By Joseph J. Portale, DMD, MAGD
Appreciation is an incredibly powerful -- and often neglected -- marketing tool.
Dentistry is a service business. It is about providing quality patient care and empowering patients to make the best decisions about their oral health. Through ongoing support and education, a trip to the dentist -- traditionally an uncomfortable event for some -- can become easier for patients who feel an established connection and sincere relationship with their dentist and office staff.
This means that a key component of good practice management and marketing is building a real, human connection with your patients. One of the busiest times of the year is approaching. It’s a time when people want to look their best; a time when they’re under a lot of stress and may need a great deal of support and encouragement to take care of themselves.
This makes the holiday season a crucial time for outreach marketing, one when a well-crafted marketing approach may reap extraordinary benefits. The holiday season presents a great opportunity for you to enhance your relationship with your patients and to set the stage for the year to come.
Most dentists I know do their marketing in an impersonalized, mechanical sort of way. They tend to follow formulas rather than doing what’s important, which is to focus on cultivating excellent patient relationships, which ultimately increases patient retention and the quality of patient care.
Christmas cards are a prime example of this. Everybody does them, so everybody thinks they should do them. But going with the herd is never a good excuse if you want to create a truly unique and effective marketing program.
People receive untold numbers of Christmas cards, and it’s virtually impossible to find one that is unique enough to stand out from the mass of material they are getting in their mailboxes this time of year. Sending a personalized mailing to a large number of people can be costly in terms of time and resources, so it is essential to manage the endeavor effectively to achieve maximum return on your investment.
But the holiday season doesn’t begin in December. It starts in November with Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving has tremendous meaning for people, and it comes before the mail blitz gathers real momentum. While Christmas and New Year’s tend to be about gifts, fun, and partying, Thanksgiving is about friends, family, and appreciation.
If you’re looking for a perfect marketing hook, here it is. Chances are people will be significantly more receptive to a warm and appealing message on or around Thanksgiving than they would be later in the season. That’s why smart practices should make Thanksgiving marketing an integral part of their outreach plans.
If you’re going to do Thanksgiving marketing, you need to make some decisions. You’ll have to decide what you want to send out, and what kind of message you want to include in your material. I feel that Thanksgiving greetings should be warm, comfortable, and personalized in some significant way.
The first priority should be expressing your appreciation for the patient’s working with you and confidence that the relationship will continue. After you’ve said thank you, some marketing content can appear. Appropriate messages include:
** Look your best for the holidays.
** Give a gift to yourself -- good dental health.
** Take care of not only your own dental health, but your entire family's.
Since people tend to tune cards out, we rely on a format in which most dental patients aren’t used to receiving their marketing appeals: letters. A good letter is one of the most personal and effective forms of communication, and that is why we use LetterMatics.
Modern printing technology also means that letters can include pictures, photographs, graphics, and other images. With a small investment of creative effort, it’s possible to gather a unique and highly appealing letter that will capture people’s attention and motivate them to think and take action.
Sending letters takes a lot of effort. But LetterMatics automates the process and can make the entire approach easier and more productive for your practice.
Dr. Joseph Portale, DMD, MAGD, has been a dentist for more than 30 years, and involved with computers and information systems for almost as long. Recently he developed the LetterMatics system to automate the process of personalized mailing by combining the power of the Internet with the affordability of the U.S. Postal Service and the flexibility of on-demand printing. He can be contacted at [email protected].
