Dental Lab Lead Nurturing

By David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Lead nurturing is an important part of any inbound marketing campaign. After generating leads through the strategic use of content marketing and custom designed landing pages, you want to be sure that your leads actually turn into customers by providing them with regular messages that increasingly nudge them toward a sale. 

But of course, as is the case in any digital marketing initiatives, it's important to follow industry standards in order to be successful.  Here are 3 best practices that aid your lead nurturing efforts, with the help of CRM Software.

1) Segment and Target

A blank nurturing strategy can be dangerous. Put simply, sending the same emails to every one of your leads risks annoying them with content that is not relevant to their individual needs. Instead, consider segmenting your leads into different groups, and targeting individual messages specifically to these groups.

Segmenting, of course, begins with a custom landing page that asks your audience for more than just their name or email address. While you need to keep your sign up forms relatively short, asking one or two distinguishing questions helps separate your contacts into distinct segments. And once you set up that landing page, an effective CRM can do the rest. Now, you can set up targeted nurturing campaigns with emails directed only at the portions of your audience for which they are most relevant, ensuring a smooth experience for your leads and better chances of turning into customers.

2) Support your campaign with Content

You should also consider expanding your lead nurturing strategy beyond mere email marketing. While emails remain the lifeblood of any 'drip' campaign, what if you use them to promote content that is relevant to leads in a specific stage in the sales funnel?

Of course, this strategy can take some effort, as you will have to build content that relates to audiences who already know about you. But once you have this type of content, you can enrich your nurturing efforts by providing actual, valuable content rather than just a prompt to become your customer. It turns your emails into true nurturing efforts, rather than mere promotional messaging.

3) Time Strategy 

Finally, you should pay serious attention to when you send out your emails. Individual studies vary on the optimal amount of emails you should send your audience per month, but most experts generally recommend a median between once and twice per week.

Finding the right balance in your email send frequency is crucial: if you don't send nurturing emails often enough, your contacts will forget about you or go with a competitor instead. But do it too often, and you will land in too many spam folders and unsubscribe lists to be effective.

If you're looking which exact send frequency can work for you, your CRM can help. In fact, you can ran reports on your open, click-through and unsubscribe percentages, which in turn helps you understand how your send frequency impacts these success metrics. Thankfully, most CRMs allow you to easily make changes to your automation workflows that ensure you get the most out of your email nurturing efforts.

Nurturing your leads to becoming customers can be incredibly valuable, especially considering its low cost and the high degree of automation available through customer relationship management software today. But even with this software, you want to be sure that you follow the above best practices.

By segmenting your leads and targeting your messages, supporting your emails with content, and implementing the right send frequency, your lead nurturing efforts will make a significant impact in generating new customers. And if you're looking for a CRM that can help you throughout the process, contact us!  visit DentalLabSupport.com for more information or contact us by telephone 1-888-715-9099.

3 Ways Dental Labs can Better Communicate with Dentists

In order for dental labs and dentists to keep patients satisfied, they need to keep dental patients’ needs at the forefront of everything they do. So how can dental labs work with dentists to keep dental patients happy? Make communication easy, honest and enjoyable.

1) Offer Multiple Lines of Open Communication

Dental labs must not only open up multiple lines of communication - phone, email, website, social media, text - but must listen to what is being said. While this seems obvious, how many times have you had a dental case shipment sent back-and-forth because the dental materials didn’t match the dentist’s specifications? Listen to what the dentist needs, and map out what your dental technicians must do in order to meet those needs.

2) Be Honest

Similar to #1 above, dental laboratories must be honest with their dentists about which services they provide and within what time frame. A simple "yes, we can do that" or "it's going to take one day longer than expected because of XYZ” goes a long way towards reassuring your client, and more importantly, enabling dentists to fulfill their promise to their dental patients.

3) Follow Up

The relationship doesn’t end once the shipment has been sent. Dental laboratories must have their dental team follow up with each dentist to verify that not only the dental case was received on time, but that it met the needs of both the dentist and the dental patient. Follow up with your dentists by asking “How did the material fit?” and “Was the patient happy?” 

Treat your work relationship like a personal relationship and you’ll see success in your dental lab. Open up lines of communication, listen to what’s being said, be honest about your abilities, and follow up in order to nurture your relationship with existing dentists. After all, dentistry is deeply personal work - so act like it!

4 Major Problems in the Dental Laboratory Industry

Dental laboratory owners have been feeling the ripple effects of the dental lab crisis over the last several years as dental lab schools have slowly but surely shut their doors one by one. While not all dental lab schools have closed down, the smaller availability reflects the population’s interest in pursuing dental lab technology as a career.

Dental lab owners have approached this problem of fewer dental lab schools in different ways. Some dental laboratory owners remained optimistic about the changing tides while other lab owners despaired and prepared for the worst by more carefully selecting their dental lab tech team. 

Regardless of whether you’re a dental lab owner who fought tooth and nail against the struggle or simply allowed your dental laboratory to adapt to the changing conditions, the fact of the matter is that fewer and fewer people choose to pursue dental lab technology year over year, and this has caused 4 major problems in the dental laboratory industry:

1. USA dental technician certification is increasingly becoming unavailable
2. Dental technician certification is either not required or unimportant to dental techs
3. Offshore dental laboratories continue to expand, causing unequal competition with American dental laboratories
4. Relationships between American dental technicians and dentists is seriously lacking 

As a result, currently large-sized dental labs have continued to increase while many medium- and small-sized labs - other than the boutique dental labs - have shut down.

What most dental lab owners don’t realize, however, is the one-two punch to the dental industry: lack of dental lab schools and lack of practical experience in dental education. 

Three or four years of dental school is not enough to prepare new dentists for real world dentistry because new grads severely lack real-life practice, and instead these dentists completely depend upon their dental technicians’ knowledge of technical aspects of all dental procedures. 

All four major problems within the dental lab industry combined with the dental education crisis are a double whammy: new dentists don’t yet have the right practical training, and there are less dental lab technicians available for them to rely on.

Now, how can we in the dental lab industry address and correct these issues? Check back next week for our blog post where we cover simple solutions to the 1st major problem in the dental laboratory industry!

By: David H. Khalili. CEO