Email Newsletters vs. Direct Mail

Direct mail marketing was once the only way to reach interested customers and a business’s target market, and often required using extensive market research tools and databases to search for customers. Direct mail marketing includes coupons, fliers, brochures, and other print materials that help customers learn more about your dentistry business and office. Direct mail still offers many benefits, but is no longer the only effective medium to stay in touch with customers and send out offers or campaigns. With the growth in internet advertising and web based communications, this same type of customer reach can easily be transformed into email newsletters. Email newsletters make it easy to create an effective marketing strategy using an efficient, low-cost, and high impact marketing campaign for your dentistry.

Benefits of Email Newsletters

Email newsletters can offer a variety of benefits for your dentistry, and are easily the central part of your business marketing campaign or strategy. Email newsletters help you build up a subscriber list so your patients can stay updated on current trends, new product launches, or even creative advertising messages as your business grows. This is essential for your dentistry business, as acquiring a new customer is considerably more expensive than retaining current ones. Email newsletters make it much easier to keep maintain a strong relationship with your patients and loyal customers.

Keeping your dentistry ‘on top of mind’ is much easier with email newsletters and other web-based advertising that can reach your target market with ease. Key benefits of email newsletters include:

• Powerful marketing tool that reaches your potential customers on a regular basis
• Helps to build customer confidence and brand power
• Builds a highly responsive database of customers for ongoing marketing campaigns and advertising opportunities
• Opportunity to extend offers, incentives, and special discounts
• Building a community for steady web traffic to your business website
• Low cost, mass mailing opportunity
• Simple but effective design process, that can incorporate your business logo, slogan, and theme
• Options to upsell products, services, and provide recommendations on popular brands
• Opportunity to partner with other advertisers for a co-marketing campaign

Developing Powerful Email Newsletters

Internet communications and marketing is heavily focused on providing short, clear, and concise messages as often as possible. Email newsletters can easily be tailored for your target market with:

• Bullet points and simple outlines of services and products your dentistry offers
• Direct links to your website to increase traffic and generate interest
• Coupons and special discount codes embedded within the email newsletter
• ‘Send to a friend’ option to help build your subscriber list and refer new patients to your dentistry
• Discounts for customers who place orders or make appointments online

Email newsletters are one of the leading online marketing tools available for businesses today, and offer several advantages over direct mail and ‘traditional’ marketing campaigns. Developing a consistent email newsletter campaign can help your dentistry business grow its customer base and with updates and news delivered to your patients throughout the year.

They specialize in, dental endo dontists, cosmetic dentists, orthodontists, periodontists and plastic surgeons.

One of the most important marketing aspects for the successful dental businesses is a comprehensive and informative website. One with good tracking codes so that you know how the site is performing. How many visitors your getting which is traffic to you.

The site will assist in education your patients, colleagues and potential patients.

By including some good interesting and informative dental information and advice your customers will come back.

How Do You Know If They’re Coming Back?

By using measuring and tracking services. You can get a free stats counter at: http://www.counterdata.com/ or you can get your webmaster to put it on for you.

When considering a website for your dental business, there are some considerations you should look at, like….

1. A good looking home page, maybe with a picture of your building on it. Put a stats counter here, very important so that you can determine if many people are visiting your home page or not. If they’re not then you need to look at what’s wrong.

2. You might have to change your content, make it interesting and informative.

3. Use good design, make it look like a dental site, if you use graphics about “sports cars”, then you’ll lose the theme of your site and your visitors.

4. Dental specific content, i.e. your appointment contact details, what you specialize in, prices, years in practice, and maybe an online Doctor referral system.

5. Get an autoresponder account. These are accounts where you use a simple code to put on your site which is a form. You offer something for FREE and if they sign up you’ve got their name and address. You can then login to your account and mail them for a newsletter or some special offer you might have.

This is very POWERFUL don’t dismiss this one!

This is your database that you can follow up with anytime you like, as long as they stay subsribed.

If you’re using PPC which is pay per click then you can use some of their free tool. This is meant for Google, they have some great tools.

You just put some code on your site, and then when you login to your Google Adwords account, you’ll be able to see your stats.

This is especially handy for the business that is using this method which costs money, so you must know how your advertising dollar is spent. More importantly, what is your ROI?

If you’re not using tracking for your dental business, then you’re leaving money on the table. You could be literally spending a fortune on advertising without a clue if it’s working or not.

This is ludicrous, a business will surely fail without proper tracking and measuring, but the business person who is savvy enough to know the importance of this tactic, will surely win every time.

Effective pay-per-click or PPC is not easy to achieve for many. They find it easy to implement a pay-per-click campaign, but they subsequently discover that they are being asked to pay high bid prices, or that their ads don’t convert well, or even not at all. In frustration they often give up, concluding that pay-per-click doesn’t work.

However, it does work, and it works very well indeed for millions of advertisers worldwide. There are merely a few simple rules to follow, a few guidelines to observe, along with some commonsense, and all should be well. This article will attempt to guide you on the road to success and show you how to achieve effective pay-per-click campaigns.

Several factors need to line up in your favor for a PPC campaign to be effective:

• The keywords you are targeting need to be reasonably popular with having too much competition.
• The bid price of your keywords needs to be as low as possible.
• The adverts need to be written in a compelling and persuasive manner with a clear call to action.
• The click through rate, or CTR, needs to be reasonably high, or at least higher than 0.5%.
• The landing page and the pages around it need to be of high quality to increase and maintain a good quality score.

There are other factors that will affect a PPC campaign, but these are the main ones. The good news is that all these factors can be within your control, to some extent at least. The most common reason for a poorly performing campaign is the lack of adherence to these simple guidelines.

The first thing that you can definitely control to create an effective pay-per-click campaign is the landing page. Google and others are now insisting that the landing page, the page where the visitor goes after clicking your PPC ad, must be of high quality.

They will also look at the pages near it. In other words, the entire web site, and they will expect to find a good, solid, well-built site, and not something thrown together over a weekend to try and make some quick cash. You are in control of your landing page, so make it, and the entire site a good one. This will increase your quality score and it will help to lower your bid price too.

Traditionally, advertisers would research lots and lots of keywords and throw them all in, hoping that some would be profitable. This doesn’t work any more. Research and choose your best buying keywords, in other words, the kind of keywords that people use when they are ready to buy.

For example, “boots” is a general keyword that will not convert to sales easily. The keyword, “leather soled hiking boots” is better, but still may not convert too well. If, however, you were to use the keyword, “where to buy leather soled hiking boots,” you would be targeting people who are ready and willing to spend money. Place an offer of reasonably priced good quality leather soled hiking boots before such people, and you will convert a surprising percentage of them into buyers.

It is also important to use negative keywords in your campaigns. These are keywords that you do not want your ads to appear for in the search results. A typical negative keywords often used is, “free.” There are many others of course. By placing a minus sign in front of a keyword when setting up your campaign, you will let the search engine know that you do not want your ad to appear when that word is part of the search.

Your ad needs to be well written to convert viewers into clickers. If your ad is properly written and targeted, then of those who click through, an acceptable percentage will convert to buyers. The click through rate, or CTR, is the percentage of viewers who click on the ad. The better written the ad is, the higher the CTR will be in general.

PPC ads are small. They do not allow much space for a full description of your product. For this reason, it is usually better to target the benefits that your product will deliver. This plays on the viewer’s emotions rather than their logic. People buy though emotion and not logic, so this makes sense.

Always use the keyword you are targeting in the headline of the ad. In fact, make the headline just the keyword. The first line should be a benefit and the second line can also be a benefit of the product with a call to action. Some people advocate having the first line a feature of the product, but listing two benefits works at least as well, if not more so.

The call to action is vitally important. This is where you tell the viewer what to do. Usually you are not allowed to use words like “click here” in a PPC ad, but there are ways around this. You could have the second line of your ad read something like, “To discover more, visit us now at:” The next line of your ad is the URL, or web address, of your landing page. This is a clear call to action and it will greatly boost your CTR.

This whole procedure is not rocket science. It is an art that can be learned. There are clear steps like those listed here that you can take to make your campaigns more effective. Always remember that you have to play by the search engine’s rules. It is their business model that they are allowing you to make use of. If you respect that, and also think in the same way that a potential customer might think, then you will have successful and effective pay-per-click campaigns.

Dental Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your web site to make it more favorable to rank for keyword phrases in the Search Engines.

Search engine optimization of a web site should be performed in two parts: on page optimization, and off page optimization.

On Page & Off Page Search Engine Optimization

On page optimization is the practice of constructing web pages in such a way that the search engines find them favorable.

Off page optimization is the practice of strategically arranging situations external to a web page in order to make that page more favorable to the search engines. In this way the pages will rank higher in the search engine results that they might have otherwise.

Search engine optimization on page means constructing the page properly. All too often pages are poorly constructed, or even incorrectly constructed. It is no wonder then that they perform poorly in the search engine rankings.

The important elements of any web page are contained in the underlying Hyper Text Markup Language code, or HTML. Most people construct their web pages using an HTML editor, such as Dreamweaver or Front Page. Using an HTML editor it is easy to construct a page properly.

Dental Keywords and Keyword Phrases

Every page should be based around a single primary keyword, or keyword phrase. This keyword will reflect the general overall theme of the web site as a whole. In this way the entire web site will be tightly focused on one subject, with each page reflecting a part of that overall subject, or theme.

Dental Web Page Title

The most important part of any web page is its title. The opening title tag, can be found in the head section of the HTML code. The title should no more than 200 characters in length.

However, 60 characters or less is better, as this is the amount that most major search engines will display in their listings. A character is a single letter or space. For example, the phrase “character count” is made up of 15 characters; 14 letters and one space.

The title of a web page should have the primary keyword in it at least once, preferably near the beginning. It can be added once again if possible, but it shouldn’t be forced. The title should be descriptive and informative in a factual way. Avoid superlatives in the title, as they will only detract from the purpose of the title.

The head section of the HTML code should also contain the description Meta tag and the keywords Meta tag. These have become less important in search engine optimization than they once were, but they still carry some weight.

The description Meta tag will not affect your search engine rankings, but some search engines use it in their listings. A well-written description can attract potential visitors to click on the listing.

• Keep the description to fewer than 150 characters.
• Be factual and descriptive.
• Avoid superlatives.
• Avoid unnecessary information.
• Don’t use the primary keyword more than twice.
• The keyword Meta tag will probably not affect your search engine rankings either, but it is always a good idea to include it. It should contain your primary keyword first. If you wish to target a secondary keyword, or even a tertiary keyword, they should be included too.
• Each keyword should only be included once only.
• A comma only should separate each keyword, or keyword phrase.
• Do not leave a space between the keywords.
• Include no more than seven keywords, or keyword phrases.

Each web page should begin with a headline. The H tag in HTML code should govern headlines. This tag goes from H1 (the largest text size) to H6 (the smallest text size), and should proceed in a strict hierarchical order. In other words, an H2 headline tag should not come before an H1 tag.

On Page Headline

The primary keyword should be included in the main headline, preferably near the beginning. It can be included twice, but only if it reads sensibly.

The headline is followed by the main page text broken into paragraphs. The primary keyword should be contained in the first paragraph at least once, but no more than twice, and the first instance should be in the first sentence.

Dental Page Optimization

The density of the primary keyword throughout the main body text should be within the limits of 2% to 5%. This should be a natural density level and not contrived. It is important that the page reads right to human visitors. The overall body text should be at least 400 words and probably no more than 800 words.

Dental Off Page Search Engine Optimization

Off page search engine optimization is the most important aspect of getting ranked in the search engines. It almost exclusively revolves around back links to your web site. It is not only the number of back links that is important, but the quality of these back links is vitally important too.

Ideally, a back link should be one way from a high-ranking quality web site to a page on your web site. It should use your primary keyword as the anchor text, that is, the piece of text that forms the actual link. However, if every back link were of this nature, it would soon appear artificial. For that reason back links should use varied anchor text.

Bear in mind also that you will not find it easy to get quality web sites to provide one-way back links to you. You will probably have to provide a link to them first in order to get the back link. This is a reciprocal link, and the search engines do not give these types of links as much weight as one-way links.

Your link building strategy should be well thought out and for the long term. It is an ongoing task that should never end. In this way a web page, and the site as a whole, will steadily rise in the search engine rankings over time.

Dental Search engine optimization has no magic wand to wave in order to achieve high search engine rankings. It is work that needs to be done, and done properly. There are no real shortcuts and it won’t happen in a day or two. But if you persevere, the rewards will be considerable and well worth the effort you put in.