As a dentist, you can greatly utilize email marketing to your advantage. Email marketing services allow you to message a lot of people in a short amount of time. You can customize your messages and target different people based on needs and timing. For example, you might want to use email marketing to send:
• New deals on teeth cleaning services
• Family and referral discounts
• Advice for taking care of your teeth
• Updates for latest changes
• Retaining customer loyalty
• Positioning yourself as an expert
The best part is that customers love email marketing. According to a Medical Economics survey, 56% of patients love hearing about promotions and payment reminders, 68% want to hear helpful health information, and 49% want to read about patient care. Plus, according to Search Engine Journal, email marketing has a 4,300% return on investment! It’s incredibly inexpensive and provides excellent profits. Clearly, you need to get on the email marketing train if you haven’t already.
However, many email marketing efforts are wasted when messages are unfairly marked as spam. A little over one-fifth of all legitimate subscription emails somehow end up in junk folders, according to Return Path. That means that if you had a mailing list of 100,000 people, more than 20,000 wouldn’t ever receive your message. Email marketers who get marked as spam too often will often get kicked off hosts such as MailChimp and Constant Contact.
Even when your messages do get through, it’s not uncommon for people to mistakenly flag your email for abuse. Some people’s spam filters will rely on this information and one flagged email may get you permanently banned from several other inboxes. Make sure that your messages get past spam filters and bad judgment calls with these tactics:
Follow the law. I shouldn’t have to say this, but you’d be surprised at how many emails I’ve received that don’t comply with these standards. Some people have been fined thousands of dollars for each single spam email they’ve sent. Any large spam campaign ended up costing them a LOT of money!
It’s pretty simple though. You just need to make sure you do these:
• Include a functioning unsubscribe link. People who don’t know how to unsubscribe will mark you as spam anyways, so it’s good practice.
• Add your physical address.
• Avoid dishonest subject lines.
• Don’t impersonate anyone else.
How easy is that?
Don’t buy pre-populated lists. Here’s another fairly obvious point, but you’d still be surprised at how many people make this mistake. As an upcoming dentist superstar, you might not have a massive audience just yet and would want to take the easy way out by buying a pre-populated mailing list. Sadly, this is a huge waste of money for several reasons.
First, you can’t necessarily trust random strangers on the internet. Many will contain defunct addresses or even traps to catch spammers.
Second, even if there are legitimate people with those email addresses, they don’t want to receive your message to begin with. They never signed up for it, so why would they care? If you weren’t marked as spam already, you will be soon enough.
Hell, just look at MailChimp’s statistics on purchased lists. Then, if that’s not enough for you, head to caniuseapurchasedlist.com for a more direct answer.
Use the right timing. The most common way to get marked for spam? According to a TechnologyAdvice survey, 45.8% of respondents flagged a business email because they were getting too many messages even though they subscribed to those emails in the first place. Yeah, that’s right. People are so picky that they’d rather hit the “Mark as Spam” button instead of “Unsubscribe.” The same survey found that 43.9% of respondents think companies should send less frequent emails. Truth be told, most people don’t care about their teeth as much as you do. Their inboxes are likely already stuffed, so don’t make it too hard on them.
That being said, you do need to engage with them at least sometimes. A survey from MarketingSherpa found that most customers want to receive promotional emails “at least monthly” or “at least weekly.” You should test out different mailing times with your subscriber base to see what works best.
Make them opt-in twice: How can you be absolutely sure your customers want to hear from you? Try a double opt-in method. Some providers like MailChimp offer this feature. Basically, when someone signs up to get your promotional emails, MailChimp sends them a different email asking them once again to confirm. This way, you’ll know for certain if they want to be a part of your email marketing campaign.
Conclusion
With a 4,300% ROI, how can you not have an email marketing campaign? Make sure to follow these best practices to ensure that your messages are getting through to your audience.
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