Dental Email Marketing Trends You Must Know
How often do your patients hear from you when they’re not at your office or getting transactional communication from you? When I think of the variety of my family’s healthcare providers, it’s not that often that I get a value-add. There are a select few that do send me their email newsletters, and even if I’m not particularly interested in the monthly topic, it does put their names in front of me regularly so I don’t forget about their services, or forget to refer to them should a friend have a need.
Email Marketing Is Up To 40 Times More Effective Than Social Media
And you know what, with dental email automation, it doesn’t take a big effort to make a pretty positive impression. Especially when you don’t have to worry about content creation!
So the point of this blog is to remember not to abandon email marketing, but rather get back at it like a heavy-weight fighter! It’s one major patient communications powerhouse in your marketing arsenal, with 60% of consumers saying it influences their buying decisions, and 80% of business professionals believing it increases customer retention.
And … not to be salesy out of the gate on this blog, but for great patient engagement and retention, our super-easy, set and forget, high-quality monthly patient email newsletters get DOUBLE the industry open rate. And you can activate them FREE with your Practice ZEBRA subscription. Isn’t that just a no-brainer? You don’t have to create content, we brand the communications to you … and educational content that patients will enjoy will hit your patient households each month, setting your practice apart and helping to ensure your patients stay your patients?
99% of consumers check email every day
58% check email before news (5%), social (14%), or search (23%) combined
Therefore, with email marketing so powerful for dental offices … you’ll want to make sure that your emails are making it to your patients inbox.
- Do you know how your data compare’s to the dental industry?
- Did you know that the average dental practice is MISSING almost 40% of their patient email contacts?
- Do you know what the stat is for your practice? Do you know that we can quickly and easily help you with all this?
A practice management enhancement tool like Practice ZEBRA provides easily clickable lists including patients with missing or incorrect emails so that you can get a clean-up crew on top of that.
Because email is such a powerful patient communication function, this task should be a goal for completion by year-end. (And it can be done, top practices maintain over 90%, missing just 7% on average). If you’re not sure how to get your lists, schedule a time to review with your Account Manager.
Step 2 … implement a complete email strategy.
Email is appealing and used by patients of all ages. In fact, email engagement has increased by almost 80% over the last twelve months. I guess COVID has given people more time to check their emails and make buying decisions! We’re at home but we’re on our devices!
According to Neil Patel, “email marketing is still ranked as the most effective marketing channel, beating out social, SEO, and affiliate marketing.” And the stats concur.
Everyone expects emails from their preferred providers. Yes, our inboxes may be overflowing, but when we see a subject line that catches our attention, a provider name that we’ve been meaning to contact, or we see content relevant to something we’ve been thinking about, email gets read. When good content comes in, we continue to be subscribed. The worst thing a business can do is discount the power of email marketing due to anecdotal feelings that it won’t work or because we don’t want to be part of the clutter. Email marketing is a critical component of your marketing mix despite the overload.
Your high-quality dentist emails will trigger action. The important thing is to be there consistently so your business is seen, known and can be easily found.
Email marketing truly takes limited time and effort on your part. If you have a great marketing partner, (like us at Patient NEWS), you can set and forget much of your email marketing strategy and have your campaigns structured in a way to consistently stay connected with your patients 24/7 without even thinking about it. The most successful practices do this.
According to the Direct Mail Association, you can expect an average return of $42 for every $1 you spend on email marketing. For a dental practice, when you think of email newsletters, appointment reminders, review generation, and other sales-oriented tasks being automated by email doesn’t that seem like a pretty conservative ROI estimate? And that is huge!
Half of consumers say they would like to receive promotional emails (from their favorite brands) weekly. Maybe “the dentist” isn’t a “favorite brand” but it could be, and regardless, this statistic demonstrates that people are interested in hearing from brands they choose. When you send quality information, your patients will look forward to hearing from you, they’ll forward to friends and refer, and they’ll remain connected!
With dental software like Practice ZEBRA, you can have all of your email marketing with one convenient supplier. Email marketing doesn’t have to be complicated, you can select which patient communication modules you want, and then your Account Manager will set everything up for you, and it will all just run.
What’s in ZEBRA (so far) when it comes to dental email services & marketing automation for dentists:
Monthly Patient Email Newsletters
We are the patient newsletter gurus. Our writers are the best in the industry. All we do is create great content for dental offices to share in their newsletters, websites, social feeds and email.
Set and forget great quality dental email newsletters to reach patient inboxes monthly. Newsletters are branded, include your contact information and a reminder that you accept patient referrals. Our email newsletters boast DOUBLE the open rate over industry newsletters, and what patients click most, the practice phone number or website.
This email solution makes it super easy for your patients to reach you and stay connected.
Google/Facebook Reviews From Patients – Review BOOSTER
Reviews are becoming more and more important, and when you make it easy for patients to post a positive review, they will! Dental offices that switched to Review BOOSTER almost doubled their Google review count … and gained 52% more reviews in the period after implementation compared to the same timeframe before start.
“On Average Review BOOSTER Users Almost Doubled Google Reviews”
Plus, if you’re using Podium or Birdeye, you can replace that technology with Review BOOSTER …and gain so much more. For one thing, the email portion of your patient review communications includes a value-add educational article, and we include a function to help direct “not so great” reviews back to you instead of pushing patients online. Also…
All email automation solutions in Practice ZEBRA are included in your one low monthly fee. So you can eliminate the pain of having multiple providers and reduce your monthly costs.
Appointment Reminders
Today almost everyone has an automated appointment reminder system. Like those, ZEBRA’s reminder solution (text & email) will help your team save time, increase practice efficiencies, and reduce no-shows. With read/write capability, it makes it simple to ditch other automation budgets and your brand image will be consistent through all of your marketing automation.
Dental Membership Plan promotion.
We have found that in-house plan patients usually contribute higher revenue than non-insured patients, and in-house plans are a great way to convert more new patients. If your practice (US only) has a membership plan, you’ve probably found it difficult to promote to non-insured patients. Either the message is going to all patients, or the task is left to seeing patients when they’re in and cherry-picking who finds out about your plan. With ZEBRA’s automated DMP Booster, non-insured patients receive an automated cadence to promote your plan and remind them to consider it when their appointment is pending. In addition, we can also include reminders to boost renewals for your plan. Check out your patient values in Practice ZEBRA … you will be able to review:
- Average patient value versus new patient value
- Average non-insured value versus each insurance program
- Average membership plan value compared to above
Email Anything Anytime
If COVID-19 taught us anything, it’s that sometimes you need to send a custom message to your patients but you don’t have time to deal with creating the message or sending it to patients. ZEBRA’s email anytime solution does just that.
All you have to do is tell your Account Manager what you want patients to know, and we’ll take care of it all for you, including the email subject lines that will increase opens. Or, of course, you can log into Practice ZEBRA and take care of it all yourself. Whatever you like, ZEBRA makes it super easy to get messages out fast.
Do take a look at your email marketing strategy and consider the various components you’d like to add to your marketing mix as we close out 2020 and head into 2021, and know that the team at Patient NEWS can help you with any dental email service.
The number one thing I recommend is to get a monthly newsletter going. It’s not a cost issue, and if you don’t want to create the content, implement our monthly patient email newsletter. I’ll bet most of the dental competitors in your area are not doing it, and with Practice ZEBRA, it’s super easy, takes no effort, and will make a positive impact on patients.
Contact your Account Manager to make sure you have this module activated.