Posted by Amy Carbone on Jan 25, 2023 9:00:00 AM
Creating an email newsletter for your dental practice is a great way to connect and share relevant information with current and potential patients in your area. While this is an effective way to engage with your audience, it may be hard to know where to start.
Why Is Email Marketing Important for Your Dental Practice?
Email marketing is a great way to connect with your audience, foster a relationship, and build your brand. In addition, HubSpot estimates an average 3,800% return on investment.
While you may be worried about sending an email into someone’s already-saturated inbox, there are ways to make sure you stand out. The biggest key to this is creating and sharing content that your audience is interested in reading and engaging with.
Below, we’ll discuss how to create a successful email marketing strategy for your dental practice in six steps:
Step 1: Choose an Email Marketing Provider
Email marketing providers give you the ability to send manual and automated emails to recipients on your mailing list.
Popular email marketing providers include MailChimp, Constant Contact, and Drip. Each platform comes with a number of features, so it’s important to examine each and find the one that works best for your practice needs.
For example, you and your team may not have a lot of time to create a newsletter on a regular basis, which means you must consider the ease of use of the platform you want to choose. If it’s too complicated, you may not have the time to complete a newsletter to your satisfaction on a regular basis.
Step 2: Choose a Publishing Cadence
A publishing cadence is a regular, repeatable time that you plan to send out your dental practice’s newsletter. This could be weekly, biweekly, monthly, or quarterly.
Often, dental practices choose monthly, because it provides enough time to create a quality newsletter while staying on your patients’ radar. Finding a healthy balance is important so you don’t inundate your email list with messages or spend too much time writing multiple newsletters.
Step 3: Choose Your Newsletter’s Theme
Your newsletter’s theme establishes to your audience the type of information you plan to provide through this channel.
Most dental practices’ newsletters contain dental health tips and upcoming information regarding their practice. For example, if there is an upcoming change to the insurance providers that you accept, you can include this in your newsletter.
You may also include community events depending on your involvement in your area. This is a great way to provide additional value to your readers while showing them that you’re an active member of the community.
Step 4: Create a Conversion Opportunity
Before you send your newsletter, you’ll want to give your audience a chance to opt in to receiving that communication.
Consider creating a signup page or area on your website where you can gather email addresses for your newsletter. On this page, it’s a good idea to list information about the newsletter, including your publishing cadence and your theme.
You should also provide safety and security information to your readers, including by making a commitment to never sell their contact information. This allows your audience to know that they’ll never have their information sold to spammers and other third parties. An explicit opt-in on your site and data disclosures will help ensure that you are not sending to disengaged individuals and remain in compliance with anti-spam laws.
Step 5. Write and Schedule Your Newsletter
Before you send out your first newsletter, it’s important to remember: newsletters are meant to be general ways for companies to keep in touch with their patients; it’s not a way to send information that could be considered “sensitive” in any way.
Newsletters should never include any personal identification or medical information.
If you can, it’s also a good idea to create newsletters about a week ahead of time, which gives you plenty of time to make final tweaks if necessary. Once you’ve written the newsletter you can schedule it to automatically send on a future date.
Once it’s scheduled, you’re done! The email marketing software will take care of sending it, collecting responses, and more.
Step 6: Look at Your Results
The email marketing software you're using should give you access to information like open and click rates, bounces, unsubscribes, and spam reports. Here is some more information about each of those results and what you can expect:
Opens and Clicks
Opens are how many people opened your email and clicks are how many people clicked a link in your email. These numbers are positive indicators that you’re sending recipients information they expected and enjoyed.
Bounces
Bounces are the number of email addresses that couldn’t receive your email. This number tends to indicate that someone mistyped their email address into your conversion form.
Unsubscribes
Unsubscribes are how many people opted out of receiving future emails. This happens for a number of reasons, but no matter the reason, it’s both good and bad.
Unsubscribes are bad, of course, because you can’t email that contact anymore. However, there is a bright side: they’re telling you they’re not a good fit for your newsletter, which can help you refine your audience.
Spam Reports
Spam reports are how many people thought your dental practice newsletter was spam and marked it as such in their inbox. Spam reports are negative signals that often happen because a reader forgot they signed up for your newsletter, someone signed them up using their email address, or they accidentally clicked the wrong button in their email client.
Connect With Your Audience To Grow Your Dental Practice
Staying engaged with your audience and community is a great way to ensure your patients know who you are — and an email newsletter is just one of the ways you can do this.
You can also connect with your audience through:
- Additional marketing, promotion, and advertising efforts.
- An effective, up-to-date online presence.
- Participation in community outreach programs.
By connecting with more people in your area, you’ll have more success with effectively growing your patient list. For more information, access our in-depth guide on how to grow your dental practice today.
About Treloar & Heisel
Treloar & Heisel is a financial services provider to dental and medical professionals across the country. Our insurance and wealth management divisions assist thousands of clients from residency through retirement. We strive to deliver the highest level of service with custom-tailored advice and a strong national network.
