How to grow your business with email marketing

This week on Marketing Monday, Angus Pryor, the founder of Dental Profit System, will be talking about how to grow your business with email marketing.

Transcript: How to grow your dental business with email marketing

Well hello entredentists. Angus Pryor here, creator of the Dental Profit System, coauthor of the Amazon crushing book, “The Better Business Book,” bringing you this week’s Marketing Monday. The weekly show designed to boost the marketing at your practice.

Well we are continuing our series on internal marketing. Our topic for the day is around email marketing. Before we get into email marketing, I want you to think about something. If you want to grow your business  I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about this, but there are actually only three ways to grow your business. More clients. It’s fair to say most of the contact that I get from people, what they’re interested in is knowing about more clients, but there are two other ways you can grow your business.

Let’s do more visits. Now this model, you know I imagine in a retail context if you got a business where you’ve got people that are coming to see you once a month, but what if you could get them to come and see you twice a month? You wouldn’t need to change anything else and you would double the size of your business. So, more clients, more visits. Then a bigger spend.

When we look at email marketing today, it’s one of those, but it’s not the one that we usually focus on. So mostly I’ve got people focusing on more clients, but what I want to be encouraging is more visits and a bigger spend. So it’s actually two out of the three.

Now I want you to consider something. It’s a growth chart. If you’re a dentist let’s imagine we’ve put a check in each box where the client interacts with you or thinks about you. Honestly for most clients this is what it looks like. Once a year maybe.

You know, for most clients thinking about a dental business, that’s all that they’re thinking about. Once a year they’ve got their appointment. If you’re lucky, it’s twice a year. Guess if they’re coming in April that means they should be coming in October. Well getting back to our more clients, more visits, bigger dollars. If they’re only coming once or twice a year then you’re really struggling.

This is why email marketing can be so effective because twice a year is not nearly enough. Think about all the other stuff that’s going on in their life, they’re not thinking about dentistry. Whereas if you’ve got some email marketing going on you can have them thinking about your practice once a month instead of once or twice a year. So that’s the first point there.

Now in terms of the actual email itself a few things to bear in mind. Your world is dentistry and so you’re thinking about that all the time, but the reality is for your clients when you’re sending emails to them, you’ve got to be thinking connecting dentistry and what you do with what their normal life is. So the content that you send out is so important.

Things not to do. I would not want to be seeing stuff about, like new equipment okay, but only if you can relate it back to them. As I heard someone say, there is a website that everybody’s tuned into, I’m sorry a radio station, WIIFM, I’m listening to FM radio, what’s in it for me? It’s really important with your emails that the content is all about them and that requires some creativity. Making a connection between something you do and something that’s in their life.

If you can make a connection between going to Christmas parties, which is that’s real in December. Sending an email that says hey you’re going to be at Christmas party’s soon, you’re going to be seeing friends and family you haven’t seen for a while. That’s their reality and if you can then attach that, well then maybe you should get some whitening done, then that can work.

Now in terms of email the other thing that I get asked about it is permission. Frankly I’m not a lawyer so I can’t speak with any great authority, but the one thing I would recommend is on the new patient form that you have something built in there that says we may contact you infrequently about whatever, if you don’t want to then you can opt-out. Some practices that I deal with say well if the client hasn’t expressly opted-in then, thanks for the thumbs up, then they’re not going to email them and I have to say my view is that’s an overly conservative approach and from a marketing point of view a real waste. Permission can sometimes be inferred.

The second part is, what you do want to have is an easy opt-out. I can tell you we’ve been doing this with clients all over Australia for the last year or so. The worst we’ve ever had is the first email that went out one or two people said please don’t send me an email and that was the worst of it. For everybody else they either get it, they don’t open it, they read it or they opt-out. So just bear that in mind.

One of the simplest ways to do this and we’ll wrap up here, there is a range of different systems you can use. MailChimp is one of the easiest to use and it’s free as long as your mailing list is not too big. I know that you can do it through Oasis if that’s the software that you are using. Basically it’s using this system so that you’re checking this box twelve times a year instead of once or twice a year.

So I hope that makes sense, remembering there are only three ways to grow your business. More clients, more visits and bigger dollars. Well the fact is you can use email marketing to target both of those. How do you target bigger dollars? So I hope you found that helpful.

Otherwise for me, Angus Pryor, keep dancing, keep having fun. A lot of gratitude, there’s a lot to be thankful for even if things are going tough in your life. We’ll see you next time on Marketing Monday.