Grow Your Dental Practice Using Email Marketing

Email addresses are gold for your business. Without them, you don’t have a ready and willing audience for the email marketing campaigns necessary to market and grow your dental practice and boost revenues. No matter what specialty you perform, you should collect email addresses for everyone who walks through the door.

But how to ask? Here are a few dental marketing tips to help you make email collection part of your office practice:

• Have your patient information sheet designed so that it includes space for an email address, along with telephone number and mailing address. If a form is returned without an email address, ensure your staff is trained to ask the patient to please fill in the address if they have one.

• Let the patient know you’re asking because you want to keep in touch so that he or she is informed of all important announcements, doesn’t miss out on time-limited special offers and is given the opportunity to save by filling in for a last-minute cancellation. Once patients know that you plan to email them regularly — and that you could be making offers that will benefit them — they will be more willing to hand over their online address. And they will be more likely to look for your emails. There is a big difference between advertising your dental practice only using marketing promotions and advertisements versus maintaining a relationship with you patients and focusing on what is good for them and not necessarily yourself..

• As an alternative, you can add a section for email addresses on your patient information form. For example, along with asking for the patient’s email address, you might want to ask how often they check it. While most people check their emails daily, others rarely do. Knowing this will help improve customer service. You might also want to ask whether the patient prefers to be contacted by email or phone. Chances are he or she will choose email, since emails can be read at the recipient’s leisure, making this a convenient method of communication. Again, this lets the patient know you intend to keep in touch online, which will signal your patient to keep on the lookout for messages from you. This ensures your emails will not be deleted before they are opened.

• Email addresses should also be collected when a new patient calls in search of a dentist. By collecting it before the first visit — even before an appointment is made — you will have the opportunity to begin building a strong patient relationship by sending them a “welcome to the practice” email. This is one of the most powerful marketing tools to ensuring that the patient will show up to their first appointment and will become a loyal and long-term patient of your practice.

• Because email addresses often change, staff should ask for a current online address each time a patient calls for an appointment. This way, an important announcement or special offer will not bounce back, causing scheduling problems or missed sales opportunities.

• While signing up visitors to your website is the easiest and fastest way to collect email addresses from non-patients, you can also collect email addresses from friends of patients through your email marketing campaigns by offering the patient and a friend a patient marketing promotion or advertisement that requires an email address be collected when the offer is accepted.

Want to instantly grow your practice through email marketing? It’s simple: collect email addresses!