How Email Drip Campaigns Can Elevate Your Brand

Email marketing is an incredibly powerful way to connect with dental clinicians and increase your brand awareness. Over 3.9 billion people use email worldwide – more than 50% of the global population. That means that companies who aren’t using email effectively are missing out on an enormous potential to engage with their customers, scale their business, and increase revenue.

Most brands are familiar with the concept of an email newsletter to keep their subscribers informed. However, newsletters lack the ability to stay at the forefront of your subscribers’ minds and drive up engagement numbers.  

That’s because newsletters are focused on engaging with your entire email list at once. On the other hand, an email drip campaign can be designed to target specific types of customers. For example, if someone signs up to learn more about your dental lab product – you can initiate a targeted email drip campaign to introduce them to your business and get them excited to engage.

Email drip campaigns for dental labs present a great opportunity to engage with your customers, generate new leads, and ultimately convert more sales. Let’s dive into the details so you can see how impactful these campaigns can be for your brand’s success.  

What Is an Email Drip Campaign?

An email drip campaign is an automated set of emails that initiates when a user performs a certain action. All of the emails in a drip campaign are written beforehand, so once the user’s action is performed, the email campaign gets sent automatically.  

What sets email drip campaigns apart from typical email campaigns is that they can be highly targeted for customers at different stages of your sales funnel. For example, you can have one drip campaign for customers who leave items in their cart at checkout and another for people who’ve signed up for your blog.

This specific targeting is what makes email drip campaign engagement so high. In fact, companies that use targeted email marketing have seen up to a 760% increase in revenue.

Here’s a brief example of how an email drip campaign can be structured to entice customers to upgrade to a premium service after they’ve started a one-week free trial.

• Email 1 (sent on signup)
  The user will get an email as soon as they sign up to welcome them to the free trial.  
• Email 2 (sent 2 days later) 
  An informative email that tells the customer how to maximize their free trial.
• Email 3 (sent 4 days later)
  Introduce the key differences between the paid service and the free trial. The email should focus on the benefits of going premium and offer the option to upgrade.
• Email 4 (sent 7 days later)
  Alert the customer that their free trial is ending later in the day and make a strong pitch for the premium, paid service.

Email drip campaigns can be built right into the fabric of your business. That means that once a customer takes an action (like signing up for a free trial) the email drip campaign gets sent out automatically, according to a predefined schedule. But the real beauty of these campaigns is their flexibility to be implemented in a host of different ways (which we’ll get into below).  

Here’s an example of a drip campaign flow.

Marketing Benefits of Email Drip Campaigns

The short answer is this: the more often people engage with your site, the more likely they are to convert into paying customers.

Effective email drip campaigns allow people to build a better relationship with your brand while keeping your brand in their awareness. It’s easy for people to visit a website, sign up for a free eBook, and then forget about a brand completely. You have to stay in contact if you want to convert anyone from an interested lead to a paying customer.  

As mentioned above, email drip campaigns are a great marketing tool because they’re highly targeted for specific people, at a specific stage in your sales funnel. This is great for building trust because it allows you to provide more relevant, personalized content in your messaging.  

Personalized emails connect with people better and statistically increase engagement rates across the board. 82% of marketers have reported an increase in open rates through email personalization. And increased open rates mean more opportunities to sell someone on taking a specific action.  

When you implement them properly, email drip campaigns are an excellent way to consistently grow your brand. Once they’re set up, you can automate the entire process so your campaigns get sent out automatically without sacrificing a ton of overhead.  

The Best Ways to Use an Email Drip Campaign

The only way to maximize the benefits of an email drip campaign is to be extremely clear about a couple of things:

1. Which customers you’re targeting

2. Your goal for the campaign

Remember that each campaign is designed to connect with a specific group of people, for a specific purpose. The following list is not definitive by any means, but these are some of the best ways to run email drip campaigns. 

Lead Nurturing

As you know, not everyone who engages with your brand is going to make a purchase right away. The goal of lead nurturing is two-fold: guide potential customers toward making a purchase and develop strong relationships with them through your brand. Companies that neglect to run lead nurturing campaigns are selling themselves short.

The stats are clear: companies that don’t perform lead nurturing end up losing 80% of their leads – meanwhile, companies that implement a lead nurturing strategy generate 50% more sales while spending 33% less.  

Customer acquisition is a process. It’s rare that someone will visit your site for the first time and make a purchase that same day. In fact, a report by Marketo found that 50% of leads aren’t ready to buy the first time they engage with a brand. An email drip campaign is one of the best ways to nurture your leads, build trust in your brand, and ultimately, convert more paying customers.  

Welcome New Customers

Whenever you acquire a new email address — whether it’s from a newsletter signup, a product purchase, or an eBook release — it’s a great time to engage and keep your brand in their sights.

An email drip campaign provides much more value and engagement potential than a simple “thank you” email. That’s because an email drip campaign keeps the value coming over a longer period. It ensures that your new customers don’t quickly forget about their purchase with you and move on. In the long-run, retailers that send out an email drip campaign after a customer’s first purchase make 13% more revenue than those that just send one.  

Re-engagement Campaigns

These are for your long-time customers who haven’t interacted with your brand in a while. The goal here is to re-engage with your customers and win back their interest in your brand.

You can use these to showcase new products, discounts, or offers and entice people to revisit your site. Sometimes all it takes to get someone to come back is to send out a simple ‘We miss you!’ email.  

Abandoned Cart 

If you run an eCommerce brand, it’s bound to happen: a customer clicks buy, starts filling out their information, but doesn’t complete the purchase. In fact, the Baymard Institute found that 67.35% of online shopping carts are abandoned. That’s a lot of missed opportunities… 

Image source can use an email drip campaign to entice those customers to come back and complete their purchase. The campaign can be initiated automatically as soon as a customer leaves your site with an item in their shopping cart.  

Educational Campaigns

An educational email drip campaign is focused on providing actionable insights and value to your customers. They’re a great way for brands to increase their credibility amongst their customers and stand out from the competition.

For example, a fitness center could offer their customers the option to join a free six-pack abs course. Over a series of emails, the customer will be introduced to real ab workouts and tips they can use to improve their physique.

Although these campaigns aren’t directly focused on making a sale, they’re great for building rapport with people who’ve already shown interest. You’ll increase rapport, increase your brand’s reputation, and build the trust that people need to actually make a purchase down the line.  

For more information about dental lab email marketing campaifgns, call 888-715-9099. or visit DentalLabSupport.com

How to Build a Lead Infrastructure and Grow Your Dental Lab With Email Marketing

Email marketing remains one of the most effective and least complex digital channels for dental labs of any size. So naturally, small dental labs look for the tool to help them grow and expand their customer base.

But here is the problem: in isolation, email may not be successful in helping you accomplish that goal. If you want to grow your dental lab with email marketing, you have to build a reliable infrastructure around it.

Focus on Organic Leads

The success of your email marketing efforts only goes as far as your audience. If you send even the greatest emails to recipients who simply don't care or who your selling proposition doesn't apply to, you may as well never hit the 'send' button.

But how do you reach this type of audience? Despite conventional wisdom, buying lists of recipients within your industry is not the answer. Instead, focus on a marketing strategy that helps you grow your leads organically. If you only add contacts into your email software who have actually stated their interest in your company, you know that your emails will reach the most relevant audience possible.

Define and Segment Your Audiences

Of course, even using the above strategy, not every email will be relevant for every member of your contact database. That's why contact management and segmentation is absolute key for successful email marketing.

Instead of sending email blasts to every member of your database, consider segmenting your contacts into relatively homogenous groups. For example, for a local dental lab, you may want to consider separating your recipients into groups that might be interested in specific products, or live in individual neighborhoods. That way, you can design emails that are more uniquely relevant to these audience segments.

Build Beautiful Emails

Speaking of which: at the core of every email marketing strategy is the actual message. We now receive more than 100 emails every single day, which means that your emails absolutely have to stand out from the crowd in order for your audience to actually pay attention.

A beautiful email starts with the subject line, but it certainly doesn't end there. The best marketing emails are short, to the point, and actually valuable. They're also designed with at least one visual, and attractive enough to be readable (and enjoyable) on any screen.

Automate Your Lead Nurturing Flows

Finally, consider building a framework that doesn't rely on you sending individual emails out each time you want to reach your audience. Instead, build an automated lead nurturing workflow that sends emails to your target audience in pre-defined intervals to slowly nudge them toward the sale.

We've discussed lead nurturing in this space, and the core benefits remain the same. If you can build an automated flow of relevant emails to your current contact, you can build credibility and make sure that when your leads are ready to become customers, they'll remember you.

Find the Right CRM

All of the above tips can help you integrate email marketing into your dental lab promotional strategy. But we have not yet discussed the final step of building a consistent and reliable email infrastructure: your customer relationship management (CRM) software.

Here's the thing: your CRM can make or break the success of your email marketing. Choose the right one, and you can easily implement all of the above initiatives without significant external help or budget. Choose the wrong one, and you complicate the issue to a point where successful email marketing is difficult or impossible to accomplish.

That's why we'd love for you to give us a shot. DentalLabSupport.com offers an affordable email and contact management solution that's specifically designed for dental labs To learn more about how we can help you successfully use email marketing to grow your dental lab, contact us.

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.

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.

Email Marketing Tips to Retain your Dentist's

By: David H. Khalili, Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Effective email marketing not only converts your prospects to customers… it helps to retain and maintain your Dentist base so they keep coming back to you for more.  It is much easier (and takes less work) to retain a current client than it is marketing for a new one.  They’ve purchased your product or service, so they already know, like, and trust you.  The key here is to continue building relationships with your customer list and create a WOW factor to convert them into loyal fans of your brand.

And email marketing is the proven way to achieve this goal!

You see, email marketing is said to generate 50% more sales compared to other marketing strategies with an impressively high conversion rate.  No business or organization can afford to overlook this technique and stay current on its strategies.  It plays a huge role in the success of any company

Here are four tips to help you retain more customers and grow your small business with email marketing:

#1 Keep the focus on your customers…not your product!

This may seem like a no-brainer but how often do you receive emails from companies that constantly talk about their product?  Separate yourself from amongst the masses by thinking about your target market and their problems.  What are their needs?  Who are they?  What do they enjoy doing?  How does your product or service meet their demands?  Share content that benefits your audience.

Giving value is a sure way to keep your customers liking and trusting you.

#2 Keep it short and simple

With the endless distractions of the Internet, messaging, videos, etc., its important to get right to the point in your message and use designs that are simple to follow.  Make your intentions clear quickly (in 3 lines if possible) by sharing a problem that your target market faces and how they can solve it by clicking on the following link (or whatever your goal of the email is).

And by the way, never ever send an email message with a call to action!  Tell your readers what to do next (typically its to click on a link).

#3 Include Video Link in Your Email Content

Using the word “video” in the email subject line boosts open rates by 19% and click-through rates by a whopping 65 percent Therefore, every time you create new media (and blog) content, be sure to promote to your subscribers.  This keeps your brand in their forefront.  Your CRM can easily connect your contacts to platforms like YouTube and Vimeo, allowing you to better leverage your time.

#4 Segment Your Email List

This tip is golden!  There’s nothing like a subscriber getting an email they feel was created just for them, also known as contextual emails.  These emails are personalized uniquely for the customer, speaking directly to their qualities.  Segment your list by using criteria like geography, age, interest, or responsiveness towards certain email messages.  Subscribers are more apt to open and react to your messages when the content resonates with their interests.

Customer retention is critical for the success of any company.  You want your clients to continue doing business with you for a long-term sustaining organization.  Leveraging your email marketing with your CRM software tool properly will help you maintain those relationships thus driving sales, boosting revenues, and creating happy customers.  A win-win for all!

Starting Early: How Message Consistency Can Help You Close More Doctors

By David H. Khalili,  Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Every dental lab wants to maximize its sales process. But in reality, that's often easier said than done. By the time your sales department picks up the phone and calls a lead, their decision on whether or not to become a customer has probably already been made..

You can still convince members of your dental audience who are on the fence to go one way or the other, but if you truly want to improve your sales rates, you have to start earlier. From the moment your target audience is first exposed to your brand, they will begin to form an opinion about your brand that ultimately impacts their likelihood of becoming a customer. So if you are looking for effective ways to close more sales, you have to start early: with message consistency.

Messaging and Branding

The ultimate marketing goal of every business should be to create a consistent brand. Global powerhouses like Nike and Apple succeed because everyone knows their brand and has a general ideal of what it stands for. How did they get to that point? 

Below is a list of 7 key characteristics that successful dental laboratories share. They include:

1.  Audience Knowledge
2. Uniqueness
3. Passion
4. Consistency
5. Competitiveness
6. Exposure
7. Leadership.

Achieving any of these characteristics for your brand as a dental lab requires a thoughtful, strategic approach. But for the purposes of this post, we will focus on what we would argue is the single most important aspect of branding: consistency.

Think about it from a Dentist's point of view. If you hear about a dental lab a few times, and the message or visual identity is different every single time, it will be impossible form a coherent image of that brand in your mind. If, however, the same brand establishes a clear visual and textual identity, focusing on the same core benefit again and again, it will be much easier for you to form a reliable opinion about that brand. Consistency, in other words, is absolute key.

The Consequences of Cognitive Dissonance

At this point, you may be wondering how branding and message consistency plays into your ability to close more dentist. To answer that question, we have to explain a key psychological concept that applies to all of us: cognitive dissonance.

In social psychology, dissonance theory suggests that we have an inner motivation to keep our attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge in harmony, and avoid disharmony at all costs. If, however, messages conflict with each other or don't line up in our minds as desired, we tend to discount all variations as untrue to maintain harmony.

If you're not careful, cognitive dissonance can affect your sales efforts in the dental lab, in a very tangible way. If your messaging throughout the marketing campaign, leading up to the final sales call, has not been consistent to create a firm brand image in your leads' mind, they will dismiss your company as not credible and the final sales call will do little to persuade them otherwise. And even if the marketing has been consistent in itself, a sales call that's inconsistent with previous promotional messages can lead potential customers on the fence to say no to your company.

How a CRM Improves Message Consistency

Consistency, in other words, is crucial for your business to close more sales. Fortunately, Customer Relationship Management software can help you increase and maintain that consistency, in two ways:

• Consistent email marketing. If your email marketing relies on sending impromptu messages to potential customers, you run the risk of sending conflicting messages without even noticing it. A single change in phrase can suggest something entirely different to your audience. A CRM allows you to set up and automate your promotional messages, increasing the consistency as a result.
• Consistent Marketing-Sales Hand Off. Especially if your marketing and sales efforts are maintained by different departments, integrating both to maintain message consistency can be difficult. Because CRM software stows all of your contact information, your sales department can make more informed sales calls based on information your marketing department has gathered in previous efforts.

 In short, optimizing your sales efforts starts with message consistency. To learn more about how a CRM can help you achieve just that and maximize your ROI, contact us at 888.715.9099 or visit DentalLabSupport.com

4 Steps to Lead Nurturing: Walking the buying path with your customers

Lead generation can take you on a long hike. The one thing I can guarantee you about the journey is that more is not better if you don’t know how to nurture. The goal of lead nurturing is to help progress leads from initial interest toward purchase intent. It’s about progression.

That said, I’ve seen companies spend most of their budget getting people to raise their hands but not putting enough toward progression. Get out your walking shoes, and take a journey with your customers.

I define lead nurturing as consistent and meaningful communication with viable prospects (those that are “a fit” for your solution), regardless of their timing to buy. It’s not “following up” every few months to find out if a prospect is “ready to buy yet.” True nurturing involves a sometimes long and circuitous path, but along the way, you’ll be building long, meaningful and trust-filled relationships with the right people.

Salespeople often struggle with developing nurturing content without support. If you’re wondering what kinds of content helps progress leads further faster, ask your sales team. Start by asking your sales team questions like, “What’s the content you share with leads that helps them convert?” or “What’s the content you use to help take people to the next level?”

The first step on that path to success is to start thinking like a customer.

Step #1: Walk in your potential customers’ shoes to build a customer journey map

Be the customer, and get as you close as you can to their experience by really observing the behaviors of your customer. After you’ve gaining a solid understanding, build your customer journey map.

What is a customer journey map? It tells the story of the customer’s experience: from initial contact, through the process of engagement and into a long-term relationship.

The journey map is about helping you understanding the key interactions that your future customer will have with the organization. What are their motivations? What are their questions with each marketing touch point? Try to understand what they want and the concerns they’ll have along with peers they’re interacting with. The goal of customer journey mapping is to gain customer wisdom.

As you do that, consider the questions that customers have in mind before they make a buying decision:

• How will this product or service help my company?
• We’re doing OK, so why do we need this?
• Is there another company out there that is better?
• Will their solution really work? Can they prove it?
• Is the company credible?
• Can we afford it?

Help prospects find the answers to these questions, and you’ll remind them of the benefits of working with you. You’re creating value by giving them useful information in digestible, bite-sized chunks.

Step #2: Plan your path to create content geared toward progression

Invest as much in forming creative and content for lead progression as you do for lead capture. I’ve seen companies spend most of their budget getting people to raise their hands but not enough toward progression.

The goal of lead nurturing is to help progress leads from initial interest toward purchase intent. It’s about progression.

Read “Content Marketing Tips for Lead Nurturing” for ideas on content to use. Through the combination of all these, you’re providing relevant, educational and thought-leading content. For more ideas, read “Lead Nurturing: 5 tips for creating relevant content.”

It’s worth noting:

• The tactics employed and the frequency of touches will depend on the solutions being sold and the buying cycle of the prospect.
• You need to create different lead nurturing tracks based on demographic criteria, such as size, industry, role in the buying process and more.

Step #3: Walk the path with your customer

In a complex sale, the journey can be long and challenging to help people move from initial interest to purchase intent.

Your only job is to make certain you nourish your customer along the way and guide them with a meaningful compass toward the right and best decision for their needs.

Think of your marketing team as trail guides who will need to point out all the sights along the way that are useful in the decision-making process.

Slow down, and walk at the customer’s pace, even if that means taking the long route with them when it comes to buying your service or product. If you hurry them along, you might end up with an exhausted customer who doesn’t feel good about the journey and won’t turn to you to continue the path to purchase.

“How you sell me is how you will serve me”

Most economic buyers subscribe to the notion that how you sell me indicates how you will serve me. Here’s where that little statistic I mentioned earlier comes in. A study of business-to-business buyers shows that salespeople who become trusted advisors and understood the needs of economic buyers are 69% more likely to come away with a sale.

The complex sale requires that your prospect:

• Must be familiar with you and your company and with what you and your company do.
• Must perceive you and your company to be expert in your field.
• Must believe that you and your company understand his or her specific issues and can solve them.­
• Likes you and your company enough to want to work with you.

Remember you can’t automate trust. Trust-building should be the theme of your nurturing efforts.

Building trust

By providing valuable education and information to prospects up front, you become a trusted advisor. You are then perceived to be an expert. You don’t sell; you don’t make pitches. Instead, you provide insights and solutions all within the realm of your expertise and, as a result, become the first company they turn to when there’s a need.

Make your marketing program’s single point of focus be to develop trust, and your business will become more profitable and less reliant on competing on price. Selling, per se, is reduced in the interest of more open and honest conversations with prospects. You win more business on a sole-source basis, and more new business referrals come your way.

Step #4: Keep marching

Startling as it may seem, recent research (and even studies from 20 years ago) shows that longer-term leads (future opportunities), often ignored by salespeople, represent almost 40 to 70% of potential sales. Research compiled by the MarketingSherpa Lead Generation Benchmark Report showed, “marketing departments with a lead nurturing campaign reported a 45% higher ROI than marketing departments that did not utilize a lead nurturing track.”

If inquiries are simply passed on to salespeople, reps, partners or distributors for follow up, beware.  You may be leaving as many as eight out of 10 sales prospects on the sales path for your competitors.

Now, get your compasses out and begin the long-yet-fruitful journey toward an effective lead nurturing program. You’ll be surprised how many potential customers will want to join you along the way.

How the Emergence of Digital Local Affects Dental Labs in 2016 and Beyond

By David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

The philosophy behind dental lab marketing used to be relatively simple. Digital marketing strategies made sense to raise brand awareness, but to get people in your neighborhood, more traditional methods were most reliable. A print ad in a community magazine, sponsoring a local event, or even a telemarketing to get the people around you to pay attention to your products and services.

But increasingly, digital marketing seeks to compete with these traditional methods, creating local advertising possibilities that you should not ignore. As we move into 2016 and beyond, these digital marketing opportunities are becoming increasingly easy to access, meaning you should give them serious thought as a part of your budget in the new year. Let's discuss digital local marketing opportunities relevant to small businesses today.

Local Search

When Google first introduced its Pigeon algorithm update in 2014, it changed the game for local search optimization. Without boring you with the details, the update prioritized local results over national results as appropriate for search queries related to your business.

Today, search is ubiquitous among your audience. Especially thanks to the rise in mobile, a potential customer who is looking for a way to get your product or find out about your opening hours simply pulls up Google and types their query into the search bar. Do you know what shows up when they do?

As it turns out, the search engine actually lets you control the result to some degree, by allowing you to set up and optimize a My Business Profile. If you have not done so yet, you should make it a priority before 2016 or, at the very least, a New Year's Resolution. Potential customers will search for your dental lab, so you want to be sure you can be found easily.

Local Targeting Possibilities

But your opportunities to go local go beyond mere search optimization. Thanks to the in-depth targeting options of many digital channels, particularly on social media, you can now target very specific areas, neighborhoods, and even individual blocks with distinct advertising.

Facebook, for example, allows you to set targeting parameters for its ads to a specific zip code. Google, on the other hand, lets you engage in geo-targeting, even allowing marketers to target based on specific IP and household addresses. This hyper local targeting means you can be sure to reach your audience, no matter how geographically restricted it may be. 

Combining Digital with Traditional

Here, email marketing can come into play. If you use your digital ads as an opportunity to gather leads, or if you request email addresses from customers for post-sale nurturing opportunities, emails can be crucial tools to connect your initial ads and your customer experience. By allowing you to reach out to your target audience in a personalized way, it establishes your dental lab and brand as an important part of your customers' mindset and consideration point for future purchases.

How can email marketing become a part of your local marketing efforts? Contact us to learn more.

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