Fix Your Marketing Message to Keep Dental Patients Engaged

Maybe you’re having a difficult time keeping patients engaged with your dental practice. Maybe they’re coming in once for an emergency procedure, then you aren’t seeing them again years. It’s possible that the issue is their commitment to oral health. Or it could be that your marketing efforts aren’t effective. Blair Drenner, vice president of strategic business development at eRelevance Corporation, talks about refining your marketing message to keep your patients coming back.

Interview Transcript (slightly modified for readability)

“I think the best way to re-engage patients that haven’t been in the practice for a long time, I think there’s a couple of main components. One is, have a message that is applicable for them. Often times, dental practices are simply sending newsletters or appointment reminders that are generic in nature when really they need to make sure they know who their client is and the types of clients, and reach out to those clients in a very personalized manner.

The second thing is the way that we reach them. Often times, dentist are sending messages. The easiest way is through email. Email is something that’s probably either 15 or 20 years old, in terms of its ability to reach people. Most open rates are only around 20 percent. My question is, how do you reach the other 80 percent?

It’s a very important to develop a multi-channel approach, which is reaching people in the way that people communicate these days, and different generations communicate, which is via social media, via web landing pages, via text messaging, conversational marketing, as well as email. It’s important to increase to reach them as well as have applicable and information and content for them.”