Email campaigns are a very effective means of educating your dental prospects about the solutions to their dental problems. Maintaining regular contact also keeps you top-of-mind with prospects and gives them reasons to choose you when they’re ready to select a dentist.
However, getting the content and timing of email campaigns can be tricky. Here are four dental email campaign mistakes that you must avoid if you’re going to get more new patients.
- Not having dedicated content streams.
Ideally, you’ll have separate content streams for prospects with specific dental issues: missing teeth, gum disease, cosmetic needs, and so forth. You should consider producing at least 10 informative, expertly-written emails for each stream. Depending on the nature of your practice, that could be as few as four streams or as many as twelve. Regardless, it’s a huge commitment of time and effort to produce that content.
- Not considering where each prospect is in your sales funnel.
Your content should be written to take your prospects on a journey beginning with acknowledgement of the impact of their problem on their emotional, physical, and social well-being, and ending with them picking up the phone to book an appointment. But your prospects enter your sales funnel at different times. Sending out the last email in a series as the first contact with a prospect is a losing strategy. You must have a way to take each prospect on the journey from start to finish.
- Emailing too often or too little.
The next question is the timing of your emails. Just like that neighbor who you enjoy talking with, but not every day, sending emails to your prospects is a balancing act. Too often, and you’ll be viewed as being pushy and intrusive. Too seldom, and you run the risk that the people you’re trying to convert will choose another dentist.
- Not knowing what works.
Dentists are notorious for not testing which emails work best to get prospects to pick up the phone. An email has a number of parts that may or may not further that goal: the subject line, the opening, the amount of text versus the amount of graphics, the comprehension level of the text, the call-to-action, and more. Testing different combinations to find the right balance between those factors for different content streams takes a great deal of time, effort, and monitoring.
Juggling those four considerations – different content streams, prospects at different points in the sales funnel, timing, and testing – can eat up a tremendous amount of staff time when it’s handled manually. There’s also a high likelihood of some prospects receiving the wrong emails at the wrong time, or not receiving them at all.
Automation is the Solution
Automated email marketing takes the guesswork out of timing your email campaigns and ensuring that prospects receive the correct emails for their respective stages of the journey.
Automated systems maintain your content in a database, together with prospects email addresses. Once a prospect is entered into the system, he or she will receive the correct emails at carefully determined intervals. Automation also simplifies testing different combinations of subject line, call-to-action, and so on to help you dial in on what works best.
There are any number of email automation programs out there, varying in cost, ease of use, and features. If you’d like to learn more about one of the programs SmartBox Web Marketing provides for its dentists, visit www.smartboxwebmarketing.com.