Starting your own dental practice is a scary prospect. You have to find a dental clinic. You need to hire people. You need to market your dental practice. That last one is the scariest of all the components in a dental profession. Sure, it’s easy to find a location and hire staff. But, dental marketing? Yikes!
Fortunately, you don’t need sophisticated techniques to get your marketing strategies going. What you need to understand about marketing a dental practice is that those old techniques work. Yes, old techniques such as direct-mail marketing. Snail mail is still in when it comes to a dental practice. Who said the postman is no more? You’ll definitely need your local postman once you start your dental business.
Sending Welcome Postcards to Your Customers
Are there newcomers in your town? Remember that a dental practice is essentially a local business. You need to connect with the local people. If there are newcomers in town, send them a welcome postcard to make them feel more at home. That is also an opportunity to introduce your dental clinic to them. Everyone needs a dentist so it would be nice for them to keep your number for future reference.
Greet Patients During Special Occasions
You should have a record of your patients’ birthdays. Make it a point to offer them special discounts and coupons during their birthday month. That might make them want to take advantage of your offers. Also, your patients are going to appreciate the fact that you made an effort to greet them and offer them something for their birthdays.
Remind Them of Their Appointments
Although more than 80% of your patients will book an appointment using your online appointment system, there is still a small percentage of them who’ll want to speak to someone on the phone. These older generations—the baby boomers and the silent generation—will be more comfortable with offline than online communication. The same can be said for appointment reminders. They’d want to receive a postcard reminding them about their appointments. Online reminders won’t work for them.
You will be surprised to know that direct-mail marketing is more effective than other forms of internet marketing such as paid ads and search engine marketing. It’s even more cost-efficient than SEO marketing. The only two dental marketing techniques better than direct-mail marketing are email and social media marketing. And even then, the gap between social media and direct-mail marketing is smaller than expected.