- Mar 04, 2020
Email marketing is a cost-effective marketing strategy that has stood the test of time. It is being leveraged by marketers all across the globe to reach their niche market and prospective customers.
Dentists all over the world are also utilizing email marketing to enhance their healthcare practice. Are all of them finding it useful? Are there also practitioners willing to tap its power but are unsure about how to proceed?
For those of you who are not finding it useful and for those who are skeptical about its successful impact, we have come up with this article with several tips and strategies that will reassure you to consider email marketing seriously for the success of your dental practice. If you are in one of these categories or simply want to learn or enhance your already running email marketing campaigns, read on…
1. Your emails must be as professional as you are
There are a lot of aspects that are consistently fine-tuned by you that makes you a professional. Similar is the case with your emails. You have to look into every portion of it and give it a professional touch. Your language must be professional as well as emphatic for the patients.The color you choose must match with your brand. The text must be comprehensible and easy to read. Use few images that are indispensable for showcasing the brand and for delivering the right message. Overall, everything must be aligned and not look messy.
2. Your emails must be mobile-optimized
Nowadays, most of the emails are opened on mobile devices. No matter how good your content and presentation may be, if the email fails to load on the mobile device or if it is distorted to the extent of not delivering the intended message, your efforts are bound to go in vain. The best thing to do is double-check your emails before you send them. Send a test mail and verify in all the devices, including mobile devices.
As a dentist, the information you are sending along with images has a substantial value when it is in complement with the image. An image may have an aesthetic value of its own when it supports the content. Moreover, many a times, the image may provide information along with the content. So, without the image, the information you want to give may be incomplete. So, a dentist must take precautions by two-fold when in the marketing arena.
3. Avoid click baits and deceitful subject lines
An exaggerated subject line is unprofessional, and is meant to throw dust in the eyes of the populace. Also, do not think you can get away by making people click on links that, more than your prospects, are needed by you to fill your pockets. Such strategies may or may not work in the short term, but for the long term, they have devastating consequences. An annoyed patient will never ever come back to your website and your clinic, and will not even let others come. Their online and offline reviews will raise the curtain from your backstage activities. And most importantly, dentistry is a medical profession, and the last thing people want to hear from their medical practitioner is a misleading promise.
If you are using a catchy line that is supposed to be exciting, use one exclamation mark only. Using more than one exclamation mark will make you look not only unprofessional, but like an exhilarated teenager!
Avoid using subject lines like:
“Hi John!!! Have a dental check-up today and get a chance to win a FREE trip to Hawai!!!”
Instead, use something like the following:
John, it’s been a long time since your last check-up
Now, whether you should use upper case or sentence case in the subject line is a matter of discretion. Use upper case to give a professional tone to your message while use lower case to give a personal touch. Whatever you choose must be dictated by your brand message and content tenor.
4. Use few CTAs
How would you feel as a dental surgeon if too many peers and superiors of yours give you multiple instructions at a time when you are operating on a patient? Irritated? This is exactly how your email viewers would feel if there are too many call-to-action links in your email. The gravity of the matter might be much more, in the mentioned comparing situation, in your favor, though, the feeling of irritation is comparable.
In today’s web world, everyone’s attention span is very short. If your email is sprinkled with ‘Read More’, ‘Buy Now’, ‘Call Today’, ‘Find us on Facebook’, ‘Visit Our Clinic’, etc. all at one place, you have already overwhelmed your user not to take any directive of yours and abandon your email at once.
To avoid this, keep the intentions of your emails simplified. At the most, have not more than two goals focused in your email. Simplicity in your emails will improve the interaction rate of your prospects with your brand.
5. Images, Stats, Graphs – Do not overuse them
Images, statistics, and graphs play supporting role for the content. However, some marketers, considering the visual appeal of images, use it the other way round. They are compulsively inclined towards stuffing images and graphs in places where they do not belong annoying readers who are unable to relate the text with the image.
Moreover, if your email content is only images, you would not even get the chance to annoy the reader because you would, at the very first step, have annoyed the bot that will render it as spam.
Still if you want to play all images, make sure to include the alt tags. You will get a clean chit from the bots. About the audience, well, it depends upon how good has been the work of your graphic team.
6. Be in the legal limits
Like the city police, there is the internet police that checks your transgressions. So if your bounce rate is way too high, mainly due to sending it to the wrong email addresses; or if you are being flagged as spam consistently, your emails are destined to reach the junk folder instead of the inbox. In extreme cases, you might be completely blocked from sending emails.
To prevent this undesirable situation, abstain from sending emails to those who have not given you their consent or who are total strangers to you. The best thing to do is send emails only to your existing patients and those prospects who have shown interest in you by clicking contact us or any other CTA button on your website.
Another mandatory thing to do that you must not forget at any cost is including the unsubscribe button in every email. Do not think that by not giving your patrons the option to abandon you will make them stay. On the contrary, it will make them report against you. Therefore, there is no trick that you cannot apply to enhance your dental email marketing. But, always remember to be in the limits of ethics and legality.
Conclusion:
These six tips or strategies are not exhaustive but conclusive enough to add value to your email marketing making it an effective strategy to market your dental services. Remember: be professional in your communication, do not lure your prospects with deceitful promises, check your emails on several devices and make sure to have them mobile-optimized, use as few as possible CTAs, use images and graphs with discretion, and last but not the least, do not forget to respect the law while trying every trick in the bag to reap profit from your practice.
