Oral Health Link to Whole Body Health: A Blog

A dentist's guide to email marketing

16 October 2015

Duane Kelly

When you are a dentist, having your own practice can be a huge career highlight. You can call the shots and create the exact practice that you want – whether that means specialising in family dentistry, orthodontics, or cosmetic dentistry.  Unfortunately, emerging with top grades from the best dental school and having years of stellar experience under your belt is not enough to make a success of a dental practice. You also need to know a thing or two about marketing, which is not something that would necessarily come naturally to a dentist.

Part of the marketing mix is email marketing, and here's how you can make email marketing work for your dental clinic.

Grow a database

Before you actually start sending out promotional emails, you need to grow a subscriber list. First of all, you should make sure that you have a subscribe option on the homepage of your website. Don't have it tucked away in the recesses of the site – put it above the fold on the home page. But because so much business success relies on the service in the clinic itself, you will also want to grow your list of email addresses in the clinic itself. Train your receptionist to ask for email addresses when your patients give their personal details in the clinic, asking  specifically if they would like to subscribe to emails from the clinic.

Establish your expertise

For any dental practice to succeed, it is imperative to establish a high level of trust, and that trust comes from establishing yourself as an authority within the community. Within your regular newsletter, you can share pieces of breaking news and knowledge from the world of dentistry, and apply this to how you and your staff work with patients in your own clinic. If you operate within a niche like family dentistry, developing trust becomes even more important.

Soft sell

Of course, you are interested in an email marketing campaign because you ultimately want to grow your business, but going for the hard sell throughout an email will just make people send you to their spam folder. In each email, you should sell one product or service maximum. The remainder of your email can talk through developments that are happening in the dentistry world and anything exciting happening with your clinic in particular, like a charity drive you are pushing.

Good luck growing your clinic with the power of email marketing!

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