How to Get Your Newsletters to Reach the Inbox

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Bill

Having a dental website doesn’t just give you space to post all of your services and provide lengthy descriptions about them. A dental site is actually a great tool for gathering online leads. Email marketing functions just the same way as newsletters did in the past. You identify individuals who may be interested with your services and then send them content which can motivate them to make a purchase.

In the past, dentists used to send brochures and newsletters through direct mail. With the rising costs of printing and other materials, this can be a big problem for dentists who want to pinch a few pennies. This is where the beauty of the internet comes in. Not only is it easy to gather email addresses of prospects, because it’s your dental website that’s virtually doing that, but sending e-newsletters could not be any more affordable.

Before your e-newsletter can work on your prospects, it should at least escape being sent to the Spam or Trash folders. Here are a couple of tips to make sure that your e-newsletters make the cut, and make it to the inbox:

Be respectful. And this includes never sending unsolicited emails. This is an offense tantamount to showing up on someone’s doorstep without calling on them first. It’s crucial that you use a double opt-in when gathering email addresses which requires subscribers to confirm that they are opting to receive your e-newsletters through email verification. Without double verification, just about anyone can place random peoples’ email addresses which makes your emails unsolicited as well. But being disrespectful goes beyond sending unsolicited emails; it also includes not giving prospects the option to unsubscribe to your e-newsletter.

Don’t be spam-ish. There are two email filters which you have to think about—the spam filter and your actual reader. Words like “free”, multiple exclamation points and text written in all caps are enough to set any mail box’s spam filter on alarm mode. Repetitive use of keywords and key phrases, and abrasively aggressive marketing content can trip off the second filter—your reader. Make your e-newsletters something which an average reasonable person will find enjoyable to read and valuable. It’s simple: if your e-newsletter is a worthwhile read, then people will read it.

The effectiveness of your email marketing campaign depends on the quality of your list of email addresses. The best way to make sure that you have a good list is to come up with it yourself. With a good dental website, that shouldn’t be a problem.

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The Benefits of Blogging to Your Dental Website

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Bill

Blogging has evolved from just an ordinary hobby to something integral to any business including dental practices. In general, there are a multitude of reasons for why people blog, but when we consider a dentist’s perspective in narrowing the list, here are a couple of advantages that one can derive from blogging:

1. Building online credibility and reputation.

The way that websites are ranked is just the same as people are in the real world. The dental websites which are considered authority in their field get ranked high as compared to others. It can take you awhile to reach this status especially if you have just recently launched your dental website. One way to hasten the entire process is by having a blog, a platform where you can share your expertise to the rest of the world. As you gain more visitors and continue to contribute more to the pool of internet knowledge, other bloggers will start to use you as reference by linking to your blog or reposting your articles. And your dental website gets to enjoy the entire ride.

2. Keeping your dental website fresh.

One of the requisites for your ranking high in search engine results is keeping your website’s content fresh. Search engines just love to crawl websites with recently updated content. By maintaining a blog (which is linked if not part of your dental site), you can easily post new articles and other forms of content. The great thing about blogs as a platform is that posting content could not be any easier and all of your posts can even be archived for easy retrieval.

3. Fostering relationships with your patients.

In the service industry, one thing which you should be investing in is relationships with your clients. The more that you connect with your patients the higher the likelihood that they’ll stay loyal to you, and in the world of low price deals, you need your patients to be loyal to you more than ever. Gone are the days when all of the articles you post are simple for search engine optimization sake. The advent of blogs has allowed businesses to help out their clients with the help of educative posts. You know you’ve accomplished your job when your patients turn to your blog the next time they have a mind boggling dental query on their hands.

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Dental Website Pet Peeves

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Bill

Because of the technology at our disposal, most websites have so many features which can be advantage or a disadvantage. You might be thinking about putting a chock-full of features on your dental website to attract traffic but this move can definitely backfire on you. Here are a couple of things which become more of a nuisance to your website than help:

1. Sharing buttons.

Although it can be helpful to have social website sharing buttons on your website articles, you should also evaluate whether these buttons are truly helpful or not. For instance, having sharing buttons on your dental website’s “About” page can be very unnecessary. What you should be placing on pages on the other hand are buttons which lead to your practice’s Facebook or Twitter page so that your visitors can “like” or “follow” you.

2. No search box.

When your dental website becomes well-established and is full of helpful posts, you will be getting lots of repeat visitors who treat your dental website as a reference. When they need an article to help them with their recent dental mishap, they’ll go to your website and try to look for the answer there. But wait! They won’t be able to do that if there isn’t any search box on your dental site and maybe they’ll try searching elsewhere, leaving your website behind.

3. Very small font sizes.

Not all of your prospects and patients have 20-20 vision. Even the young adults may not have perfect vision and how about those who have progresses in age? If you want to entice more visitors to linger on your website, then you have to make it easy for them to read your articles. Also stay away from font and background colors which contrast each other in a very painful way. Having a black background and then a red font color is the easiest way to drive away visitors.

4. Calling the default email program.

Most of the time, contact forms summon default email programs like Mail which no one ever uses. This can be very annoying to most visitors. Although it’s really very easy to copy and then paste your email address and open our own browsers, most of us just do not want to be bothered by it at all. It would be so much better to just have your email address on the Contact Us page instead.

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80 Percent of Americans Search for Dental Health Information Online

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Bill

Dentists who aren’t that convinced about the power of websites have a rather logical argument on their hands. They doubt the willingness of individuals to turn to the internet and search about health related services. According to them, it might be understandable for consumers to look up products like dresses and shoes, but for something as sensitive as their health, would they really trust what the internet spits out? Isn’t it so much more reliable to ask your family and friends which dentist they go to instead of just depend on random online posts?

But according to a study by Pew Internet, 80 percent of adult online surfers, or roughly 93 million individuals, have used the internet to search for health information. 93 percent of the respondents use the internet to send emails while 83 percent research products and services before availing of them offline. This means that searching for health information is one of the most popular activities that online surfers do. Most of the time, those who scour the cyberspace of heath information are those who are seeking answers for a certain condition. This means that the effectiveness of dental websites should never be underestimated.

Other factors which dentists should take into consideration when planning their dental websites include the fact that most of those who search for online health information are women. Even in traditional avenues, it’s usually the women who are more eager to learn more about heath care and other related information so this morsel of information should not be very surprising. One way that you can take advantage of this fact is to come up with online deals which are targeted towards women. Find dental services which appeal particularly to females and try carving out special internet deals using these services. Since most of the visitors are women, then creating a deal specially made for them is extremely practical.

Dentists should also take into consideration the fact that thirty percent of individuals who make use of email services exchange health-related email with family members and friends. If converted into actual figures, an estimated 32 million Americans forward emails containing health information. This says a lot to the future of email marketing for dentists. This means that as long as your e-newsletters contain content which is helpful, timely and relevant, recipients won’t be reluctant to forward them which can lead to a rise in incoming visitor traffic to your dental website, and an overall increase in practice awareness.

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Three Simple Ways to Improve Your Website Productivity

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Bill

One of the biggest mistakes of dentists is thinking that dental websites are simply just requisites which one has to satisfy in order for their practice to grow. To some, having a website directly means having online presence. But if you do not actively manipulate your website, then it’ll be like it never existed and your investment is for nothing.
It might seem now that having a website involves a great deal of work. This is partly true but the advantages of having a dental site far outweigh not having one. The only thing that dentists have to worry about is having a web strategy which is sustainable and effective at increasing website productivity.

Keep your website always updated.

What’s different between your website and your dental clinic is the fact that the latter has definite operating hours while the former is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all year long. Prospects can visit your website even during the wee hours of the morning. The only thing that limits your website’s capacity to help visitors is when it is not updated and if information is outdated like when the office phone number on your site no longer works or when you have broken links.

Make your website always accessible through various means.

Having already said that websites are available regardless of time, the question to ask now is how can prospects view your website? Of course, there’s the 20th century method of doing so – through personal computers and laptops. And then there are smartphones. With majority of teens to middle age individuals having a smartphone, having a mobile website could not be timelier. What’s great about having a mobile website is that visitors can view your dental website anytime and anywhere, even when having lunch.

Move towards patient education for more a pleasant treatment experience.

You want the effects of your website to trickle down to your patients and your relationships with them. Basically, when your patients are empowered through education, they understand the rationale between treatments much better and are generally more pleasant to deal with. Because it’s impractical for you to give lectures during appointments, your website is the best tool which you can use to educate your patients. And if your collection of informative posts continues to grow, you’re also building online credibility and authority which helps to increase incoming traffic to your website.

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Taking Care of Your Google Reviews

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Bill

Being part of the World Wide Web means that you have access to the multitude of individuals who may need teeth cleaning, extractions and other types of procedures. Having your own dental website and being on the cyber loop gives you the ability to court more prospects and bring in more patients into your practice. But being part of the internet doesn’t just give you blue clear skies all of the time; it also exposes you to negative reviews the same way that word-of-mouth marketing has its pros and cons.

Potential for Disaster

When two patients vent about how disrespectful your hygienist was, the awful information is passed around to the both of them only. But when an unsatisfied patient feels like ranting about the poor quality of service that he got from your practice online, his post has the potential for reaching hundreds if not thousands of internet users. Although this shouldn’t scare you from using the internet to market your practice, you should be extremely proactive when it comes to protecting your online reputation.

There are a lot of review platforms which you should monitor time and time again for negative posts but the most crucial are the reviews found on Google. With Google Places, the search giant has become a leader not just when it comes to searches but also with reviews. The mechanism of posting reviews on Google is also very easy which gives more incentive for angry patients to cyber rant. Because the odds are high that your prospects will find you through Google, you cannot ignore the reviews posted in here.

Google Places Page

Before you can begin the task of taking care of your online image, you first need to verify your Google Places page. One of the benefits of having one is that places listings are given priority as compared to traditional results in the search engine results pages. This means that if individuals search for dental practices within your community, there is a big chance that your Google Places page will rank higher than traditional, organic search engine results.

Of course, you can expect a bit of competition but here’s how you beat them out: with every listing comes a review with a corresponding rating. What you should aim for is that your satisfied patients give you Google reviews with stellar ratings, which you can do so by asking them nicely. The more the number of positive reviews, the easier it is for negative reviews to be drowned out. And because prospects choose dentists, by virtue of basic psychology, according to ratings and reviews, the more stars you have and the happier your reviewers are, the more likely that you’ll woo online prospects to become paying patients.

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Maximizing Your Dental Website through Online Offers

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Bill

There are a lot of benefits to having a dental website. First off, you get to enjoy online exposure which is crucial in this time and age. People have become extremely reliant on the internet for almost everything. If one needs something, then he or she instantly opens a laptop and runs a search through Google. For dentists, it’s definitely no longer the yellow pages which rule. Include into the mix of benefits the fact that your website can serve as an online brochure. But one of the underexplored advantages of having a dental site is being able to test, launch, tweak and then re-launch marketing campaigns.

Make an offer.

Whenever you’re trying out a marketing campaign, you’ll never know how well it fares unless you make an offer. Marketing experts know that the power of any campaign really lies in the offer. If you bother to sift through the internet, you’ll find out that the cyberspace is filled with so many offers and deals which mean that placing your own offers in your dental website is only logical. With your dental website, you can monitor how well your offers do by keeping track of how many prospects call to learn more about said offers and how many of these prospects are successfully converted into paying patients. You can tailor your offers to suit various types of prospects and launch ones which are appropriate for the season, like an offer which centers on braces during the summer for teenagers or after hours appointments for working prospects.

Surveys

When you’re experimenting with marketing campaigns, you need to know your market and the only way to go about this is to run surveys. Although you can always go with the traditional paper and pen survey while patients are in your clinic, it’s more convenient for prospects and patients to answer your surveys during their down time and this is where dental websites come in. You can ask website visitors to answer your online survey (or poll if all you need answered is one question). To make visitors more cooperative, you can probably give them a small gift (which also doubles as a way to lure prospects into your clinic where you can effectively sales talk them into getting treatment. Your website is a form of investment which means that you should be thinking of ways to maximize return of investment. So don’t be scared to play around with your website.

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Are You Driving Traffic to Your Competition’s Website?

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Bill

If you’re serious about transitioning into the 21st century, it’s about time that you take a good and long look at your dental website. Gone are the days where all you need is a website regardless of how it looks like and the absence of features. With the World Wide Web becoming increasingly complex by the minute, your dental website has got to step up.

The question that you have to answer now in order for you to get the best return on investment for your website, since your dental site IS a form of investment to begin with and not just a useless accessory, is how come visitors pass your website up for those of your local competition? These may be a couple of mistakes which you have been committing:

Not showing up on the first page of search engine results.

How important is being on the first page? Well, think about it this way. The cyberspace is filled with thousands upon thousands of dental websites which means that if your dental site is buried under all that, there is no way that your visitors will dig through the entire pile just to find your website. Chances are that they stop clicking through websites after the second or third page. The lazier ones won’t even bother going through the second page. This means that for your website to stand a chance on being clicked it should land on the first page of search engine results. And even amongst the websites in the first page there is competition. If the very first website on the list is impressive enough, then searchers won’t bother clicking the rest of the first page websites which is why you should aspire to be the first on the first page.

Having negative online reputation.

Another reason for why your website isn’t making the cut is because of your not-so-reassuring online reputation. Being online can be a double-edged sword in that you have access to hundreds of prospects but can also be in the mercy of spiteful patients who feel the need to rant about your service. Although you cannot ask websites to take down negative reviews, even if some may be too malicious to be genuine, you do have the ability to drown them out by asking for positive reviews from happy and satisfied patients. The more the good comments, the less likely that the bad ones will surface.

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Making Sense Out of Dental Websites

Posted on May 3, 2012 by Bill

Having a dental website may work wonders for any dental practice but not a lot of dentists are sold on this idea. It’s very easy to be discouraged from having a website when you do not exactly know how this thing works. Dentists have no qualms about having listing in the Yellow Pages or running an ad in any local newspapers. They know that prospects can flip through the pages looking for local dentists while interested individuals may get know about their practice by scanning through local dailies. On the other hand, dentists do not know exactly how having a website means more patients.

How do people find your website?

This is one of the questions which must be answered first and foremost. When people begin searching for products or services, they go to search engines like Google. They run a query and then the search engine returns their search with a compilation of a list of websites which match the query. So when your prospects search for local dentists, your website should be on the top of that list.

How can you make sure that your website can be found?

Making your website appear on the first page of the search engine results is not a laughing matter. The entire process may be grueling which is why it’s better for dentists to entrust their website to experts. Basically, experts employ search engine optimization techniques to help make your dental website more visible. Part of this includes the use of keywords and key phrases as well as other strategies.

How sure are you that your prospects will use the internet to search for dentists?

According to studies and trend reports, consumers are more likely to research online and then purchase offline. Before making any product purchase or availing of any service, wise consumers make sure that they learn everything they need about these products and/or services, and they turn to the internet for this.

How can you market your practice to visitors?

There are a couple of ways for you to convert visitors into patients. There’s the car salesman kind of approach and then there’s the more subtle but extremely effective approach – being helpful. To do so, your website should be focused towards providing helpful solutions to patients or even just filling them in on the information which they need and want. By doing so, you give more reason for visitors to trust you and definitely more reason to make you their dentist.

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Linking Your Practice to Your Dental Website

Posted on May 3, 2012 by Bill

A website is a wonderful marketing tool which, if used correctly, can spell an overall increase in productivity. But this does not come easily and definitely not automatically. Most of the time, dentists, and just about everyone who doesn’t know enough about the internet, fall into the trap of thinking that having a website is a panacea which will instantly rejuvenate their practice and start sending troops of new patients to their clinics. Unfortunately, this isn’t true. However, just as long as your website is optimized, you can easily build practice awareness. The only thing you have to worry now is how you can get your visitors to take action.

1. Make sure that you include your complete contact information on your website.

The seriously interested visitors will take a glance at your website, click through the pages and then hunt for contact information like your office phone number, clinic address and operating hours. Sometimes, they might also hunt down for your email address as well. Having this kind of visitor is good because you don’t have to do any more selling because he or she is already sold on you. The only problem is when these visitors cannot find your contact information.

2. Give internet offers to make them visit your clinic.

Just because incoming traffic to your website is high doesn’t mean that you’ll instantly convert those visitors into paying patients. Yes, some of them will visit your clinic even without you doing anything, but there are also a number who you need to lure into visiting your clinic. You can do this by launching a special internet offer which can be anything from a free dental check up or a free teeth whitening session. Once you get a online visitor to step into your clinic, you’ll have an easier time converting him or her into a paying patient by talking to him or her personally.

3. Allow visitors to book appointments through your website.

Doing so takes away the interval between a prospect viewing your website and the time when he or she actually picks up the telephone to schedule an appointment. If you’re afraid that this feature will only encourage no-shows, a good safeguard mechanism is to call up those who have scheduled appointments online and get their confirmation. You can have your front desk staff to do this for you. The idea is that you’re making it easier for your prospects to book an appointment with you which earns you customer satisfaction points.

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