• Dental Marketing ,
• 13 Nov

Dentistry is a very personal profession.

Dental experts have full control of your body when treating you. This is precisely why clients require some level of familiarity and comfort. You wouldn’t let anyone tinker with your body!

As such, word of mouth has been the primary promotional tool for dentists all over the world. However, in the last several decades, things have changed a lot.

Nowadays, it is common for people to change their jobs, cities, and even countries. When doing so, they have to create new contacts. Among others, they need to find reliable medical professionals who will help them.

This is precisely why dental direct mail has such a big impact on potential dental clients.

How does dental direct mail work? What are its benefits?

Direct main for dental practices has been around for a while. The only difference is that nowadays, it is modernized.

Dental practices are relying more and more on emails instead of the traditional postcards. But, both approaches are feasible.

The 3 main benefits of dental direct mail marketing are flexibility, profitability, and repeatability.

What makes it even better is that you don’t have to be a marketing expert to perform it; you just need to be polite and yourself!

Unlike most other marketing efforts, it is really easy to predict the potential benefits of direct mail. It is an approach that has been used for such a long time, and if you send a postcard, you can rest assured that a person will receive your message (unlike some other modern marketing approaches).

Here are 10 super smart ideas for dental postcard marketing we recently wrote about.

Direct mail is also very simple. It doesn’t require a lot of preparation as you can easily get all the necessary data from Yellow Pages. Given that most dentists will advertise within their neighborhood, you won’t have to lose too much time scraping information.

The biggest issue is the postage costs.

According to the US Postal Service, it costs approximately 15 cents to send a postcard. You will, of course, have to buy those postcards as well. Then, you also have to consider the time spent on writing all these postcards.

This is precisely why emails are becoming more popular. Nevertheless, we cannot underestimate the personal touch of good mail.

Because of that, their conversion rate is through the roof!

Main disadvantages of dentist direct mail

Despite all their advantages, it is necessary to compare this method to all other marketing methods.

As previously mentioned, the biggest drawback of this approach is the time required.

It is much easier to set up a PPC campaign than to send postcards. Certain online campaigns, such as Facebook ads for dentists require minutes to be up and running.

Digital marketing campaigns are also much more sophisticated as they rely on existing data. When targeting potential clients, you can fine-tune ideal demographics. This way, you will be able to cut costs significantly.

It is also worth noting that PPC campaigns do not require an initial investment. You pay per click so, if there is no interest, you won’t have to spend money. Also, you have much more freedom when it comes to testing and modifying campaigns.

You get a lot of information about potential clients’ behavior, their clicks, interaction with the ad, or your company. This is something you don’t know when you’re running direct mail or email campaigns.

Unless a person responses to you and gives you direct feedback, it is really hard to tell what’s on their mind. User engagement stats go a long way in determining the successfulness of a campaign.

It is also much harder to perform A/B testing when sending letters. You will basically have to send two separate sets of mails, and even then (due to previously mentioned lack of data), you won’t have clear results.

So, should dentists use direct mail?

There is a good reason why fewer and fewer companies are opting for this approach. Even if you go with email marketing, there are certain clear issues that you cannot overcome.

However, direct mail proves very efficient when it comes to retaining clients. And as you well know, this is one of the focal points of dental practices.

If you send periodical letters to a person, there is a much bigger chance you will be able to retain it. While most dentists think that providing excellent service is enough, you shouldn’t overlook the fact that people love to be pampered.

No matter what are your marketing needs, you can contact our dental marketing company!

We have enormous experience working with different campaigns (especially digital ones), so we will certainly be able to help you out!