Email Headlines targeted to Dentists

How to Make the Most of your headlines to Optimize Your Email Marketing

For many dental laboratories, picking the most relevant and successful digital marketing channel is a crucial step to achieving sustainable success. Limited budgets and time means not being able to accomplish a 'blanket approach'; instead, you have to find the channels that work best for your needs.

But in most cases, growing your dental lab is still most effective through email marketing. That is only true, of course, if you get the subject line right.

Maximizing Your Open Rates

What makes your audience decide to actually open your email? Given that the average Dentist now receives more than 30-45 emails every single day, that question is central to determine your email marketing success. 

The answer is obvious: your subject line. While other factors, such as the 'From' name and email, also play into the equation, the subject gives your recipients a distinct idea of what the email is about, and whether they will derive any value from reading it. If the answer is no, your message never even stands a chance.

Conveying Value

Given the importance of your subject line on audience attention and open rates, your subject line has to convey the tangible value that your recipients get from actually opening it. In other words, you need to explain exactly what the email is about, and why your audience will not regret the read.

One way to convey value without getting into too many specifics is to personalize your email. If you can give your audience the idea that they're being spoken with rather than marketed to, your open rates will increase drastically. In fact, personalized subject lines provide a significant lift in open rates regardless of industry.

Technical Best Practices

The above tip sounds obvious - until you realize your restrictions. Especially as more of your readers will view your emails on mobile devices, you absolutely need to keep your subject lines short. Research shows that on average, subject lines between 61 and 70 characters in length receive the highest open rates.

Avoiding Spam Filters

Your subject line can also make a crucial difference in whether or not your email message lands in your recipients' spam folders. Email clients keep a list of so-called trigger words, which tell them that a message is too promotional and probably not relevant or honest. Avoid these trigger words at all costs.

But don't forget about manual spam filters, either. if your subject line seems overly promotional, or the body of your email does not follow up on the promise your subject makes, your audience could report the message as spam. Make sure that both your subjects and the actual messages are consistent and relevant to your audience.

Testing to Achieve Success

Finally, email subject lines offer a perfect opportunity for A/B testing. All of the above best practices apply to most industries - but who's to say that your audience behaves exactly the same way? The only way to find out is to try two variations, and send them to two random segments of your intended audience. Depending on which of these audiences opens more emails, you know which subject line worked, and can use it (or learn from it) in future messages.

For more info visit DentalLabSupport.com or call 1.888.715.9099

4 ways to retain your dentist

Any successful dental laboratory knows: attracting new dentists is only half of the equation to long-term, sustained growth and success. Retaining your existing dentists is at least as important. 

Of course, knowing that fact means little if you don't know how to actually accomplish the feat. Fortunately, a number of strategies are available that can help you keep your existing customers happy and coming back. Here are 4 ways in which data can improve your customer retention efforts.

1) Know How to Attract Desirable Customers

You may not have considered this, but customer retention actually begins before a member of your target audience ever purchases your product or service. In fact, for optimum success, it can be as simple as knowing who will be most likely to become not just a one-time customer, but a loyalist of your brand.

Data, of course, can help in that regard. By analyzing your current customers, you can find common characteristics such as age groups, location, and other geographic and demographic factors. Then, you can refine your target audience to make sure that your initial marketing efforts reach only those with a high chance of staying with you for a long time.

2) Know Which Customers to Target

Similar to the above, you can use common characteristics for your most loyal customers to make sure that once someone buys something from you, you focus your efforts on retention only if they're likely to repeat the same action.

For example, you might reserve your most intense retention efforts (such as a personal phone call) only to customers who fit the profile of your most loyal audience. Others can still get automated nurturing messages, but you can focus your resources and valuable time on the group with the highest chance of repeat conversions.

3) Know How to Phrase Your Message

Through data, you can also begin to understand just how you can convince your audience to stay with you. You may, for example, find that your post-purchase nurturing efforts are more successful if you talk about industry updates rather than promoting your product.

Through metrics such as email open rates and website engagements, you learn how your audience interacts with your messages, and adjust your retention efforts accordingly. The result is a more focused retention strategy that helps you take advantage of the insights you gained throughout the process.

4) Know When to Reach Out

Finally, don't underestimate the importance of timing when it comes to retention. Following up with new customers immediately after their initial purchase may lead to negative feelings, while waiting too long can risk missing the window of effective communication. But how do you find the middle ground?

The answer is simple: data. Research industry best practices for the timing of your marketing strategy, but don't be afraid to consult your own data as well. If you can run a few experiments in which you contact first-time customers at various time points, you can conclude which timing worked best to improve your retention rates.

For more information please visit DentalLabSupport.com or call us at 1.888.715.9099

Keeping it Fresh: In Dental Lab Sales, Timing is Everything

Have you ever searched your refrigerator only to discover that the fruit, vegetable or cheese you were looking for has gone bad? If you were planning to prepare a meal right at that moment, you would surely be disappointed. Like cooking, freshness is key to whipping up solid dental lab sales results. You can ensure nothing goes bad with a process for planning and monitoring your time.

Dental Lab Deals can go bad for many reasons: Dentists are not responding as expected; salespeople not taking the next steps fast enough; a loss of focus; or general work overload.

In your daily activities, some deals in your sales pipeline may have gone stale or are beginning to “rot.” Most prospective deals, just like food, have a shelf life.

Get help to avoid deal rot

Your deals are not the only ones to rot

Deal rot is a common problem among busy salespeople — but there’s no need to worry. When you pay attention to the average time it takes for deals to close, or move from one stage to another, you can assess whether your deal is fresh or if it’s rotting. 

DentalLabSupport's LabCell CRM feature lets you identify which deals are lingering in a certain stage of your sales flow for too long.

Some deals can fall through the cracks

Just as no-one buys food thinking that it won’t get cooked, salespeople don’t conduct their sales activities thinking that potential deals will rot.

When this happens, those deals require maintenance. You can achieve this by giving each deal a due date or setting a time constraint, so you can measure the relative freshness of the opportunity.

And some of those deals can be recovered

If you have established a good relationship with the prospect, you may be able to pick things up after a missed deadline — other deals may need to be re-evaluated. When deals begin to rot, you’ll see where you’re taking more time than usual and need to move forward.

You wouldn’t want to set a due date too soon because rushing a sale could turn prospects off. Similarly, if you wait too long, the prospect’s interest and your opportunity to close could be lost. You may be sitting on “promising” goods, only to find your potential deal is wilted and rotten.

Setting an accurate due date based on your sales cycle allows you to see what you have to work with in your pipeline, and what takes precedence. Every week, take stock of your CRM to review all open deals, as well as the lost deals from the previous week, to gain a better understanding of the next actions you should take.

Due dates matter, so pay attention

Once the deal-rotting feature is enabled and configured for your pipeline, a red hue will color the deals that have remained idle for a while. The feature is easily customizable and can be set up to display your deals as “rotten” after any number of days you choose. You can set defaults for each stage in your pipeline for each pipeline you manage.

For example, you could set up your pipeline where deals in your first stage rot after five days of inactivity and have the deals in a different stage of your pipeline rot after only two days of inactivity.

This discipline with, visibility into, and fine-tuning of your pipeline makes all the difference.

Sometimes, you need to restock

While the time it takes to complete the sales cycle varies, it’s crucial to know if a deal is still fresh. Having this visibility into a deal can help you allocate resources and time.

With food, when items spoil, we can see the real consequences of letting food rot. It looks unattractive; its time has passed. Likewise, with deals in your sales pipeline; to have a healthy sales pipeline, you need to know the state of the deals in play.

Don’t waste time on deals that are unlikely to close, or any deal that could spoil it for the rest of the bunch. If too much of the inventory is rotting away, you need to make way for fresh leads and prospects.

Want to improve your sales performance across the board?

• Set clear time expectations
• Track deals at risk of rotting
• Clear out rotten deals
• Restock your pipeline consistently

For more information visit DentalLabSupport.com or call 1.888.715.9099

The Right Email Timing Can Help Your Dental Lab Close More Sales

Closing sales opportunities in your dental lab probably is and absolutely should be among your major priorities for your business. If you have contacts in your database, why not do everything you can to make sure they convert to customers?

While the above is a simple fact, it can also be difficult to achieve. Again and again, we hear from small businesses looking for tips and techniques to close more sales. Lead nurturing tends to be an easy answer, but how do you set up your automated nurturing emails to maximize their success? Here's one crucial part: get the timing right.

Timing Your Initial Inquiry Response

Timing matters from the moment a lead enters your database. Research has long suggested that when someone fills out the contact information necessary to become a lead, they require an almost instant response to maximize their chances of becoming customers.

In fact, a landmark study by the Harvard Business Review found that following up with a lead within 1 hour of their conversion increases your chances of that lead becoming sales-qualified by 700%. Subsequent research has confirmed just how essential that first email contact is to inspire a closed sale in the future.

Following up quickly will also set you above your competition instantly. One study found that 30% to 50% of dental lab leads are closed by the business that responds first, while between 40% and 50% of all sales leads never receive a follow up at all. If you send even a quick lead acknowledgement with a promise to follow up in more detail later, your chances of closing that sale will increase substantially.

Spreading Out Subsequent Emails

Of course, the initial follow up is just the beginning of your lead nurturing efforts. From now on, you should send regular emails that both invite your leads to learn more about your brand, and share new content alongside regular industry news.

But in what intervals should these emails go out? While the answer will ultimately depend on your individual audience, Marketing Sherpa found that hovering between once a month and once a week receives optimum results. In other words, if your nurturing emails go out between 2-4 times a month, your emails will work effectively to help your business close sales.

But you have to be careful. According to a survey by Technology Advice, the most common reason your audience marks emails as spam is because they received too many emails. Keeping your emails to no more than once per week, while also varying the days of the week at which your emails send, will optimize your nurturing efforts.

How Far Out Should You Go?

Finally, the third variable of email timing is just how far out your nurturing efforts should go. In other words, how long should you keep emailing leads that do not seem to move through the funnel?

This variable is also the most difficult to narrow down specifically. Ultimately, the answer depends entirely on the length of your sales process. If you sell convenience goods that don't require much thought or consideration, a month is enough to communicate everything you need for your leads to make a purchasing decision. But if your business depends on high-consideration decision processes, going further out (sometimes to 3 months and beyond) may make more sense.

And of course, don't discount the idea of sending up infrequent follow-ups even to cold leads. They may just not have been ready to buy in the past, so checking to see whether they are now makes business sense. 

To learn more about optimizing your lead nurturing efforts to close more sales, and to find the right software to set up automated emails that increase your chances of success, contact us at 1.888.715.9099 or DentalLabSupport.com

With Segmentation, You Need to Go Small to Get Large

Most Dental Labs wait too long to embrace customer segmentation. Done right, and done early, it can make a huge difference to your success.

Not so long ago, the art of the sale consisted of placing your best products in your front windows and waiting for dentist's to show interest. Today the model has flipped - it's no longer about the dentist finding you but about you finding them. Once you do, you can tailor your message to specific subsets of customers, maximizing conversions and propelling brand loyalty. While it may sound like a paradox, the way to build a large customer base is to think in terms of small segments.     

Yes, You Can (and Should) Start Today 

Many dental lab marketers think of segmentation as a process they should put in place only after they've built a suitably large customer base. But it can also be a powerful way to build that base. How? Because it can show you the type of dentist who is most likely to engage with your product or service, and (crucially!) how to reach them. "It's not just about trying to find the right dentist, but about finding them at the right time, in the right place, and in the right mindset to want to purchase," says David H. Khalili, president of DentalLabSupport.com.

And what better way to begin that search than right at home, with those people who are already engaging with your channels? By segmenting your current customers using the data you already have, you can learn their demographic, where they are (based on geography), and how they respond to marketing messages. In fact, you can drill down to discover how many ads they've viewed, how many times they've viewed them, and even the days and times they are most likely to do so. "There are so many nuances you can find within your data regarding who comes to your site and why," David  says. "And it's important to identify the various niches they occupy."              

Once those niches have been identified, you can then look outside: researching other channels, websites, and applications that attract similar audiences. These will be the ideal places to target your advertising campaigns going forward.

Driven by Data

With detailed niche information in hand, you are in an ideal position to start building your campaign. Now you know the day and time your ads are most likely to have an effect, along with how many ads to serve, how often to serve them, and on which type of device.

This information can be further honed by tools such as A/B testing (in which two alternative phrases, headlines, or other messaging components are offered and subsequently tracked to see which version draws the best response) in order to refine a precise call to action. "All of those variables are taken into account, and that's when we really hone in and start hitting our performance drivers," says David.

At DentalLabSupport.com, this work is augmented by a powerful real-time optimization (RTO) engine, a program that continuously evaluates consumer response and market behavior, allowing administrators to react swiftly to the smallest changes in campaign performance. The human and digital work are complementary; while the computer crunches and updates data, the administrator can make adjustments to optimize ad performance. "It's like a sports car that goes in a straight line all by itself, but then needs someone to guide it through the corners," David says. This same approach extends to pricing - by determining the cost and effectiveness of each ad, you can determine and execute an optimal spend plan over the course of a campaign.  

Tailored to Perfection

Segmenting your audience, both in order to identify and expand your list of potential customers, provides you with another enormous advantage: the ability to tailor your messaging to each segment, all the way down to the level of an individual user.

This can take two forms. First, segmenting can help you determine which audience niches should be exposed to your ad or commercial. For a movie studio, for instance, that could mean segmenting its first-party data (provided by email subscribers and so on) to promote an upcoming action movie to one segment, a children's movie to another, and a rom-com to still another. And, as we've learned, that includes selecting the right day, the right time, and the right communication channel so that the user is most likely to be paying attention. 

The second form is to actually tailor the ad itself to a given recipient. Say a user has visited your site and viewed several pairs of boots. Over the next few days, you can ensure that a dynamic carousel ad will appear when the user is browsing their favorite web pages, including those boots in its rotating slides to remind the user of their interest. If the user has visited your site several times without converting, the carousel can then be configured to include an offer for a 10% discount or free shipping - a further nudge towards purchasing.

Even better, you can offer a discount to one group and free shipping to another and see which offer works best, refining as you go. "The further down the funnel you go, you should highlight more calls to action," says David. "If you've got a sale launching that's going to end in a week's time, add a countdown timer, for example, to provide just the right level of urgency."

Don't Go It Alone

When choosing a partner in digital advertising, look for one who offers a number of features that both simplify and optimize the segmenting and message-tailoring process. In addition to the real-time optimization capability mentioned above, DentalLabSupport.com also offers a full creative suite along with a team of designers and developers who will build ads to client specifications or help them create their own. And, its unique A² coding language allows the company to offer rich-media ads at the same price as conventional units. So take advantage of the data you have, and explore the many possibilities of customer segmentation and message targeting. If you want your company to fly down the straightaways and be nimble through the curves, it's time to get behind the wheel of that sports car--and step on the gas.

For more information:  Contact a Dental Lab Support marketing specialist 1.888.715.9099.

3 Steps to Improve Customer Retention

By:  David H. Khalili
Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Too many dental laboratories approach customer retention with arbitrary efforts. They think that as long as they sell a good product and offer the best possible customer service, they'll automatically build customer retention. 

This just leaves businesses spinning their wheels. For real improvement, you need an actual strategy that goes into specifics. Here's one way to go about improving your customer retention: 

Start tracking your doctor satisfaction 

The first mistake dental labs make is not tracking their customer satisfaction. Many just assume that there's no way to measure this metric quantitatively. While customer satisfaction seems qualitative in nature, it's absolutely possible for dental labs to track it. 

Test different methods and keep Dentists coming back

Once you have a concrete idea of your customer satisfaction, you can start testing with different methods. The idea is to throw things at the wall one-by-one and see what sticks.  

A common customer retention tactic is to introduce a customer loyalty program. A recent Business.com article explains why you should try this out and track its success: 

"Using rewards systems to secure customer loyalty is an old tactic, but it’s an effective one. There are many loyalty program options for restaurant owners to choose from. Make sure that the program you choose is supported by your POS System before investing, as it will help you accumulate invaluable customer data."

There are many programs you can create to keep your dentist's coming back. Consider offering discounts, adding more value to your service, and giving coupons to repeat customers. 

This, of course, is just one tactic. There are other possibilities, such as using social media and email marketing to bring your customers back. The important thing here is to try each tactic one-by-one so there's no problem isolating the cause for changes in customer retention. 

Check for changes in your customer satisfaction and customer retention

Now that you have a system to measure your customer satisfaction and have tested tactics to improve customer retention, you can see if your strategy made any difference. 

See if your customer loyalty program or social media marketing efforts made any impact on your customer retention. Similarly, track your customer satisfaction over time to see if there were any changes in its trend. 

Customer satisfaction and customer retention are related, but they don't always move together. It's possible for your customer satisfaction to increase and your customer retention to stay stagnant or vice-versa. 

In this respect, it's important to prioritize one goal over the other. Keep in mind that customer satisfaction is more volatile in the short-run while customer retention is likely a more important indicator in the long-run. 

It'll never be an exact science, but there are steps you can take to push customer retention in that direction. To talk more about customer retention, or anything else, contact us today by visiting DentalLabSupport.com or calling 1-888-715-9099. 

How to Apply Brand Marketing Principles to Your Landing Pages

Your website is an exploratory experience for potential customers in the consideration phase looking to learn more about your company or product as a whole. Landing pages, on the other hand, generate the most ROI when used as a natural extension of your digital advertising. When done correctly, these dedicated pages create a focused message aligned and personalized experience for a target audience with a single call to action.Brand marketing matters. Whether your target user is exploring your website, stumbling upon a post in their Facebook newsfeed after liking your page, or first exposed to your company in a Google search result, brand development maintains its importance throughout the customer journey.

Landing pages are not meant to replace your website, though. Your website is for people to learn more about your product in a generic way without addressing their specific needs, while a landing page is for someone to take action.

Among the fundamental differences between landing pages and a website is the act of conscious and direct personalization to create more context around a particular promotion. Landing pages also help illustrate the unique value proposition of your product at the moment someone first engages with your brand.

Brand strategy and landing pages

Authentic brands don’t emerge from marketing cubicles or advertising agencies. They emanate from everything the company does.

@Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks

Legendary copywriter David Ogilvy defines a brand as “the intangible sum of a product’s attributes.” In the context of brand marketing, the attitude and voice of your brand are determined by the totality of experiences across all of your digital properties, including landing pages.

While it doesn’t need to be identical across the entire web; product branding needs to reflect core values of your company to manage perceptions, take ownership, and drive authority, trust, and evangelism.

Brand development opportunities in landing pages

The power behind personalized landing pages is tremendous. By giving every promotion it’s own landing page, you can articulate the unique value proposition of your product to the specific persona.

Most of the opportunities for personalization exist within the qualitative variables on each page such as text, images, video, and other creative assets.

Once you lock down your branding, there are some standard consistencies to use across all of your digital properties, including your personalized landing pages. These include:

Typography: Using custom fonts across your website, ads, and all of their corresponding landing pages can increase conversions and helps keep your pages on-brand. Instapage makes this easy to do with Google Fonts and Adobe Typekit integrations.

Colors: increase brand recognition by up to 80%. Once you identify the primary, secondary, and tertiary colors for your brand, build those colors into all of your pages.

Logo: Your logo is essential to your brand identity. Create a few on-brand versions to use in different situations depending on color, size, file type, etc. Also, make sure to use the same high-quality favicon on each landing page.

URLs: Brand consistent can start and end with using custom domains. Whenever possible, always publish landing pages to a sub directory or subdomain on the root domain of your brand. Additionally, this is essential to making your landing pages SEO friendly.

Page structure: Provide a similar conversion experience every time. You’ve already trained your users where to click. Help them engage by keeping things consistent with your call to actions across all of your pages. However, always remember to A/B test your pages, especially if you want to experiment with a new page layout.

Landing pages, brand development, and the customer journey

Wouldn’t it be great if your target users discovered your high-value product through an ad, ended up on the subsequent landing page, purchased immediately, and become brand advocates forever?

Unfortunately, this is rarely the case.

WordStream reports that the median conversion rate of AdWords campaigns is 2.35%. However, even among the top ten percent of AdWords accounts with an 11% conversion rate; a one, two or three-touch customer journey from discovery to purchase is elusive, if it ever happens at all. Couple that with the fact that Salesforce states that it takes 6 to 8 touches to generate a viable sales lead and it can seem like it’s an impossible feat to close sales from PPC ads.

So how do you increase your chances of driving new sales from AdWords and PPC? Creating personalized landing pages consistent with your branding because they’re an excellent way to optimize your brand development throughout your customer's journey.

Regardless of the specific path, landing pages function as a centerpiece of brand development for users across all of your digital properties, while they move farther down the road to conversion. The intersection of brand marketing and landing pages is especially important because landing pages are the impetus for your target personas, segments, and customers to take action at every stage of the nurturing and onboarding process.

A tremendous part of your customer's journey takes place on personalized landing pages. Much of this lead nurturing also occurs within email marketing, in-app messaging, and other marketing automation.

For more information, contact us at info@dentallabsupport.com or DentalLabSupport.com 

Email Marketing: Key Performance Indicators to Watch

Email offers a cost-effective marketing solution for dental laboratories. Some dental labs even claim that it's 20x more cost effective than traditional advertising. But if you're looking to capitalize on this promotional method, you'll need to watch the following email marketing key performance indicators (KPIs).

Bounce Rate

Wouldn't it be great if every email you sent ended up in the recipient's inbox box? Assuming you have a decent number of subscribers, this typically won't happen. Some of your emails will reach the recipient, while others "bounce." The recipient's email server rejects these bounced emails, returning them to the sender. Conventional wisdom should tell you that a high bounce rate indicates a more serious underlying problem, such as poor delivery practices, irrelevant content, technical errors, etc.

There are two primary types of email bounces:

1. Hard bounce -- occurs when the email address is either invalid or doesn't exist.
2. Soft bounce -- occurs when the recipient's inbox was full, email server was down, or the message file size was too large.

Open Rate

Arguably, one of the most important email marketing KPIs to watch is open rate. Just because your email reaches the intended recipient doesn't necessarily mean that he or she will open it. If the recipient doesn't recognize your email, or if he or she isn't interested in your message, it can count against your campaign's open rate. For instance, if you send an email to 1,000 recipients, 75 of whom open it, your campaign's open rate is 75%.

Subscriber Growth Rate

Are you gaining or losing subscribers to your email newsletter? Monitoring your campaign's subscriber growth rate answers this question, allowing you to further optimize your emails and attract more subscribers.

To calculate your subscriber growth rate, take your total number of news subscribers, subtract it by your number of unsubscribes, and divide this number by the total number of email address in your list.

For instance, if you have 100 new subscribers, with 10 unsubscribes and 1,000 total email addresses in your list, your growth rate would be 9% (note: the actual total for the equation is 0.09; you need to multiply this number by 10).

Click-Through Rate

Click-through rate (CTR) is another email marketing KPI to watch. This is the percentage of recipients who click on the promotional link in your email.

CTR is calculated by taking the total number of recipients and diving by your unique clicks originating from the email campaign. If 800 prospects received your email and 160 clicked the link, your CTR is 20%. Maintaining a high CTR is essential for a successful email marketing campaign.

Here are some tips to improve your email CTRs:

• Split test different call-to-action (CTA) placements in your emails to see what works and what doesn't.
• Use a responsive design, ensuring your emails load on both desktop and mobile devices.
• Segment your email list based on user demographic. Doing so allows you to personalize your messages for a higher CTRs.
• Keep it short. Long emails tend to suffer from low CTRs.
• Include social media sharing buttons. According to a study conducted by eConsultancy, this alone can increase email CTRs by as much as 30%.

Conversion Rate

Of course, you should also monitor your emails' conversion rate. Conversion rate, as you already know, the percentage of recipients who not only click your promotional link but also follow through by taking direct action. For some marketers, a conversion occurs when the recipient buys a product or service. For others, a conversion occurs when the recipient inputs his or her personal information.

These are just a few of the most important metrics to watch with your email marketing campaigns.

To learn more about email and other digital marketing strategies for small businesses, contact us today 1-888-715-9099 or info@dentallabsupport.com. DentalLabSupport.com offers Email Marketing Management solutions for Dental Labs of all shapes and sizes.

Google Penguin 4.0 Live - What You Need To Know

Earlier today, Google announced the launch of Penguin 4.0 as a core part of their algorithm. We've been on the lookout for this release for most of this year. The rumors and news from Google about launch dates, how it might work, and other details have been like reading a tabloid. 

We have done a lot of prep work, including Penguin Awareness Month, evolving our product, and bundling tools like the Link Audit feature into our product for no charge. Read on for more information about Penguin 4.0 and frequently asked questions.

Key features:

• Penguin is now real-time. Historically, the list of sites affected by Penguin was periodically refreshed at the same time. Once a webmaster considerably improved their site and its presence on the Internet, many of Google's algorithms would take that into consideration quickly, but others, like Penguin, needed to be refreshed. With this change, Penguin's data is refreshed in real time, so changes will be visible much faster, typically taking effect shortly after we recrawl and reindex a page. It also means we're not going to comment on future refreshes.


• Penguin is now more granular. Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site.

What Is The Penguin Algorithm?

First introduced in April 2012, the Penguin update was created to target sites that used “spammy” tactics and manipulative practices that violate the Google webmaster guidelines.

The last update was in the Fall of 2014 and sites impacted by that update have been waiting two years for another update.

Is It Still Rolling Out?

Yes, and it is expected to be fully rolled out in a couple weeks.

It is now a real-time part of Google’s core search algorithm, which means that once it fully rolls out, it will be a constant process rather than periodic updates, as it's been previously.

Google:

• With this change, Penguin’s data is refreshed in real time, so changes will be visible much faster, typically taking effect shortly after we recrawl and reindex a page.

If rankings are fine now, do we think there will be any more changes?

No one will know the impact until it has fully rolled out.

Once it rolls out, it will be a real-time part of the core algorithm.

Keep in mind that Google is constantly making changes to its algorithm to improve the user experience, so with Penguin now as part of the core algorithm, it is more important than ever to ensure that your links are following quality guidelines.

If rankings have gone down, what should we do?

Don’t panic. It will still be rolling out for the next couple weeks. We have already seen some client’s ranking bounce around and then settle back into their previous position.

Identify and Remove Clogs in Your Sales Pipeline

Lead nurturing is essential for moving dentists through the sales pipeline. With targeted emails, relevant content, and social media interaction, you can encourage dentists to take the next step in the buying process. There's a lot that can go wrong with the sales pipeline, so it's important to find the source of the problem rather than trying to fix its leaks with band-aids. Dental Lab Sales pipeline management isn't a perfect system. Even with a great strategy, your pipeline will get clogged from time to time. When this happens, it's important to identify the cause, find a solution, and prevent the same problem from happening again. In the end, you'll find that you have to do regular maintenance to keep your sales pipeline healthy. 

Keep a healthy pipeline with relevant leads 

The single most important factor in regard to sales pipeline management is lead quality. To attract new customers to your business and move them along through the sales process, you need to market exclusively to your target audience. 

Irrelevant leads are the most common source of sales pipeline clogs. Because these dentists aren't interested in your products, they just sit at the beginning of your pipeline until you remove them. 

This Business 2 Community article explains the process of qualifying prospects. According to the article, it's essential to first identify your target audience:

"Qualifying prospects is at the heart of a healthy lead generation system. First, you need to paint a clear picture of the types of prospects that fit with each of your solutions. Doing so establishes the types of buyers that could flow through your pipeline in the most efficient way. When you know who to target, you qualify by asking questions that allow you to detect whether a buyer fits well into your pipeline."

Lead nurturing tactics won't be effective if you're trying to convert irrelevant leads. In this respect, the first step of the journey is the most important one. 

Align your marketing and sales teams 

It's well-known that marketing and sales teams don't exactly mesh well together. Each team sees itself as the more important counterpart and is therefore unwilling to compromise. 

It's up to lab management to get these teams to understand that they're part of a dynamic duo. A marketing campaign would be ineffective without a sales team, and sales representatives would never have any opportunities without a solid marketing campaign. 

In this light, aligning your marketing and sales teams should be your first priority. According to this Forbes article, you can do this by creating a service level agreement between the two departments: 

"If you haven’t noticed yet, integrating your marketing and sales departments is vital if you want a contribution from your marketers in the sales pipeline. You can encourage these departments by drafting a service level agreement (SLA). The SLA should describe the lead requirements like the target market and interest, the marketing contribution to the sales pipeline, support options, and how data and content will be shared."

It's a give and take. Don't expect perfect coordination overnight, but you also want to nip bad habits from the very start. 

Move Dentists along with lead nurturing 

Once you refocus your lead generation strategy and align your marketing and sales teams, you can move on to other matters in relation to the sales pipeline. At this point, you should at least have a steady stream of dentists coming in. 

While some businesses have a knack for generating leads, it's rare to see a company naturally good at converting them. If you fall into this category, then you should concentrate on lead nurturing. 

For more information visit DentalLabSupport.com or call 1.888.715.9099.

Improve Customer Retention with Personalization, Content & Surveys

It's impossible to understate the importance of customer retention. Not only are returning dentists cheaper than new ones, but they also represent long-term success in regard to your dental lab. Building customer loyalty isn't easy, but you can get started with these techniques:

Send personalized emails 

Email is the most effective platform when it comes to improving customer retention. Unlike social media, you can send personalized messages to individual users based on their order history and preferences. 

The mistake most dental labs make is sending cookie cutter messages out to the entire subscriber list. Dentists can spot these emails from a mile away, and most won't even open them.  

This recent Iamwire article talks about the strategy of personalizing emails. According to the article, just sending a simple birthday message can lay the foundation for customer loyalty: 

"Most marketing emails begin with the standard robotic messages that don’t involve any amount of personalization. Starting emails by addressing the person with his/her name not only creates a higher recall value for the customer but also shows them how much the brand cares about/ remembers them. Wishing customers on special occasions such as their birthdays or gently reminding them when they have not checked out from their cart and the likes is a great way to keep them engaged with an eCommerce platform."

Personalization makes all the difference in regard to email marketing. While robotic messages will inspire users to unsubscribe from your campaign, individualized ones will stand out to users and increase engagement. 

Create content that doesn't directly promote your dental lab

Promotion usually does more harm than good in the context of online marketing. The general rule of thumb is that if it's not on your website, then the content shouldn't directly promote your business. 

In regard to customer retention, you shouldn't even come close to promoting your products. Instead, you should create content with the goal of engaging and informing your customers. This Forbes article explains how relevant content balances your marketing efforts and build customer retention: 

"On our blog, we share content that reflects what our values are as a brand. This gives us credibility on a range of topics that goes beyond our product. New product announcements, employee features, and event recaps aren’t enough. That’s still relevant content to share, but to build retention and bring balance, it’s important that we publish articles that go beyond promoting our company directly."

This is the type of content you should share on social media and in your marketing emails. It should educate customers about your industry so they can get more out of their products and services. The better their understanding, the more likely they'll return to your business. 

Create customer surveys 

Customer surveys serve two important purposes in regard to customer retention. For one, they remind customers of your business relationship. If nothing else, they'll at least keep you in contact with your target audience. 

In addition, customer surveys also demonstrate that you're serious about your brand experience. You're asking customers for feedback with the intention of improving your business operations. If you actually take the steps to incorporate their suggestions in your strategy, then they'll see your dedication to customers first-hand. 

Creating customer surveys is fast and easy. You can include a link in your emails and on your social media profiles. The more exposure you give your surveys the better, since you want to get as many responses as possible. 

Improving customer retention takes years of patience, practice, and planning. You won't build customer loyalty overnight, but you can make great progress by executing the techniques mentioned here. To talk more about customer retention, or anything else, contact us today 1.888.715.9099 or visit DentalLabSupport.com 

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What’s A Sales Pipeline Anyway? (And How It Impacts Sales Results)

Sales pipeline — a term that gets thrown around so much, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s an empty catchphrase that simply makes salespeople who use it look like sales professionals. But your sales management operations can benefit from using a sales pipeline, and it could make a significant difference to your bottom line.

“It’s not a matter of whether you’ll get improvements. It’s just a matter of how much,” said Mark McInnes, who was recognized by LinkedIn as Australia’s No. 1 social seller and serves as an execution coaching partner at Sydney-based SalesITV.

A sales pipeline is a visual and systematic approach to selling a product or service. It allows salespeople to get a grasp of exactly where their money, deals, and other sales efforts are at all times (we’ll dive more into the pipeline below).

McInnes spoke about a client who wasn’t using a sales pipeline, and as a result, they had “little or no stats at all” about how effective their sales process was and whether their business was headed in the right direction.

But, once he implemented a sales pipeline into his business, McInnes recalled:

“Just having that level of visibility and accountability helped manage everyone’s deals and quotas. That was their best year ever.”

Sales experts explain the sales pipeline

A sales pipeline can be compared to your doctor doing a blood test.

“You can read a lot into what’s wrong and what’s right about you, and it enables the management to apply the right fixes to make a ‘sick’ company healthy,” said David P. Wallace, who has more than 30 years of sales and marketing experience and serves as the principal and founding partner of the New York-based Sales Management Group.

A sales pipeline can also be seen as a funnel that contains a set of opportunities the salesperson has identified. As more and more of those opportunities, or leads, move throughout the funnel, the salesperson is able to determine which ones will close.

“Leads and opportunities go to the top of the pipe and move down the pipe as the deal gets closer to closing,” McInnes said. A great way to store these deals is to allocate different sections. You might have a ‘lead’ or ‘opportunity’ or ‘discovery phase’ or ‘negotiations’, and the last one would be ‘close’ or ‘follow-up.’ You put your deals on the left side of the pipeline, and you slowly move them through the pipeline as you interact with customers, until they close.”

As you move through the different stages of your pipeline or funnel, the chances of a deal closing increase. Maybe they show interest and the chance goes up to 30%, then you do a demo for them and the chance goes up to 60%. By the time the lead reaches the narrowest end of the funnel, when you agree on all the terms of the deal, you’ll have a 100% chance to close it.

Pipeline visibility increases your bottom line

The visibility a sales pipeline provides serves as the foundation to increasing your company’s bottom line.

A sales pipeline is close to most salespeople’s hearts because it’s where all of their money sits.

“But many companies don’t prioritize proper management of that potential money,” said Michelle Seger, executive director and global practice lead at Atlanta-based SalesGlobe, where she helps companies from around the world improve their sales results.

“Companies don’t know what their possibilities are,” Seger said. If you can actually look at your activities, how long they’ve been there and what are your conversion rates, it tells you where you are and what’s not working.”

Setting up your pipeline

The sales pipeline can be constructed in various ways — sticky notes or an Excel spreadsheet. But if you have a complex or long sales cycle, you may want to use a CRM for efficiency. It’ll allow you to link contacts to deals, integrate email correspondence, see data insight in real time, automate tasks that will keep you on top of your game, and more.

1. Set stages: As the sales pipeline is built around your sales cycle, or all of the steps you take to close a deal, the first step would be to sort out the stages in your ideal pipeline so you can get your deals moving properly.

Depending on your industry, those stages may vary, but they might be:

• Idea
• Contact Made
• Needs Discovered
• Proposal Presented
• In Negotiation
• Close

2. Calculate goals: It’s important to have an idea of how many deals you win on average, at any stage, so you’ll know whether you are on track to success — at any given moment. This insight into your conversion rates tests your sales process, evaluates whether your sales team is performing at the level you need them to, and exposes where you have very specific needs, according to Seger. “Salespeople look at it as very daunting, but it’s not. It’s an untapped opportunity of looking at performance and what the needs are, and the data is right there,” she added.

This visibility allows a sales rep to know where they should be spending their time. McInnes explained that it’s especially important due to the diverse activities that happen in a salesperson’s day.

“Salespeople spend 13-20% of their time actually selling, and the rest of the time doing other activities — administration, email, social media,” he said. “You have to make certain activities to make your goals. Knowing how many you need to make for every quarter is very important, and if you can manage it on a daily, you can meet your target.”

Seger agreed, saying it’s easy to get lost in the activities without pipeline visibility.

“A sales pipeline provides an accurate framework for how a sales rep can manage his or her time. It provides a snapshot of all the opportunities they work on, and what‘s taking too long or what they need to do. Pipeline visibility helps your sales reps focus on what’s real,” Seger said. It also helps sales managers understand “where reps are spending their time.”

3. Build momentum: When you’re moving your deals stage-to-stage, it’s important to cite what factors help you advance your deal, so you can focus on performing those activities and continue to keep deals flowing in. It could be sending a written proposal, identifying the stakeholders, or getting a budget approved — there’s an event at each stage that moves the deal along.

You can’t control results, but constantly focusing on these activities will inevitably lead to better results.

“Pipeline visibility gives you the ability to look at statistics — how many calls, emails and meetings you’ve had with prospects,” McInnes said. “You can quickly see if you’re falling behind and need to do more, and that’s what’s going to keep you accountable and help you make your quarter.”

Seger said pipeline visibility will also show you the obstacles that stand in the way of moving forward with a deal. In each stage of the pipeline, there’s a “pivotal decision to make — if we’re going to go the next stage,” she said.

Knowing why a deal is stalling and how long it’s been in your pipeline so far helps you make that pivotal decision.

4. Find a routine: A sales pipeline helps you see where multiple deals stand, so it’s easier to manage them and remember which steps you need to take to close many more deals.  Activities that add new deals to your pipeline need to be part of your routine — daily or weekly, depending on your business.

If you have a three-month sales cycle, for instance, and you’re only working on one deal at a time, you can only sell four times a year. You need to fill the sales pipeline with as many deals as you can, so you’re closing business every day or every week instead of every three months.

“If you fill your pipeline, you can have a regular stream of business that’s closing, which means a regular stream of commission checks,” Wallace said.

Multitask and know where your next deal will come from

Having a sales pipeline will allow you to make smarter business decisions to obtain success throughout your entire company.

“Pipeline visibility is a key management tool primarily because the pipeline is what drives a lot of business decisions across the organization, not just in sales. It has ramifications for production, marketing, HR,” Wallace said.

“If you don’t have the right visibility, you don’t know how many resources to have on board or how much cash you’re going to have,” he said. “Without a pipeline visibility it’s difficult to manage a business.”

McInnes added that sales pipeline visibility is critical to your entire business.

“If you don’t have a clear picture,” he said, “you’re not in control of your business, and that’s pretty crazy.”