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