Effective Email Marketing Strategies for Dental Practices

Don’t discount email marketing as a valuable part of your marketing strategy. This type of online marketing is affordable, can enhance your credibility, and help you build patient loyalty.

Email marketing can help you grow your practice. At the same time, you build your credibility as a trusted dental service provider when you share informative and engaging contact with existing and potential patients.

Personalised email content encourages community engagement and helps you increase revenue when you offer enticing specials or promotions that bring patients to your door.

And it doesn’t have to be time consuming or expensive to start an email marketing campaign. This is an excellent strategy for dental practices with minimal budgets for marketing.

5 Essential Emails to Get Your Campaign Off to a Great Start

Creating emails ahead of time for your marketing campaign can help you set up an automated delivery system so you don’t have to spend time managing your emails. Essentially, you can set it up and let it do the work for you.

Here are five emails to consider creating for your dental marketing campaign.

The Welcome Email

This is the first email you’ll send to your community once they sign up for your list. In this email, you can introduce your dental practice and give a brief overview of what your clinic focuses on. In addition, you may want to offer a promotion or savings to encourage prospective patients to schedule an appointment with you.

New Product or Service Email

This email is an excellent opportunity to outline new products or services you have to offer your patients. For example, maybe you have an exciting new teeth whitening product to tell patients about, or you’d like to highlight Invisalign services. Create an informative email about it!

This is another excellent opportunity to offer a limited-time special on the product or service you are highlighting.

How-To, Educational, or Tutorial Emails

This email helps to build your credibility with your community as a trusted dental service provider while also providing something of value to your readers.

Your email could include a ‘proper brushing and flossing techniques’ tutorial. Or perhaps a link to download an informative E-book on dental implants.

Periodically sending out information to your prospective patients that is helpful and piques their interest may help them take the next steps towards scheduling an appointment at your dental clinic.

Reminder Emails

When you email your patients to remind them about upcoming appointments, the purpose can be twofold. First, you can remind your patients of their scheduled appointments to avoid having no-shows and open time in your schedule, and you can also use this email as a marketing opportunity.

This type of email could also remind patients that it’s time to schedule their next dental visit. For example, if it’s time for their next teeth cleaning and checkup, you can remind them to schedule their appointment and offer a take-home teeth whitening promotion they can redeem when they come in.

Targeted Promotional Emails

Targeted promotional emails can help you reward loyal patients, re-engage patients who become inactive, or just present a new promotion to a portion of your dental practice.

You can target specific segments of your email list with a special that would grab their attention, such as a New Year’s special for teeth whitening. Patient groups like gen z or millennials are especially motivated by promotions.

Targeted promotional emails may help you promote more engagement with your community.

Starting Your Email Campaign

Now that you’ve seen how easy it can be to create a successful email marketing campaign, let’s talk about getting started.

Step #1 – Choose an Email Marketing Platform

Using an email marketing platform will save you valuable time and money. You can create emails with provided templates to incorporate your own creativity and design with a platform. You can use the platforms’ automation to personalise your emails and set up a schedule to send them out.

Some things to keep in mind when choosing a platform are:

• Look for a platform with the right design features for your needs. You’ll want a lot of creative templates to choose from if you’re just getting started. If you have more experience creating content, find a platform that gives you the freedom to create your own emails.
• Choose a platform that is mobile friendly. This is critical since most people check their emails and consume content on their smartphones.
• Find a provider that provides a secure and straightforward way to transport your data, so you can transfer your email information and get up and running as soon as possible.

Step #2 – Create Your Signup Form

You will want to create a form designed to gather email information so you can get your community signed up for your emails. You can use a pop-up form or inline form on your website. These forms appear when readers visit certain pages of your website. You can also create a full-page form with a link you can share to sign readers up.

Step #3 - Start Gathering Emails With Your New Form

Now you can start gathering emails with your form. Do this by including forms on your website or even other people’s websites if you guest write a blog post, for example.

You can also use your social media accounts to promote signing up and gathering email information. For example, paid searches can drive traffic to your full-page form so potential patients can sign up.

Community events are another excellent option for gathering email signups. Create a small gift like a travel toothbrush in exchange for emails.

Don’t forget to have your staff ask new patients to sign up on their first visit. Or your hygienist can ask for patient emails when scheduling their recall appointments.

Begin Sending Your Emails

Start sending your first emails once you have an email list and an audience, beginning with your welcome email. This should be the first email in your automation process designed to send a series of scheduled emails out whenever someone signs up.

If you’ve decided to send emails to existing patients in your database, you may want to start with an educational email or a targeted promotion to encourage engagement.

Step #4 – Keep Track of Your Numbers to Monitor Your Goals

Like any other marketing campaign, it’s essential to keep track of your performance so you can make educated decisions about how to use your marketing resources.

Some hallmarks of a successful email marketing campaign are:

• Click-through rates: How many people are opening your emails and clicking through links in them?
• Unsubscribers: How many people are choosing to unsubscribe from your email list?
• Conversion rates: How many new patients or people are you getting who are interested in your promotions or specials?

These numbers will help you understand how successful your email marketing campaign is and if you should be changing your promotions. 

 Do You Need Help With Your Marketing Strategies?

If you have questions about the right marketing strategies for your dental practice, contact your team at Great Dental Websites today for more information. We’re here to help!