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.