Using the Customer Journey to Help You Achieve Sales Success

Every dental lab can benefit from reaching a bigger audience of potential dentists. 

But how do you make that a reality for your dental lab and sales team? The key is in using smart, automated campaigns throughout a customer’s buying journey. Automated, event-driven campaigns that recognize the stage your leads are in give better results than run of the mill “one message to everyone” campaigns. It is definitely worth it, so where do we start? Well, the customer journey provides a guideline for plotting a successful email marketing automation roll-out.

Understand how the customer journey works for you

If you sit down to think about it, all of the moments where a customer interacts with you are a potential point for marketing automation. In the customer journey, we describe the complete set of interactions between a customer and a company.

There are three main groups that we could focus on based on their stage of the relationship:

1. Known prospects
2. Active Customers
3. Ex-Customers

The known prospects group will be your focus for new sales. They have shown interest and you are in touch, but they aren’t customers yet.  The challenge is to draw them in and progress them through the sales funnel.

Goals we want to achieve with the known prospects:

• Drive engagement
• Educate and Inform about how you can help their problem.
• Describe your brand and your products
• Build trust and a relationship
• Offer an ‘added value’ proposition
• Understand them better and enrich their profile
• Listen very carefully for buying signals.

Notice I didn’t include the actual conversion as a goal? The trick is to not ask for too much at once, but rather go for small wins and build up the relationship.

There are typical campaigns that can make a real difference, usually tied to a direct interaction. These are what you call moments of truth, the ideal place to start. Here are some examples of strong campaigns to start with.

1. Give all of your best your knowledge away

The customer journey is such a good starting point because it allows you to go through your (potential) customer’s experience and the steps they make there. It allows you to explore if there is anything you can hook onto (on their buying journey) and help with. If you execute well, it creates a relationship that could never be achieved with traditional marketing tactics.

Education is an excellent way to build up your name with your audience. Instead of a hard sell, you’re getting attention by providing a (valuable) service. For instance, DentalLabSupport offers a two-week Sales Pipeline Academy  It is a win-win so to speak, and most people remember those that have helped them in the past.

2. Download follow up

If you have any whitepapers, downloads, tip sheets, checklists on your site, be sure to ask for email and contact data up front so all downloaders enter the realm of “known contacts”. But for most companies, it stops there, a missed opportunity to nurture the initial interest.

Here is an outline of a four email “drip campaign” after a download form is filled in.

1. Immediately send an email with the download link.
2. Make initial contact with an automated (personal) email. Include a warm greeting, the description of the download, explain follow up and contact info.
3. If they haven’t downloaded yet, you can send a reminder a few days later.
4. Send over some more information/resources.
5. Ask a simple associated question – in order for them to respond.

You can mix this up to be a combination of personal looking emails and more designed/marketing looking emails. Tor Refsland seems to have this down to an art. His popular blog on influencer marketing has a registration that triggers a conversational email flow of tips that encourages customer response. He even has an online blogger outreach course.  

You want to make sure you get some feedback and/or more information from your contacts at this point. It is better to start scoring the contacts at that moment. When it comes to sales, being persistent with your follow up messaging is often what drives success.

3. Events, presentations, and Webinars

Live events, presentations, and webinars are a great way to raise awareness and engage with prospects. They give you the opportunity to show your expertise and get more opt-ins. It doesn’t have to be your own event either, it works just as well if someone at your company or a client is a guest speaker at an external event. Most companies, however, don’t take the opportunity to reach their full audience via direct campaigns. Here is an example of a small campaign/automation sequence you can use.  

1. During event promotion: Send invitation emails, give attention to the event and lead to registrations.

2. Post-registration but pre-event: Inform about the content and practicalities of the event, build anticipation, reduce no-show.

3. On the day of the event: Any type of last minute reminder doesn’t hurt.

4. Post-event: Send a thank you note, send slides, tips, a video and continue following up with information about future events.

If you don’t manage the registrations, try to get the organizer to send the follow-up.  A generic call to action such as “to learn more” or “for more information” will surely be ignored. Instead, provide specific, tangible options for engaging with your company such as “download our presentation” or  “watch our 3-minute overview video.”

A mix of different content types keeps things interesting for your current email subscribers. You can create online events or webinars, put them on your marketing calendar and later on publish them as “gated” content on your website.

Starting Smart

Through the customer journey, we can understand the steps your leads and potential customers go through and “walk a mile in their shoes”. With all the digital touchpoints of today, interactions aren’t static, there is a seemingly infinite number of variants. But you don’t want to look like an overeager-journey-stuffing-inbox-filler. Start off with a few campaigns that really make an impact. When a lead shows activity and more interest, they will become more receptive to your messages, so take those as a starting point and work on from there.

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.

Metrics Can Help Your Dental Lab Close More Dentist

By David H. Khalili, Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Ultimately, the goal of any Dental Lab is to attract and retain dentists. Closing sales is a crucial part of that; if you get members of your target audience into your sales pipeline, but they never end up becoming customers, your efforts will be wasted. Marketing software can help your Dental Lab close more sales, but only if you know just what metrics matter in measuring your success. Here are 4 metrics to pay attention to as you optimize your sales process.

1) Lead Origin

Do you know where your leads come from? How did they learn about you, and where did they first made contact? If you gather this information, you can gain a better understanding of which leads are most likely to convert to customers.

For example, you may find that leads originated from your website are actually more likely to become customers than those who contacted you directly. Now, you can increase your focus on the former to maximize your success and close a higher percentage of sales.

2) Lead Engagement

Your LabCell Marketing Software can help you measure just how engaged your contacts are with your content after they sign up to become a lead. As you can probably imagine, leads who continue to open and click through your emails, or read conversion pages on your website, will be more likely to become customers than those who sign up initially, but never follow up.

Measuring lead engagement comprehensively allows you to categorize them into a number of groups, which your sales team can then use to prioritize its effort. Time is limited, and pitching your company only to leads who have shown continued interest in your product or service can be a valuable tool to improve your closure rate.

3) Average Lead to Customer Time

You may also want to consider measuring the amount of time it takes for a lead to turn into a customer. How many days, weeks, or months do they need in your system before they're ready for a sale? How many emails do they receive on average before indicating their readiness to buy?

Answering these questions helps you establish an average time line for your lead. If they don't become sales-ready until at least a month into the process, making the sales call a week after they enter your database will be of little value. Timing your sales-based communication means increasing your chances of reaching them at a time when they are most likely to make a buying decision.

4) Internal and Industry Conversion Rates

On average, how many of your leads turn into customers? Knowing that number, and how it compares with figures common for your industries, can go a long way toward helping you determine the effectiveness and success of both your lead nurturing and your sales efforts.

If you lag significantly behind industry averages, you may want to investigate just why that is, and how you can rectify the situation. Of course, simply running ahead of the average also deserves further investigation: you want to understand why, so you can replicate the process for future leads. Either way, knowing both your internal and industry conversion rates can help you close more sales in the future.

Of course, none of the above is possible without Marketing Software that tracks your interactions with your leads, and provides you with reports that help better understand the buying journey your leads take on their way to becoming customers. They can help your business close more sales, but only with the help of software that makes tracking them easily.

For information on LabCell Dental Lab Marketing Software please visit DentalLabSupport.com.