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November 2009 | dentalproductsreport.com Direct Mail With all that the web has to offer, is direct mail still a good choice for your practice's marketing efforts?  One key to effective direct mail is targeted messaging. Photo courtesy of Smile Reminder It’s not hard for many of you to imagine a time before the Internet dominated personal and professional communication—before e-mail, texting and instant messages. There was a time when direct mail was a dentist’s best option for promoting his or her practice, alongside the radio, local TV or billboards. It was expensive, sure, but it was worth it. Leaving a call to action in the patients’ hands was invaluable. Supposedly the web, as you may have heard, changed everything. It became harder to justify the cost of a direct mail piece when a text, Google ad or e-mail blast could accomplish the same thing for a fraction of the price. But are these new web tools effective? For many practices, yes. But, whether you’re adopting a strong digital strategy or sinking slowly because you have no marketing strategy at all, now may be the time to revisit direct mail. “I find it very interesting that so many dentists think that they can do all their practice marketing on the web. I think that’s because they believe that it costs less,” Melinda Spitek, CEO of Hycomb Marketing Inc. observed. “In today’s marketplace there is no one right way to market a practice. Why? Because people still have different ways of getting information.” There are ways to get more bang for your buck. You just have to be smart about how you execute, which all starts with choosing the right partners. Sample size matters No one factor does more to impact your costs than sample size. Far too often, dentists will cover an entire area with general messaging—a costly and ineffective method. “Buying zip code lists or postal route lists is not a wise use of your money,” Spitek said. “You need to spend your marketing dollars on the right people, not all the people.” Hycomb, for example, relies heavily on demographics and psychographics as a launching pad for an effective direct mail strategy. “We use a combination of market research, crafted just for dentists, which tell us a whole lot more—it tells us what makes them choose you,” Spitek said. “With demographics and psychographics you can cherry pick the right patients for your practice. You can send them the right message and offer the right incentive.” Smile Reminder—known for its many Web 2.0 patient communication options—recently partnered with REACH3, a company that specializes in Customer Relations Management (CRM) systems, to take that exact principle a step further. They launched ZubuMail this year, a new breed of direct mail that seeks to take as much of the guesswork out of the process as possible. So why is a web-savvy company investing in “old” methods? “ZubuMail fits into our overall portfolio because the service itself is backed by the technology of analysis, and utilizes data analytics for individuals to pinpoint likely candidates for the specific procedures a dental practice offers,” Mark Olson, VP of Marketing for Smile Reminder, explained. “Through our technology, we have the ability to analyze people and their characteristics, which allows dental practices to do a better job of weeding out non-candidates and targeting potential patients. ZubuMail is also our way of extending our services, from communicating with internal patients to communicating with potential patients with the ultimate goal of patient acquisition.” With the help of REACH3, ZubuMail is able to access three proprietary population segmentation models to help dental practices reach the ideal target patients: Propensity™ identifies consumers who are more likely to need specifics dental services. Beehive™ helps determine messaging and offers based on demographic and psychographic profiles. Target Payer™ identifies the right payer types. By being intentionally selective, your mailers have a much higher chance of yielding results. Right on target Being able to manage costs starts with selective sending—but it doesn’t need to end there. Being able to craft the direct mail piece’s message—through words and images—is an important step towards it having the desired effect: new patients. It starts with a clear purpose. “The direct mail piece should offer an incentive and tell a bit about the dentist, the practice and the services offered,” Spitek said. ZubuMail allows users to customize their communication with practice information and any special offers or incentives. On top of that, the creative is determined based on the recipients age, ethnicity and gender—making the message more personal and relevant. What if multiple dentists in your area are using ZubuMail? The company monitors the origin of orders for each design and has a “first in” policy regarding the use of a creative them. If a certain them has already been used by one customer in the market area, other practices aren’t able to use that design theme. For the newsletter portion of the direct mail support Hycomb provides, they pull from an expansive library of more than 2,500 articles on dentistry and general health, but they do use psychographic to target the material as much as possible. Cost controls Your control over sample size and message can go a long way to help reduce costs or improve your return on investment. ZubuMail goes the extra step in making access to their services free, then allowing dental practices to choose how much they want to spend on targeting their prospects. “With other forms of promotion you have to spend X amount of dollars and you don’t necessarily have control over how many people you reach,” Olson explained. “With ZubuMail, a dentists is able to control outreach very specifically and thus track results closely. “Traditionally, direct mail has had poor response rates because it uses an ineffective ‘spray and pray’ method. The average direct mail campaign usually gets a 1-3% response rate,” Olson continued. “ZubuMail has received an 8-11% response rate, proving that it is much more cost effective.” Hycomb also works to make your partnership more cost-effective by creating newsletters that can apply to both prospective and current patients. By sending the same newsletter, you can have both batches printed at once which helps to reduce costs Follow-up is critical It seems like a no-brainer, but you should be making every effort to track the results of your direct mail efforts. Hycomb recommends you have front office tally the source of all new referrals so you can track responses. They also encourage doctors to measure the ROI in dollars, not just percentages. For example, even a .5% response rate can mean a significant influx of funds and ROI.. Smile Reminder suggests setting up a unique telephone number for each direct marketing campaign, as this can help make it easier to reconcile the number of active responders to a campaign. Remember, even the most effective direct mail campaign shouldn’t serve as an excuse for not branching out into other forms of marketing. The smart dentists, as Spitek said at the beginning, recognizes that the ways to reach patients are as diverse as your patients themselves. Thais Carter Editor in Chief of DPR. Contact her at tcarter@advanstar.com.
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