4 Tips to Get Your Dental Lab's Emails Mobile-Ready

By:  David H. Khalili,  Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Email is and continues to be a vital part of dental lab digital marketing success. 

Especially small dental labs on a limited budget can use the concept to effectively communicate with their audience, slowly nudging them to become first-time and repeat customers.

At the same time, email marketing can only be successful if you design effective messages that resonate with your audience of your dental lab. One key consideration to keep in mind is the fact that an increasing percentage of that audience will view your messages on a mobile device; in fact, up to 70% of your audience will read your message on their smartphone or tablet. If you are looking to grow your dental lab with email marketing, keep these 4 best practices for mobile-friendly email creation in mind.

1) Keep them Short

Above all, your audience's attention span on mobile devices is shorter than on a desktop. Because they can see less of your email on their screens, they will be more quickly turned off by long emails that go into detail about a specific concept. 

One study suggests that for optimum results, your emails should be between 50 and 125 words long. For comparison, that's about the length of the introduction to this post. Anything longer, and you risk decreasing response rates as mobile recipients lose interest midway through reading your message.

2) Stay Away from Long Paragraphs

For the same reasons mentioned above, try to stay away from full paragraphs as much as possible. Avoid the dreaded 'wall of text,' which becomes especially noticeable on small screen sizes.

Instead, take advantage of email formatting options. Bullet points, numbered lists, and single-sentence paragraphs can go a long way toward making your email more readable on mobile devices, you may also want to consider using graphics and call to action buttons to break up your text.

3) Use Visuals to Enhance, not Distract

Speaking of graphics: including visuals in your email can go a long way toward increasing its effectiveness. Visual content marketing has been proven to be successful, increasing audience goodwill and message recall.

But for mobile devices, you should be careful to use visuals strategically. Much like long paragraphs, large images that prevent smartphone users to see any other part of the content tend to distract the audience, making it less likely that they will take action. Stay away from large banner images, and incorporate smaller, slimmer graphics into your email instead.

4) Test Your Emails

Finally, make sure to not send out any email to your audience without first testing how it looks on mobile devices. Most email clients now offer templates with responsive design, adjusting dynamically based on screen size. But that could mean the content of your email shifts around in ways that you didn't anticipate.

To ensure that your content does not begin to look undesirable, send yourself a test email to view it on your mobile devices. Most Customer Relationship Management software now allows you to do just that. If you are lucky and your CRM enables you to view a visual preview of the email in different email clients and screen sizes without even having to send it, you should absolutely take advantage of that feature.

Keeping Mobile In Mind at all Times

Audiences across industries and demographics are increasingly relying on mobile devices to complete internet-related tasks. Whether your brand markets to other dental labs or just dentist, keeping mobile in mind when communicating with your target audience has become absolutely crucial.  In fact, to effectively grow your dental, that emphasis should come even before you send out your first email marketing messages.  

To learn more about our services, and how it can accommodate your dental lab marketing needs, contact us today 1.888.715.9099 or visit DentalLabSupport.com.

Why Your Dental Lab Is Chasing Too Many Bad Sales Leads

David H. Khalili,
Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Stop chasing bad sales leads by doing the right work upfront. With better inbound lead qualification processes, your company can turn more of your leads into big sales

Many dental labs don’t do enough upfront work to qualify their new sales leads. They simply pass every single sales lead through to the sales team, even if the prospect is nowhere near ready to buy or is even a good fit for what the company sells.

According to statistics cited by HubSpot, 61 percent of B2B companies send all of their business leads directly to sales, even though only 27 percent of those leads will be qualified to count as “serious buyers.” Having too many unqualified sales leads wastes the time of the sales team and causes the company to miss out on legitimate sales opportunities. When your salespeople are bombarded with low-quality leads that aren’t a good fit for your product or service, they’re going to miss the chance to talk with prospects who are legitimately good sales opportunities.

If your company is chasing bad sales leads, the following strategies will help you better qualify your inbound sales inquiries upfront:

Ask Lead-Qualifying Questions

Not all sales leads are the same, so why would your company want to treat them all the same? After all, every single prospect is unique; they all have different problems and pain points and budgetary concerns, and they all have unique business needs that your solution has to address. But if your company is simply passing every sales lead along to the sales team without even asking any questions, you’re missing a big chance to learn more about the prospect.

Asking questions to qualify the sales leads is a simple step that you can take to start prioritizing and ranking your sales leads. By asking sales-related exploratory questions, you are starting to build trust and build a relationship, and you’re learning more about the larger picture of the customer’s business challenges. Asking questions also helps you do “lead scoring” to rank your sales leads based on how likely they are to buy. This is somewhat of an inexact process, but with time, you’ll get better at deciphering the subtle clues and behaviors of prospects to see which ones are genuinely interested and which ones are just calling around to do research or get price quotes.

Ask Open-Ended Questions

Asking lead-qualifying questions is a subtle process that requires some skill and savvy. For example, you don’t want to be too direct or aggressive by asking questions such as, “Do you have a budget for this purchase?” or “Are you definitely in the market for a new solution?” or “Are you looking to buy sometime soon?” These questions tend to create sales pressure and make the prospect feel defensive.

Instead of putting the customer under pressure, start by asking open-ended questions that get them to talk about their overall business situation. For example, you could ask, “What challenges are you experiencing with your current solution?” This helps get the customer to open up a bit and share their frustrations that are causing them to seek a new vendor. Or you could ask, “How is your current solution impacting your overall business processes?” This is a great question, because it helps you analyze the overall picture at the prospect’s business and evaluate how urgently they might be looking to make a purchase decision.

Every lead-qualifying question is your chance to hear more from the customer. Get them to open up about their business challenges, and then really listen to what they say.

Follow Up By Phone

Other companies make the mistake of relying too much on automated systems. For example, when you get new inbound sales inquiries via your website or online advertising, you might have an automated email reply or online intake form that asks the prospect some questions about what they’re looking to buy. These automated tools can be helpful, but you can’t rely on a fully automated lead qualification process.

Instead, call people back. Get on the phone and have a detailed conversation that allows for the “human element” of relationship building and establishing trust. Even with the great technology we have today, you still need to get on the phone and talk with your customers.

Why? For one thing, the buyers who are most urgently looking to make a decision want to hear back from your company immediately, and from a real person. Motivated buyers are probably contacting several of your competitors, and according to HubSpot’s cited statistics, 35-50 percent of sales go to the vendor who responds first.

Some prospects are never going to be the right fit for what you sell, and not everyone is a “good” customer. But with better inbound lead qualification processes – one that includes asking good questions, sorting and ranking the sales leads and following up quickly – your company can turn more of your sales leads into big sales.

About DentalLabSupport.com

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David H. Khalili is the founder and CEO of DentalLabSupport.com, an industry-founding lead generation firm based in Los Angeles. His company helps Dental Lab companies to generate sales leads and improve their sales processes. For more information please contact us at info@dentallabsupport.com or 1.888.715.9099.