to spam.
To avoid this, you want to only send emails with valuable information. You also want to create a posting schedule to keep track of your emails. Aim to send out an email newsletter every week or month.
Track Performance with Analytics for Email Marketing for Dental Campaigns
As with any marketing strategy or campaign, it is important to track performance to identify areas of improvement and success. Knowing what subject line and call to action combination were effective can help you refine your email marketing plan. Data tools such as Google Analytics can help you interpret those results.
Look at key metrics such as web visits and conversion rates to determine what worked well and what didn’t. With this insight, you can find new ideas on how to improve your content quality and email personalization.
It’s important to know if readers truly engage with the content.
How Social Media Marketing Differs in Results from Email Marketing for Dental Campaigns
While you have a chance to get to know a practice’s personality and values through social media marketing, email marketing offers a personalized experience that is hard to replicate through social media.
You can personalize an email campaign from the subject line to the content, making the experience much more meaningful for the average consumer.
Social media may offer a wider reach than emails, but you will create a loyal following of long-lasting consumers through a simple email campaign.
Why You Should Still Post on Social Media Regularly as a Dentist
While email marketing will get you far, we still recommend you retain your following on social media through regular posting.
Unlike email marketing, you are able to exchange communication via social media. This means that you can get valuable feedback from your patients.
Social media platforms like Instagram are a great way to receive instant feedback from all campaign efforts.
Do not miss out on another outlet to obtain and retain patients.
Overview of Email Marketing for Dentists
You are now more than ready to begin email marketing for dentists! We live in the age of information and emails are a part of it. There is a huge opportunity to leverage email marketing in the dental industry.
With email marketing, real relationships with patients are formed and trust is built. Our experts at YoYoFuMedia can help you start with email marketing.
Additional Information for Your Dental Practice:
