Sending a regular e-mail to existing and potential patients who have registered with you on your website is one of the easiest and cost-effective ways of marketing your practice. So if you don’t have an effective e-mail marketing strategy, this is the year to get one.

Of cause e-mail marketing all starts with having the e-mail addresses of patients and potential patients. Not getting a patient’s e-mail address can no longer be an acceptable standard in your practice. If your team are not consistently getting the e-mail address of new patients and existing patients when they phone or visit the practice, you need to ensure it starts to happen.

Keeping in touch with patients between visits is a proven way of increasing both loyalty and also compliance with recalls. This process also boosts referrals and improves the uptake of more elective dental procedures. If these are not reasons enough to start sending regular e-mails – the whole process is essentially FREE.

Effective e-mail marketing is best handled by what is called an ‘Auto responder’ which is software that handles the delivery of mass e-mails, subscribe and unsubscribe requests and gives you data such as how many people opened, forwarded or responded to your e-mail. Stand-a-lone Auto-responder software is inexpensive and usually provided on a subscription basis. However, most of the good dental practice management software packages already have Auto-responder features built in, so yet another excuse not to do this removed!

I often hear the comment that ‘People get too much e-mail for mine to be noticed’ – which is exactly why you need to send e-mails on a regular basis – to get noticed. We all wake up to an in-box of e-mails from clients, suppliers, things we have subscribed to and of cause spam. No differently to sorting through the flyers in your letterbox on a Friday night, we now do this at breakneck speed deleting things that are not relevant in the moment and moving on to the things that are.

I have proven many times that enough people respond to make e-mail marketing a highly effective promotional tool for dental practices to use and the intangible is how you have kept your brand alive with patients and potential patients in the process.

Oh – one last point, if you have got this far in the article, you know that this works as it was sent to you via e-mail.

If you need any help with getting your e-mail marketing set-up or would like some tips on what sort of topics to write about ……….e-mail me.