Across all types of marketing emails, newsletters are among the most common. They are typically aimed at informing and educating clients, which makes them indispensable as an integral part of email marketing campaigns in all industries, dentistry included.
Here’s what incorporating newsletters into your dental email marketing strategy can do:
Clients that keep coming back are the best clients: they are loyal, plus they don’t cost as much as the new ones in terms of marketing. For dentists, sending out newsletters that keep patients engaged is an effective way to retain them and encourage more visits.
Newsletters typically contain shareable content — something that might be useful to many people (more on that later). If your clients or prospects find the contents of your emails compelling enough, chances are they’ll pass that information along to their contacts.
Providing bits of engaging content in your newsletters (blog article excerpts, for instance), accompanied by links to your dental practice or company website, helps drive traffic and move your clients down the marketing funnel. Announcements, promo offers, etc. work in a similar manner when you provide links to your website page in the email body.
Sending out promo offers and discounts can help you lift conversion rates and, eventually, boost sales — either by driving traffic to your website or online store, or by encouraging direct calls to your dental office.
Last but not least, providing expert materials on such topics as dental health and care helps establish you or your company as true professionals people can trust. That, in turn, is a great way to beat the competition and, eventually, win more clients.
Ready to learn how to craft dental newsletters like a pro? Here are a handful of tested tips that will help you level up your game.
First and foremost, we recommend against adding anyone’s email address to your mailing list without that person’s consent. That is because some people may consider it an intrusion on their privacy, which will prompt negative associations with your brand or name. Moreover, it is unethical, and, in certain cases, can even be illegal.
To avoid negative reactions and start your communication on the right foot, always request permission to add your clients or prospects to your mailing list — for example, by adding the subscription page to your dental website.
Spam is unwanted junk mail that is usually filtered out by email services and eventually ends up in the trash folder. But emails that are not necessarily spam might also end up there. For example, if you send out too many newsletters or continuously fail to provide value, people might mark your emails as spam manually.
But one of the most common reasons why marketing emails end up in the spam folder is sending out bulk emails without a professional email service provider. In that case, emails don’t have a specific signature that allows servers to recognize them as 100% trustworthy. As a result, the recipients’ email services might mark them as spam. To avoid that, use professional email marketing tools when working with bulk emails.
As we’ve just mentioned above, bombarding your contacts with irrelevant information might compel people to mark your newsletters as spam; some of them might choose to unsubscribe altogether. But there is a guaranteed method to make your newsletters more targeted — a common email marketing practice called list segmentation.
Here’s how it works. First, break your mailing list into groups, or segments, based on common characteristics (demographics, location, interests, etc.). Then, send personalized content to each group — for example, give parents brushing tips for kids or inform elderly patients about special offers for their age group. If you do it the right way, that’s a win-win: people get the information they need, and you get more positive reactions in return.
List segmentation is essential to making your newsletters more personalized. But there is more you can do in that direction. For example, using clients’ names in subject lines is a proven tactic to increase open rates by 14.68%. You can also tweak the contents of your newsletters based on whatever information you have about your clients or prospects (specific issues, preferences, dates of visits, etc).
But the thing is, advanced personalization features are typically not available in free email services. To get the most out of your personalization efforts, you’ll need to use a professional email marketing tool.
As a dentist or a marketing specialist in a company selling dental supplies and equipment, you know more about your area than your typical patients and customers do. Therefore, you might be tempted to dish out everything you know in your dental newsletters to prove your expertise. But that’s not how it works. In marketing, it’s crucial to put clients first and only share information your target audience can grasp.
But dentistry is a large industry that is not limited to the B2C sector. Companies that sell dental supplies and equipment need to leverage email marketing to stay in touch with their clients, too. If you’re a marketer composing a B2B email newsletter, your target audience is people from the industry, and you should speak their language.
Coming up with engaging copy, attractive layout, and attention-grabbing subject lines is imperative. But how can you know whether your emails are actually hitting the mark? By running tests and comparing metrics, of course!
The easiest way to do it is by utilizing A/B testing — an advanced feature that professional ESPs typically include in their paid plans.This feature allows marketers to automatically test any elements of their emails and compare the data in order to quickly choose the best-performing version. Alternatively, you can run these tests manually, and then compare the results.
The next question is, what do you write about in your dental newsletters? We advise that you put together a list of topics to choose from. Below, you’ll find a few suggestions that work best for dental practices, but you can add your own ideas to the list whenever you come up with something creative.
Oral health tips are the perfect dental newsletter topic because they are relevant to everyone. From tips on proper brushing and flossing to professional oral cavity hygiene recommendations, they are a great way to educate patients and establish your expertise at the same time.
If you’re sharing tips in your email body, make them short and simple, like the one in the example above. For the in-depth materials, it’s best to utilize links to articles posted on your website, which is also a proven tactic to increase website traffic.
Most moms and dads have a hard time trying to teach dental care basics to their kids. If you regularly give parents some helpful clues in your newsletters, guess who they’ll come to when their kid needs a doctor or a dental care product? What’s more, they might come to you themselves, too, if you have something to offer them.
Besides, tips-for-parents newsletters are exactly the kind of content your readers might want to share with their friends and family members. That will help you raise brand awareness and, possibly, win new patients or clients.
Email marketing is also an effective way to promote upcoming events, especially online ones such as webinars. Of course, you can also use a social media platform of your choice for that purpose, but emails are way more personalized. Another important thing is, many people get notifications when new emails arrive in their inbox, which means they’d be less likely to miss your event.
To ensure maximum results, choose a template that includes all the essential elements — time, date, location, topic, and speaker(s) profiles. Links to your social media accounts will also come in handy should your readers want to learn more about you or share your event announcement.
Essential dental procedures such as restorative treatment are always in demand. Elective procedures such as whitening or straightening, on the contrary, are far less common. But educating your patients through providing in-depth information about these elective services and sharing success stories can make them more inclined to try them out.
To instantly grab your readers’ attention, use subject lines that spark curiosity, and don’t forget to spice up your emails with eye-catching visuals — photos, videos, and infographics. Storytelling can also work great in this type of content, as well as “before and after”-style illustrations, as shown in the example above from EJL Dental.
Most people like taking online quizzes, and you can use it to your advantage. When you add quizzes or simple trivia questions to your dental newsletters, you keep readers engaged and educate them on dentistry-related topics such as oral health at the same time. If you’re promoting an event like a health week or month, content like this can also come in handy.
To make your quiz truly irresistible, use an eye-catching design template and inform the readers about the estimated time it would take them to complete the quiz. You can also use quizzes to drive traffic to the website like Colgate does in the example below.
Ready to raise the stakes? Offer an incentive — a small present or a discount for your products or services would do great.
Dentists are constantly in need of new patients, and acquiring them on a regular basis can be quite daunting. We’ve already mentioned that including shareable content in your newsletters can help generate referrals as a positive side-effect. But you can also ask your customers for help more directly.
For example, you can include a “thank you for your referrals” note in every newsletter edition, along with the “share” buttons for social media. Another idea is to offer an incentive for every referral or even launch a contest with a fancy prize at stake.
Need more inspiration for your dental newsletters? For this section, we’ve picked a selection of examples that illustrate what you should aim for when crafting emails for your dental practice or office.
Promotional activities such as sales, discounts, and special offers are always popular because everyone loves bargains. Moreover, they can encourage people to try out your services or goods, especially if the steep price was what stopped them from doing it before. If they end up satisfied, there’s a good chance they’d become your loyal clients and recommend you to their contacts.
As a rule, promotional newsletters have eye-catching designs to make them more visible, as you can see in the Cocofloss newsletter However, if your brand colors and overall visual style are more toned-down, it’s best to stick with them anyway.
Customer feedback is an invaluable source of information that you can use to improve your services and align your marketing strategy. Besides, asking for feedback is also a great reputation management tactic because people tend to trust those who actually care about their opinions and experiences. Want to boost motivation? Add an incentive such as a discount or a gift, or follow Quip’s example and spark excitement by offering a chance to win a prize.
Email is also a convenient channel for leveraging standard customer satisfaction surveys such as NPS. That’s how it looks in an example from Colgate.
Moreover, gathering feedback can help you get more insights about how your content performs, what your subscribers like about it, and what they would like to change. A simple way to collect this information incorporating a quick feedback section in every newsletter as shown in the example below. It’s from another industry, but the technique works the same way.
The word “newsletter” has the word “news” in it for a reason — initially, it was an actual letter delivered via direct mail and containing whatever news an organization had. By the way, dental direct mail is still an effective way to promote your dental services too, so make sure you don’t overlook that channel.
In fact, both email and direct mail newsletters are ideal for promoting new services or products because this is exactly the kind of information people expect to see in a newsletter. In an email, however, you can also add links with buttons such as “buy now” or “schedule an appointment”. Look at how Quip introduces its limited edition new brush.
Besides introducing new treatments or products, you can also share other news in your email newsletters: tell about new employees, promotions, equipment, etc. Besides helping ignite curiosity and generating more leads, this tactic will also keep your patients engaged and help them feel part of your business. That, in turn, is a great way to increase loyalty and encourage return visits.
Sending out newsletters is a proven way to retain customers and boost engagement. In dentistry, like in any other industry, it can deliver impressive results, provided you know what your customers need and how to offer it in the best possible manner.
Getting creative and diversifying the contents of your newsletters is one way of maximizing the effect of your email marketing efforts. Another way is getting savvier at implementing automation features that professional ESPs offer. Mastering both these tactics using tips and ideas from this article will help you take your dental email marketing to the next level.
