While people’s inboxes are often crowded, email marketing can still serve many important purposes for dental practices. Fortunately, a little knowledge can go a long way to make your dental email marketing profitable.
For example, interesting email subject lines for dentists can make sure your email gets opened. Sending an email with “Dental Office Newsletter” as a subject probably won’t get much attention. “Want whiter teeth in just a few minutes? Here’s how” would be much more likely to be opened.
Also, sending long emails that don’t give people reasons to keep reading is a surefire way to have them unsubscribe or stop opening them. But interesting emails, even if you are working from dental email templates, can keep people reading to the end and even take action on a promotional offer.
In other words, not all email marketing works. But it’s super easy to put together effective email marketing campaigns. Here are three of my favorite ways to use email marketing to grow your dental practice.
Using Email Marketing to Generate Interest in Your Practice Before It Opens
One of my favorite ways to use email marketing for dental practices is to use it to help dentists build a waiting list for appointments even before they open. For example, email marketing was a key part of the strategy used by Dr. Ashley Joves get about 300 people on her VIP email waiting list and have 50 people schedule appointments before she even opened the doors!
Email marketing is an easy way to keep in touch with people and share your vision, practice culture, construction updates, pictures, videos, and more. The best part is for much of this time you won’t have anything to sell, so your emails will mainly build relationships and get people emotionally connected to your practice. When it’s time to open your doors, you’ll have already built significant momentum.
Using Email Marketing to Make Your Facebook Ads More Effective at Finding Ideal Patients for an Existing Practice
Email marketing is a great way to get more patients to your practice. For example, you can create a series of emails that give people more information about relevant procedures after emailing them a free checklist or guide you promised in a Facebook ad. That series of emails will also help you build trust with them through additional touch points and sharing your practice story and culture.
If your Facebook ad was about sleep apnea, you can follow up with emails talking about the dangers of sleep apnea and solutions to sleep apnea, and offer them a free consultation about sleep apnea treatments.
This builds trust with the patient over time, adding valuable information and even offering them a free consultation over email before presenting them with any treatment plan. If you’re looking to promote sleep apnea solutions, this is a great way to use an automated email series to improve your return on investment.
Using Email Marketing to Make your Funnels More Effective
Dental marketing funnels allow you to walk patients through an automated relationship-building process. The process generally starts with a series of web pages, offering patients something for free, and eventually asking them if they’re ready to schedule an appointment.
While funnels are powerful, only a small percentage of people will make it through all the webpages in one sitting. Many times, they’ll download the free guide and close out. Sometimes, they’ll take one more step, perhaps to watch a follow-up video giving them more information about a procedure.
But few will make it to the end and schedule an appointment. That’s where email marketing comes in. This works similar to the way email marketing can make your Facebook ads more effective, sending people who make it part of the way through your dental marketing funnel a series of emails about the relevant procedure and your practice, and then delivering offers to them. These additional touches will help you get many more people to take you up on your offer than if you relied on the funnel web pages alone.
How do you use email to grow your dental practice?
These are three of my favorite ways to use email marketing to grow a dental practice. But they’re only three of many ways email marketing can help you.
Share some of your favorite email marketing strategies in the comments. How do you create effective subject lines to get your emails opened? Do you work from email marketing templates? What works best for you? Let us know!
If you’re interested in connecting with me and other dentists, join my free Dental Marketing and Profits Facebook group. Thousands of dentists and I help each other build better practices in there.
For additional help using email to grow your practice, be sure to check out Dental Profit Academy. There, you will find my best training, systems, and strategies for everything from practice building to marketing, and even motivating your team.
You can also join my next Dental Facebook Bootcamp to learn how to use Facebook to bring in 30 or more new patients per month on autopilot - all while spending less than $500 on ads.
This article originally appeared on DeliveringWow.com.