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.