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

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.

3 Steps to Improve Customer Retention

By:  David H. Khalili
Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Too many dental laboratories approach customer retention with arbitrary efforts. They think that as long as they sell a good product and offer the best possible customer service, they'll automatically build customer retention. 

This just leaves businesses spinning their wheels. For real improvement, you need an actual strategy that goes into specifics. Here's one way to go about improving your customer retention: 

Start tracking your doctor satisfaction 

The first mistake dental labs make is not tracking their customer satisfaction. Many just assume that there's no way to measure this metric quantitatively. While customer satisfaction seems qualitative in nature, it's absolutely possible for dental labs to track it. 

Test different methods and keep Dentists coming back

Once you have a concrete idea of your customer satisfaction, you can start testing with different methods. The idea is to throw things at the wall one-by-one and see what sticks.  

A common customer retention tactic is to introduce a customer loyalty program. A recent Business.com article explains why you should try this out and track its success: 

"Using rewards systems to secure customer loyalty is an old tactic, but it’s an effective one. There are many loyalty program options for restaurant owners to choose from. Make sure that the program you choose is supported by your POS System before investing, as it will help you accumulate invaluable customer data."

There are many programs you can create to keep your dentist's coming back. Consider offering discounts, adding more value to your service, and giving coupons to repeat customers. 

This, of course, is just one tactic. There are other possibilities, such as using social media and email marketing to bring your customers back. The important thing here is to try each tactic one-by-one so there's no problem isolating the cause for changes in customer retention. 

Check for changes in your customer satisfaction and customer retention

Now that you have a system to measure your customer satisfaction and have tested tactics to improve customer retention, you can see if your strategy made any difference. 

See if your customer loyalty program or social media marketing efforts made any impact on your customer retention. Similarly, track your customer satisfaction over time to see if there were any changes in its trend. 

Customer satisfaction and customer retention are related, but they don't always move together. It's possible for your customer satisfaction to increase and your customer retention to stay stagnant or vice-versa. 

In this respect, it's important to prioritize one goal over the other. Keep in mind that customer satisfaction is more volatile in the short-run while customer retention is likely a more important indicator in the long-run. 

It'll never be an exact science, but there are steps you can take to push customer retention in that direction. To talk more about customer retention, or anything else, contact us today by visiting DentalLabSupport.com or calling 1-888-715-9099. 

How to Apply Brand Marketing Principles to Your Landing Pages

Your website is an exploratory experience for potential customers in the consideration phase looking to learn more about your company or product as a whole. Landing pages, on the other hand, generate the most ROI when used as a natural extension of your digital advertising. When done correctly, these dedicated pages create a focused message aligned and personalized experience for a target audience with a single call to action.Brand marketing matters. Whether your target user is exploring your website, stumbling upon a post in their Facebook newsfeed after liking your page, or first exposed to your company in a Google search result, brand development maintains its importance throughout the customer journey.

Landing pages are not meant to replace your website, though. Your website is for people to learn more about your product in a generic way without addressing their specific needs, while a landing page is for someone to take action.

Among the fundamental differences between landing pages and a website is the act of conscious and direct personalization to create more context around a particular promotion. Landing pages also help illustrate the unique value proposition of your product at the moment someone first engages with your brand.

Brand strategy and landing pages

Authentic brands don’t emerge from marketing cubicles or advertising agencies. They emanate from everything the company does.

@Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks

Legendary copywriter David Ogilvy defines a brand as “the intangible sum of a product’s attributes.” In the context of brand marketing, the attitude and voice of your brand are determined by the totality of experiences across all of your digital properties, including landing pages.

While it doesn’t need to be identical across the entire web; product branding needs to reflect core values of your company to manage perceptions, take ownership, and drive authority, trust, and evangelism.

Brand development opportunities in landing pages

The power behind personalized landing pages is tremendous. By giving every promotion it’s own landing page, you can articulate the unique value proposition of your product to the specific persona.

Most of the opportunities for personalization exist within the qualitative variables on each page such as text, images, video, and other creative assets.

Once you lock down your branding, there are some standard consistencies to use across all of your digital properties, including your personalized landing pages. These include:

Typography: Using custom fonts across your website, ads, and all of their corresponding landing pages can increase conversions and helps keep your pages on-brand. Instapage makes this easy to do with Google Fonts and Adobe Typekit integrations.

Colors: increase brand recognition by up to 80%. Once you identify the primary, secondary, and tertiary colors for your brand, build those colors into all of your pages.

Logo: Your logo is essential to your brand identity. Create a few on-brand versions to use in different situations depending on color, size, file type, etc. Also, make sure to use the same high-quality favicon on each landing page.

URLs: Brand consistent can start and end with using custom domains. Whenever possible, always publish landing pages to a sub directory or subdomain on the root domain of your brand. Additionally, this is essential to making your landing pages SEO friendly.

Page structure: Provide a similar conversion experience every time. You’ve already trained your users where to click. Help them engage by keeping things consistent with your call to actions across all of your pages. However, always remember to A/B test your pages, especially if you want to experiment with a new page layout.

Landing pages, brand development, and the customer journey

Wouldn’t it be great if your target users discovered your high-value product through an ad, ended up on the subsequent landing page, purchased immediately, and become brand advocates forever?

Unfortunately, this is rarely the case.

WordStream reports that the median conversion rate of AdWords campaigns is 2.35%. However, even among the top ten percent of AdWords accounts with an 11% conversion rate; a one, two or three-touch customer journey from discovery to purchase is elusive, if it ever happens at all. Couple that with the fact that Salesforce states that it takes 6 to 8 touches to generate a viable sales lead and it can seem like it’s an impossible feat to close sales from PPC ads.

So how do you increase your chances of driving new sales from AdWords and PPC? Creating personalized landing pages consistent with your branding because they’re an excellent way to optimize your brand development throughout your customer's journey.

Regardless of the specific path, landing pages function as a centerpiece of brand development for users across all of your digital properties, while they move farther down the road to conversion. The intersection of brand marketing and landing pages is especially important because landing pages are the impetus for your target personas, segments, and customers to take action at every stage of the nurturing and onboarding process.

A tremendous part of your customer's journey takes place on personalized landing pages. Much of this lead nurturing also occurs within email marketing, in-app messaging, and other marketing automation.

For more information, contact us at info@dentallabsupport.com or DentalLabSupport.com