There’s an old saying that water can slowly wear away rock because it’s persistent.
There’s a lesson here for dentists when it comes to attracting new dental patients: persistence pays off.
Google estimates that buyers will consult up to 10.4 sources of information before making a purchasing decision. But those buyers will likely come to a decision over time. Dental patients are no different. You want to make sure that that vast majority of those information sources come from you.
The only way you accomplish that is to “drip” a carefully timed flow of relevant, interesting, and useful content to your prospects. Here, though, the math is against you. You may have a dozen, largely separate dental issues that you address. If you’re going to make 10 contacts with each segment of your prospects, that’s 120 pieces of content!
You can produce those, although it’ll take a great deal of your time and/or your staff’s. But the real issue is to keep track of who gets what content and when they receive it. Contact them too often, and you’re a nuisance. Too seldom, and they’ll be looking at another dentist.
And if you’re nurturing 100 prospects, that’s 1200 pieces of content that has to go out via email at just the right time to just the right people. That’s a job and a half, and it never ends.
If you’re going to attract more prospects, sell them on you, and convert them into paying patients, you need an email automation program. Ideally, it would also serve as a customer relationship management (CRM) program.
There are a lot of those automation programs out there. They vary in quality, complexity, capabilities, and price.
SmartBox provides our more than 500 dentists with Infusionsoft® Drip Marketing; we’re a Top 5 Infusionsoft partner. Infusionsoft allows you to carefully segment your prospects and “drip” information to them at predetermined intervals. It also handles your CRM tasks.
To be fair, Infusionsoft offers so many capabilities that it can be daunting for a small dental practice to set up and master. That’s why we handle our dentists’ drip marketing, email campaigns, and even content creation.
The alternative, of course, is to staff up to handle your automated customer contacts. Even with a less capable program than Infusionsoft, you might have to add staff.
With dental competition increasing, the name of the game is to stay in front of your prospects until they’re ready to buy. Dentists who do that – correctly – will thrive. Those who don’t, won’t.
If you’re not already using an automated email/CRM program, do your research to find one that fits your needs and is easy to set up and use. You’ll still need to produce all the content for your drip marketing programs, and refresh it from time to time. If your practice can handle that you should be able to compete with all the other solo dental practices, large practices, and corporate practices who are also going after your prospects. At the least, you can hopefully hold market share, if not increase it.
Or, you can contact SmartBox Web Marketing and benefit from what we do for over 500 dentists on three continents.