Dental Lab Email Marketing Best Practices: Avoid The Spam Folder

By David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

In what's become a popular series among our readers, we have been focusing some of our posts on email marketing best practices for dental laboratories in the recent past. In fact, we've covered the importance of a good subject line, the body content, and the best time and date to send your emails. But none of that matters if you don't make sure of one thing: that your email does not land in your recipients' spam folder.

Being marked as spam is any email marketer's greatest nightmare. It can happen automatically thanks to spam filters or manually by your audience, but the difference is minuscule - if it happens, your emails won't be read any longer. Even worse, senders who are frequently marked as spam get blacklisted by email clients, which might mean that your entire email campaign will be for the birds.

Naturally, you want to avoid that happening. So here are 3 best practices that ensure your email remains compliant with all spam rules and regulations.

1) Avoid Trigger Words

Most email clients now have automatic filters in place that redirect marketing emails to the spam folder without ever letting the user see them. These filters check for a variety of things, but trigger words are among their chief priority. These trigger words (and symbols) can range from "$$" to "guarantee," and including them in your headline often means certain death (or endless purgatory) for your email.

You can find a full list of current trigger words at this link. But don't use it as your guide; instead, you should simply ensure that your email subject lines and content doesn't sound like click bait, making empty promises and aimed only at drawing readers in.

2) Include a Physical Address

The CAN SPAM Act of 2000 is a law that oversees all email marketing and should guide all of your practices. Among many other things, it states that every marketing email should always include the physical address of the business from which it is sent, in order to allow the recipient an easy way to contact the company if need be.

Circumventing that rule means actually breaking the law, but it also means your email will likely end up in spam purgatory. That's why you should always include a physical address at the end of your email.

3) Include (and Maintain) Unsubscribe Option

Another stipulation of the CAN SPAM Act is that every marketing email should include an 'unsubscribe' option for users who choose not to receive any more information from the company in question. Of course, that unsubscribe button is mutually beneficial; if your readers don't want to hear from you, you should not attempt to keep communicating with them.

But what many marketers don't know is that maintaining your list of contacts who have unsubscribed is just as important as including the button in the first place. Send another email to someone who has already unsubscribed from a previous message, and they won't just unsubscribe again - they will mark your message as spam, which, as we explained above, can lead to a chain reaction that ultimately leaves you blacklisted. 

Landing in the spam folder is the worst thing that could happen to your email. To learn more about how CRMs can help you avoid that dreaded situation, contact us today!

Visit dentallabsupport.com or call 1-888-715-9099 for more information.

Dental Lab Lead Nurturing

By David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Lead nurturing is an important part of any inbound a dental laboratories marketing efforts. After generating leads through the strategic use of content marketing and landing pages, you want to be sure that your leads actually turn into customers by providing them with regular messages that increasingly nudge them toward a sale. 

But of course, as is the case in any digital marketing initiatives, it's important to follow industry standards in order to be successful. So without further ado, here are 3 best practices that aid your lead nurturing efforts, with the help of CRM Software.

1) Segment and Target

A blanket nurturing strategy can be dangerous. Put simply, sending the same emails to every one of your leads risks annoying them with content that is not relevant to their individual needs. Instead, consider segmenting your leads into different groups, and targeting individual messages specifically to these groups.

Segmenting, of course, begins with a landing page that asks your audience for more than just their name or email address. While you need to keep your sign up forms relatively short, asking one or two distinguishing questions (such as their state of residence, their industry, or their job role) helps separate your contacts into distinct segments.

And once you set up that landing page, an effective CRM can do the rest. Now, you can set up targeted nurturing campaigns with emails directed only at the portions of your audience for which they are most relevant, ensuring a smooth experience for your leads and better chances or turning into customers.

2) Support with Content

You should also consider expanding your lead nurturing strategy beyond mere email marketing. While emails remain the lifeblood of any 'drip' campaign, what if you use them to promote content that is relevant to leads in a specific stage in the sales funnel?

Of course, this strategy can take some effort, as you will have to build content that relates to audiences who already know about you. But once you have this type of content, you can enrich your nurturing efforts by providing actual, valuable content rather than just a prompt to become your customer. It turns your emails into true nurturing efforts, rather than mere promotional messaging.

3) Time Strategically

Finally, you should pay serious attention to when you send out your emails. Individual studies vary on the optimal amount of emails you should send your audience per month, but most experts generally recommend a median between once and twice per week.

Finding the right balance in your email send frequency is crucial: if you don't send nurturing emails often enough, your contacts will forget about you or go with a competitor instead. But do it too often, and you will land in too many spam folders and unsubscribe lists to be effective.

If you're looking which exact send frequency can work for you, your CRM can help. In fact, you ran run reports on your open, click-through and unsubscribe percentages, which in turn helps you understand how your send frequency impacts these success metrics. Thankfully, most CRMs allow you to easily make changes to your automation workflows that ensure you get the most out of your email nurturing efforts.

Nurturing your leads to becoming customers can be incredibly valuable, especially considering its low cost and the high degree of automation available through customer relationship management software today. But even with this software, you want to be sure that you follow the above best practices.

By segmenting your leads and targeting your messages, supporting your emails with content, and implementing the right send frequency, your lead nurturing efforts will make a significant impact in garnering new customers. And if you're looking for a CRM that can help you throughout the process, contact us!  visit DentalLabSupport.com for more information or contact us by telephone 1-888-715-9099.

Flexibility with an outside agency

By David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Flexibility can have different meaning for different people in different situations. It’s more than just the capability of being bent or elastic. The same word is also often tailed with outsourced telemarketing, or even outsourcing in general. Because of it being such an ambiguous term, this question may have already surfaced your mind: just how flexible outsourced telemarketing can be?

Benefits of an outside Agency

• Adaptive to change and setbacks – Flexibility can be measured depending on the outsourced telemarketer’s capability to adapt to the fast shifting demands of your target prospects. More than just the cost-efficient advantage of outsourcing, a skilled outsourced telemarketing provider handles setbacks of the campaign effectively, allowing you to have the time and leisure to focus on your core business.

• Expertise – Experienced telemarketers practice their expertise just about every waking day. It wouldn’t be too hard to compare a trained in-house newbie to a veteran telemarketer. This sums up the possibility of you saving heaps of effort and number of staff to train, not to mention the added operation for you to work on.

• Follows new trends and approaches – While the new emerging approaches to B2B marketing is popularly utilized, outsourced telemarketing providers are also up to these challenges, continuing to implement its proven techniques while following to the new trends that optimizes the B2B marketing process.

In the end, flexibility of outsourced telemarketing depends on how the service is provided as well as your relationship with your provider. It doesn’t only take a flexible service for an outsourced telemarketing to work.

For More Information Contact DentalLabSupport.com - Info@dentallabsupport.com  1-888-715-9099

3 Adjustments that will Instantly Build Your Dental Lab's Online Presence

Dental lab marketers who ask the question "what can I do to help my business right now?" are often disappointed. Many strategies, from optimizing your website for search engines to building your social media presence, require dedication and resources, and often take months to bear fruit.

But fear not! As it turns out, you can do a few things that will help you market your business successfully without delay. So instead of wasting more of your valuable time, let's jump right in: here are 3 adjustments that will instantly build your online presence.

1) Write for the Web

Perhaps the single biggest issue dental lab owners face when beginning to market their products or services online is one of which they may not even be aware: adjusting their writing for the web.

Even if you have some experience writing text for local ads or newsletters, make no mistake: writing for the web is an entirely different animal. Just knowing that, and adjusting your writing accordingly, can instant improve your online presence.

As you probably know, Twitter has a character limit of 140 characters on all of its tweets. In fact, that may be the exact reason you've stayed away from the network! But what if we told you that you should treat your Facebook presence as if it had the same limit?

As it turns out, the text in your Facebook posts starts getting cut off after 90 characters depending on your readers' device of choice, so making sure you put the most important, convincing part of your message in those first 90 characters is absolutely crucial.

And that's just one example of the need to adjust your writing. Web users have little patience; they won't stick around to read a paragraph that's longer than 3 or 4 sentences and looks like a "wall of text" on their mobile device. By shortening your sentences and paragraphs, and directing them to "you" text rather than "I" statements, you ensure that a much greater percentage of your users read and share your text, and your online presence grows.

2) Quality over Quantity

Many dental lab owners mistakenly think that to be successful in the digital realm, they need to push out content as often as possible when in fact, the opposite is true. Yes, Google loves regular content updates, just as regular exposure on social media is important. But that doesn't mean you should emphasize the quantity over quality.

Again, take Facebook as an example. Thanks to its EdgeRank algorithm, the network only shows your posts to a portion of your "likes" who have engaged with past posts of yours. Because your audience is much more likely to engage with posts that it deems interesting and relevant, businesses focusing on quality content reach a much larger audience than those who simply push posts.

The same is true for Google. Increasingly, the search engine seeks out quality content to rank highly, determining its relevancy in a scoring algorithm that continuously updates itself to maximize user satisfaction. If your individual page updates aren't exciting enough for your users to interact with and share, you won't get to take advantage of potential exposure on the search engines.

3) Connect Your Efforts

Finally, you should absolutely encourage your offline consumers to visit your online presence, whether that presence is a website or a social media profile.

Asking for (honest) reviews, administering a survey, or even offering small rewards online that you can promote in your storefront all drives new users to your web. And if, once they're there, they discover the quality content you have developed with your newly-acquired web writing skills, they'll be likely to stick around and ensure that your online presence keeps growing.

BONUS: Capture Your Online Visitors

So if you're beginning to grow your online presence, what's next? Ideally, you should capture your visitors, encouraging them to give you their contact information become leads in exchange for your quality content. Then, you can begin to engage in targeted marketing campaigns which will increase your customer base and benefit everyone involved.

So if you need any help with making sure that your newly-grown online presence turns into actual revenue, contact dentallabsupport.com! We'd love to talk to you about our services and how it helps you move leads toward becoming customers.