Direct Mail Marketing Tips – Part 2
There are a multitude of variables that can affect direct mail campaigns. Two weighty factors to keep in mind are the saturation of dental offices (dentist:population) in your area and the level of marketing they’ve been doing. When there are more dentists in an area, especially ones who are marketing, it can take longer for your marketing to become effective. Not because it can’t or won’t, but because top of mind awareness and even just recall are more of a challenge to establish when there are more competing messages. Frequency is key here.
Certain times of the year are better for direct mail than others, at least for the type of direct mail we’re talking about. We don’t recommend mailing from the second half of June through the first week of July. (At least we do our best to schedule mailings for projected hit times from the second week of July and on, but unfortunately we can’t control the U.S. Postal System – even though sometimes we wish we could influence it.) We also don’t recommend mailing from the second half of November (before Thanksgiving) through the end of December, because the holidays are really slow for dental offices’ direct mail. A viable alternative here is an in-house mailing, like a year-end letter to your patient base. During the holidays, it is much easier and more cost effective to get current patients in for recall or a holiday special than it is to solicit new patients. An internal push for referrals is another end-of-year solution for filling spots in a slower holiday schedule. If you’re a Practice Cafe client, please ask us to send you our document of recommendations for when to mail marketing pieces for family and pediatric dentists.
We totally understand our clients’ desire to see good responses to a campaign right away, especially since marketing can be a significant financial investment. We feel the same way about the marketing we invest in for our company. If a campaign isn’t working, we never suggest that you stick to it until it drains you. Marketing requires flexibility. If something has been tested for long enough to show that it’s not quite the right formula for a particular office and area, for whatever reason, the next step is to reevaluate and tweak. Sometimes completely overhauling a direct mail plan is necessary. But this is only after everything else is in place, such as a website and functioning office systems.
When evaluating, ask yourself, Am I catering to the target market that is realistically mine? For example, is there a high demand for insurance acceptance in your area but your office is strictly fee-for-service? If so, your marketing probably won’t work as well as you’d like (if at all). Especially for older offices, think, Is my office up-to-date enough for the expectations of consumers? See our next LEARN MORE article for suggestions to spruce up your office. Many times an unsuccessful direct mail campaign is purely a manifestation of some other facet of your practice that should be improved upon if at all possible.
We’ve even come across front desk receptionists negatively affecting direct mail response, albeit inadvertently, because of the way the phone is sometimes answered... Dentistry is getting more and more competitive as time goes on, and factors that were minor in the past have become major points of competition. Do not expect your marketing to work wonders if you’re not paying close enough attention to the other kinks in your office environment and systems.
There are no guarantees of return on your marketing investment. Our team’s goal is to do our best each and every time we work on a project for you. We strive to serve you according to your needs to the best of our ability. Even when we do our best to make your marketing pieces satisfactory to you at the same time as true to the combination of elements we’ve found to work in campaigns around the country, other factors can still thwart the success of marketing. One major rule of thumb in all of this is that marketing is not what makes something marketable. Something must be marketable (according to its target market) first, and then marketing is the way to let your target market know about whatever you’re marketing.
To view our Return on Investment projections for our direct mail campaigns, click here. You’ll notice that we’ve taken into account multiple year ROI projections, because we hope that the relationships you establish with new patients will be long-lasting.
