Email addresses are gold for your business. Without them, you don’t have a ready and willing audience for the email marketing campaigns necessary to grow your practice and boost revenues. Whether you decide to market your dental practice, place dental advertisements or simply do nothing at all, you should still collect email addresses from everyone who walks through the door.
But how to ask? It’s easy when you make email collection part of your office practice. Have your patient information sheet designed so that it includes space for an email address, along with telephone number and mailing address. If a form is returned without an email address, ensure your staff is trained to ask the patient to please fill in the address if they have one.
Let the patient know you’re asking because you want to keep in touch so that he or she is informed of all important announcements, time-limited special offers, newsletters and other dental marketing communications. Once patients have given you permission to contact them, it guarantees that they will pay more attention to your dental marketing promotions and encourages them to participate in a long term, interactive relationship.
As an alternative, you can add a section on email to your patient information form. For example, along with asking for the patient’s email address, you might want to ask how often they check it. While most people check their emails daily, others rarely do. Knowing this will help improve patient relationship management. You might also want to ask whether the patient prefers to be contacted by email or phone. Chances are he or she will choose email, since emails can be read at the recipient’s leisure, making this a convenient method of dental marketing and communication. Again, this lets the patient know you intend to keep in touch online, which will signal your patient to keep on the lookout for messages from you. This ensures your dental emails will not be deleted before they are opened.
Email addresses should also be collected when a new patient calls in search of a dentist. By collecting it before the first visit — even before an appointment is made — you will have the opportunity to begin building a strong patient relationship by sending them a “welcome to the practice” marketing campaign.
You can also use your website to collect email addresses by having people sign up for a free dental newsletter (if you have that feature available). Signing up visitors to your website is the easiest and fastest way to collect email addresses from non-patients.
Want to instantly grow your practice through email marketing? It’s simple: collect email addresses! |
