For a while, postcards were all the rage in the world of dental marketing. Then we had Google ads, then Facebook ads, then “implant funnels”…all going in a digital direction. So, should you focus purely on digital marketing nowadays, or is it still worth including direct mail in your marketing strategy? That’s what Jeff discusses in this week’s episode, along with some key tips to get good return-on-investment in your marketing.
Links:
Phone Scripts - https://www.mgeonline.com/the-mge-new-patient-phone-scripts-ebook
New Patient Call Log - https://www.mgeonline.com/np-call-log
The MGE New Patient Workshop - https://www.newpatients.net
Team training video courses - https://ddssuccess.com
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Questions From This Episode
Is direct mail marketing still worth doing for a dental practice?
Jeff says yes, in the right situation. Marketing channels are cyclic: they rise, become saturated, and fall into disuse. Because fewer practices send direct mail than 10 years ago, he sees an opportunity for those willing to do it right. It works best in suburban and small-town areas, and less well in downtown areas where patients commute in from elsewhere.
What should a direct mail postcard include?
Before and after photos, pleasant artwork, a clear call to action, and an offer. Jeff recommends not overspending on printing and design, since most cards end up in the trash. He suggests a new patient special as a loss leader and varying the artwork slightly between mailings so the card does not get tuned out.
How many postcards should you send, and how often?
At least 5,000 a month, with 10,000 being better, and consistently over several months. Jeff recommends hitting the same group repeatedly, either monthly or in weekly batches, because patients often respond on the third mailing. Every Door Direct Mail from the US Post Office is much cheaper than first class or bulk mail.
What response rate should you expect from postcards to new patients?
A good response rate is about 0.25%, or roughly 25 phone calls from 10,000 postcards, and a call is not the same as a new patient. If a postcard produces no calls after two mailings, Jeff would stop using it and redesign. Whether the campaign pays off then depends on conversion: in his example, an 80% conversion turns 25 calls into 20 new patients, while the 23% national average gives about six.
How do you know whether the postcard or the receptionist is the problem?
Track every new patient call in a call log, with the caller's name, number, and what prompted the call, and give each postcard variation a unique identifier. Jeff also says to train your receptionist, since the national average conversion is 23% and he wants 70 to 80%. He offers a new patient scripts ebook, a free mystery call service, and a phone skills course on DDS Success.
Episode Transcript
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When you talk about dental marketing today, especially new patient marketing, what's normally discussed? The majority of what you're going to hear is very internet heavy: how your website is done, SEO (search engine optimization), Google pay-per-click, Facebook ads, implant funnels, and how to get more online reviews. It's all about internet marketing. You still see some information out there about mail marketing or postcard marketing, but direct mail is definitely not as popular as it was 10, 15, or 20 years ago.
Why is this? Number one, it's an older form of marketing. It's been around for quite some time. It was a thing when I entered the profession in the early nineties, when people were sending out postcards. It's also potentially very expensive, especially if it doesn't work. Postage alone on a promotional piece is at least 30 or 40 cents, maybe the high 20 cents if you do it the right way, so it can get very expensive very quickly. If I'm looking at the choice between spending $1,000 on pay-per-click or $5,000 to send out a bunch of postcards, I might go the $1,000 route because there's less risk associated with it. But the real question that should be asked about direct mail marketing is: does it still work? Is it still a useful tool in your practice marketing toolbox, or is it a relic from the past that we should just let die?
That's what I want to talk about in this week's episode. I want to talk about the pros and cons of direct mail marketing, how to determine whether it's something you should adopt as one of the marketing strategies for your practice, and, if you do, how to do it so that it actually works. My name is Jeff Blumberg and I'm your host.
The first thing to know about any form of marketing, or marketing in general, is that marketing evolves. And it doesn't just evolve, it's almost cyclic. It's sort of like ties, if you wear ties for work, as I do. You'll see a cyclic aspect to tie shape, size, even design. The two-and-a-half-inch ties are in fashion, then it's three-inch ties, then three-and-a-half-inch ties, really big fat ties, and then it goes back down to one and a half inches. There's a cyclic aspect to fashion, and there's a cyclic aspect to marketing.
Let's say you were an early adopter of marketing postcards, sending them out in 1992. Not a lot of folks were doing it back then. We had clients doing this. I remember looking at one client's postcard that used to get him 25 new patients a month. You would think it was a beautiful postcard. It was ugly. He and I used to joke about how ugly the thing was. It was orange or hot pink with navy blue, almost purple, ink on it, just one color. The postcard said something like "Have healthy teeth and gums, come in for a new patient special," and it used to get him 20 to 25 new patients, sometimes 35 new patients a month. Postage back then was a lot more affordable, so this was a great form of marketing.
Then what happened? People in town saw he was sending out this postcard, so other people started sending out a postcard. Then more people started sending out a postcard. Maybe it became cheaper to get them printed because more people were doing them, but the newness and uniqueness of the postcard were gone. It wasn't the only postcard prospective patients were getting in their mailbox anymore. You'll see this with every form of marketing. It starts off with early adopters, then other people pile in. Then it hits a maximum where everybody's in and the return isn't as good as it was early on. Certain people start to drop off, and maybe the marketing comes back, or it stays, or it falls into disuse, and then it can be brought back again, which I'll explain in a bit.
This has happened with everything. In the early days of the internet, when websites weren't the greatest, email marketing was a thing. You probably remember getting emails advertising this or that. Nobody was really email marketing back then, so the only emails you got were from your friends, your business coworkers, or clients. Now you were getting an email about a promotional item, and nobody else was sending them to you. Those tended to work better than they did five or six years down the road, when everybody was doing email marketing. It got so bad that companies like Google, with Gmail, created a promotions tab, because everybody is getting so many marketing emails that they don't have time to go through them, and their inbox has 26,000 emails in it because they don't clean it out every day. So if you're doing bulk email marketing, the effectiveness compared to 15 years ago (not 50 years ago, 15 years ago) is not nearly as good. If the person you're mailing to has Gmail and it's a promotional email, it ends up in their promotions tab. They may or may not see it. You have the same thing in Outlook, with a focused inbox and another inbox, general or unfocused. Maybe they're not looking at those, because the focused inbox is where the important emails are.
This is what happens with every form. Google pay-per-click was the same way. Initially it was cheap, then it became more expensive. Just as an aside, we adopted Facebook marketing very early on. We started in 2012 or 2013, so really early. At the time it was very easy to do and very easy to use, because Facebook hadn't yet made advertising a main source of its revenue. You could know very little and put together Facebook ads. We did it for ourselves here at MGE, and it worked great. Then my marketing director and I thought, I wonder how this would work for clients. So, in 2013, just for funsies, we grabbed a client and said, "We would like to do some Facebook marketing for you. You'd have to pay for the ads, of course, but we just want to try it and see what you think." This office did a lot of Lumineers and Invisalign and things like that, so they said sure, let's try it.
To give you an idea of the effectiveness: he was spending $1,400 a month, we did the ads for free, and he was averaging 20 new patients a month. These patients were all coming in for Lumineers and Invisalign. Think about that. If you could spend $1,400 for 20 new patients, that's $70 a new patient, and it's not just a new patient coming in for a night guard. This is a new patient coming in for Invisalign or Lumineers. It worked great.
Then, eventually, more and more people saw that dentists were advertising on Facebook. Agencies started advertising to dentists to do it, and other doctors saw it and wanted to be on there too. You end up with a lot of ads. That doesn't mean you don't advertise there or that you stop. It just means you have to be a little more crafty to make sure your ads actually get seen. It definitely starts to dilute the effectiveness, compared with being first to market or the early adopter.
So with marketing, because it evolves, there are two things you want to do. There are things that are your steady Eddie marketing: you're always doing pay-per-click, you're keeping your SEO in good shape, you're making sure your website is proper and reflects what's actually going on in your office, and maybe you're sending out some kind of mail. And then you're always keeping your eye open for newer opportunities. Maybe you were an early adopter of Instagram. There are a lot of dentists on TikTok now, and I know quite a few who get a lot of new patients from TikTok. Eventually, TikTok will start to get saturated. All these marketing channels start to get saturated, the effectiveness isn't quite as good as it was before, and maybe you can keep it that way if you're really smart with how you market. But eventually people start to drop out, and if enough time goes by and the channel still exists, it falls into a degree of disuse.
The funny thing is that's happened to a degree with direct mail. Not a lot of people do direct mail anymore. I can tell you, just as a consumer, I don't see as many postcards from dentists in my mailbox as I used to see 10 years ago. What that tells you is that if it's falling into disuse but people are still receiving it, it's potentially not a bad thing to do. It becomes popular, then it loses popularity, and there's always a way to bring it back.
So should you do direct mail in your practice? And if you should, what should you send out? It depends on a few things: where your office is located, what you plan to send out, whether you can fund it so it stays consistent, and whether you're set up to make it work. We talk about this a lot in the MGE New Patient Workshop. We do a lot on internet marketing and reviews in that workshop as well, but we do discuss direct mail marketing too. If you want to know more about the New Patient Workshop, we'll put a link on the episode webpage.
Let's say you're looking at your office and thinking, I'm doing all these other marketing channels, I've got my SEO in good shape, I've got a good website that really works, I'm doing all the things I'm supposed to do. Should I do direct mail? Can I get more new patients from it? Number one, it depends on where your office is. If I were in a downtown area where a lot of my patients were coming from other offices or businesses in the area, I probably would not do direct mail, say in a high rise in Manhattan. There aren't a lot of folks who live around my office, and most of the people who come to my office work near my office. The idea is that my direct mail has to get in front of somebody who's potentially a patient in my practice or could become one. If I have a suburban practice, which is where most offices are, I'm probably going to do direct mail, because within a five or 10 mile radius there are going to be a lot of potential patients. If you're in a really rural area where there's a local newspaper for your little town that everybody actually reads, you could even advertise in the newspaper, or put an insert in it, because people actually read it. The thing to keep in mind is that you want to put this in front of people who could potentially become a patient. In a downtown area that might be tough, whereas in a suburban area or a regular small town it might be easier.
The next question is, if you're going to send out direct mail for new patient marketing, what should you send? There are a few things to consider. It could be a postcard or a flyer. You could do a six by nine inch postcard, or a small postcard. I've seen people get inventive and do a really big one. I don't know that it necessarily makes a difference, and this is something you can experiment with. You could even take a regular letter-size piece of paper, eight and a half by 11, and fold it into a tri-fold mailer. The type of thing you send out is not that critical, but the key is that you don't want to spend a ton of money on it. This is where I see people make their first mistake. They say, "This postcard is going to represent my office, so it has to be 100% high class, high tech." That's going to get you in trouble.
Think about this for a second. Say I send out 10,000 postcards and I get an enormously off-the-charts response rate, and 200 people respond, which probably won't happen. I'll get into what the actual response rate is a little later. But say 200 people respond. That's 10,000 postcards for 200 patients. That's amazing, right? That still means 9,800 postcards ended up in the garbage. You can make a very tasteful, nice-looking postcard without spending a lot of money, especially today, with the access we have to printing and design through on-demand printing, which we didn't have 10, 15, or 20 years ago. So the key is that you don't want to go completely nuts with the quality, to the point where you're spending a dollar a card or it's gold embossed. You want it to look nice and reflect your practice, but you want to keep the costs reasonable, because most of these are going to end up in the recycle bin, hopefully, or the trash.
That's the first mistake I see people make. The next question is what you're going to put on the postcard. This could be a whole episode in and of itself, but you definitely want before and after photos. You want to make sure your postcard art is nice and pleasant to look at. And you want to make sure it has some form of patient offer. I know some people go back and forth on this. Do I want to offer a discounted something? Is that going to make people think weirdly about my practice? Absolutely not. If you have no kind of offer, there's really no reason for a person to respond. If I get a postcard from you that says, "Hi, I'm a dentist in the area, give me a call," I don't really have a reason to call unless I feel like it. This is mixed into what we call the call to action, which you may have heard in marketing lingo as the CTA.
It might be a new patient special for a cleaning, exam, and full mouth x-ray. You might be advertising a couple of different things: an exam and x-rays, a free consultation, or some type of special for people who are missing teeth and want implants, where they get a cone beam and this and that for $110. Whatever the offer is really doesn't matter. You want to make sure the offer is good, you want some reason to induce the person to call, and then you tell them to call now to make an appointment. That's usually when you see postcards work out poorly: bad artwork, no before and afters, no real call to action of any kind, and no offer.
And if you get the idea that having an offer is bad, let me ask you a question. Have you ever bought anything because it was on sale? Be honest for a second. You heard it was on sale, and that made you want to buy it. Maybe you wanted to buy it anyway, but the fact that it was on sale induced you to act, which is the only reason you put an offer in there. The other counterargument I would make, if somebody says, "I don't want to discount my cleaning, exam, and x-rays," is this. Say your cleaning, exam, and x-rays normally cost about $300, and the PPO fee is $110. You do a new patient special where you do a cleaning, exam, and x-rays for $110. So you're giving away almost $200, and you say, "I don't want to do that, I don't want to lower my fees." Well, if you take PPOs, you are doing that every time you see a patient. This you're only doing the first time you see them. It's a loss leader. You've heard that term before, where you spend a little bit of money to attract somebody with the idea that they're going to stick with your business.
Say you come up with a postcard idea. There are a couple of different ways you can do this. You could print a lot of the same postcard that you're going to mail multiple times. Or, since there aren't going to be that many differences in a six by nine postcard, you could have a little bit different artwork on each one, so it looks slightly different. I'm more of a fan of that. I try not to send the exact same thing out over and over again, because one thing I've realized over the years is that marketing can get tired. If I'm sending the exact same thing over and over, eventually someone may tune it out. If I have some slight variation the second, third, or fourth time they receive it, it at least keeps them interested. Maybe there's something I did differently with this card that attracts their attention, whereas last time it didn't.
Say I'm doing a postcard or a flyer of some kind. Who would I send it to, and how much would I send out? This is another area where I see mistakes get made. In the old days, before we had things like Every Door Direct Mail with the US Post Office, where you can pick a route and everybody on that route gets your card, we used to have clients buy mailing lists. They would buy a list of people in their area who make over a certain amount of money, or sometimes homeowners, depending on the criteria they were looking for. For example, if I were marketing specifically for implants, I probably wouldn't market to people under the age of 35 or 40, because most of those folks aren't going to be missing any teeth unless they're hockey players or something. I'd stick with people over 40 if I'm marketing implants, and you can pull mailing lists for things like this. Obviously there would be income criteria there too.
Nowadays you have Every Door Direct Mail, EDDM. You can go to the US Post Office if you're in the United States (there may be something similar in Canada or in the EU), pull up a map of a zip code, and pick the different routes, because every mail carrier has a route they deliver to. You look at it and see, okay, there are 875 people on this route, so they're going to distribute 875 of your postcards. This is substantially cheaper than mailing via first class or bulk mail. Bulk mail is cheaper than first class mail, and first class mail, which is what you'd send a letter with, gets prohibitively expensive. EDDM is pretty good. If you go to a neighborhood and you like it, you're basically blanketing the whole neighborhood.
So you pull your list and put it together, and the key is that you want to send this out in an adequate quantity and you want to send it out consistently. Both of these things are critical to making this work. What kind of numbers are we talking about? I wouldn't tell somebody to postcard market if they were not willing to send out at least 5,000 cards a month. 10,000 would be better, and you can do more than 10,000. Again, it depends where you are. You can look at the routes in your area, or pull a mailing list from around your office, and within a couple of miles there might be 50,000 prospective patients. We'll pick the first 10,000 you want to mail to.
How are we going to mail to these folks? There's a basic concept in marketing of multiple contacts, or multiple touches. Say you're marketing and you have a billboard and a big sign, you're doing postcards, and you're doing Facebook ads in my area. I see you on Facebook, I see your billboard, and now I get your postcard in the mail. I've had three contacts with you, which may spur a response. There's been enough contact that I say, okay, I'll call these folks, especially if I have some kind of dental problem. This is where the rest of your marketing all works together synergistically. If you've got good SEO, a good website, and good reviews, and you're doing pay-per-click and Facebook and whatever, your postcard marketing will actually become less expensive, because there's more recognition. I saw you on Facebook, and now I see your postcard. I'm more likely to respond because you're hitting me on multiple channels.
This is also where you want the ability to think like a consumer. A lot of us don't do that, especially when making the postcard. Think like a consumer. Don't think like yourself. We're not trying to attract more dentists as new patients, we're trying to attract more new patients, so think about what the consumer is going to want to see. I know that's sometimes difficult, because you may not like it. That happens to me. We have a joke about it: if I make a marketing piece and I don't like it, it's going to work, because it's not for me, folks, it's for the consumer. I'm not my consumer. You're not your consumer.
And you want to be consistent. Let's say I pick a couple of routes around my office and I've got 10,000 names. I'm not going to send 10,000 postcards out the first month, send nothing the next month, then send to another 10,000 people, and then another 10,000 the following month. What I'm probably going to do is hit these folks every month for a few months. It might be with the same postcard, or a slightly different one, because I want to create repetition. Remember repetition. I've had clients tell me patients have walked into the office with the postcard and said, "I got this thing for the third time, I figured I'd better call and show up." Literally. It does sometimes take this continuous communication before the person finally responds.
If I'm sending out 10,000 postcards, I could break them into 2,500 a week over the course of a month. That might be nice, especially if you're getting a consistent response rather than an overwhelming response the first week of the month and then nothing the rest of it. Or I could send 10,000 out at the beginning of the month and nothing until the beginning of the next month. Either way is fine, whatever's easier. I'm a bigger fan of consistency, doing it weekly, but that's just me. So say here's my 10,000, and I'm sending to this group at the beginning of January. I send that same group a postcard at the beginning of February, and again at the beginning of March, and maybe even in April. Is it the same postcard? Possibly, or maybe a slight variation, as I was talking about earlier.
A couple of considerations on this. Number one, and I mentioned this earlier: what type of response do you think you're going to get from postcard marketing to new patients? Not patients of record. You're going to get a better response from your patients of record, because they know you. But for prospective patients, a good response, just so you know, is a quarter of a percent, 0.25%. That's a good response, and keep in mind a response is not a new patient. If I send out 10,000 postcards, I'm going to get 25 phone calls on average. Some people think they'll get 2%, 3%, or 4%. No, you're not. You're going to get an average of 0.25% with a decent postcard. So I get 25 phone calls off these 10,000 postcards. I'll get into how those phone calls are handled in a second.
But say I send a postcard out and I get no phone calls. That's bad, and I've done this before. I'm not saying you have to do it, and it doesn't mean I wouldn't mail market, but think about this: when I send out a piece of mail, the biggest expense is usually not the printing, especially with a postcard. The biggest expense is the postage. So it's not going to cost me more until I mail it out. Say I send out a postcard and it gets me no response, I send it again, and it gets me no response. This postcard is obviously a dud. It's not going to work. Would I send it out again? Probably not. I've thrown marketing away because it was going to cost me more to mail out something that wasn't working than to go back to the drawing board and print something new that was going to work. Luckily, I've had to do this very infrequently in my career, or I wouldn't have lasted. But it should be getting you some response. And again, if I want 25 phone calls, I've got to send out 10,000 cards.
So if I'm sending out 10,000 cards and I get 25 phone calls, now it comes down to how good my office or my receptionist is at converting these calls. This is a big deal, because it can make or break your marketing. A response is not a new patient. I've sent out my 10,000 cards and I have 25 phone calls. Let's say my receptionist is dynamite, really good, and converts 80% of these calls into new patients. They got 25 calls and converted 80%. That's 20 new patients. The average first-year revenue for a patient in a dental practice in the United States is about $1,200 to $1,500. And I'm talking average, it could be a lot better than this, folks. So say I spent $5,000 on those 10,000 cards (that might be a little expensive), I got 25 calls, and we converted 20 new patients who came into the practice. If the average first-year revenue is $1,500, we made $30,000 for spending $5,000. And if we're doing a good job retaining these patients, there's going to be revenue year after year after year. This was a successful marketing campaign. I spent $5,000 to make $30,000, possibly more. That's a six to one return on investment. That's excellent.
But now say my receptionist isn't as on the ball, and out of these 25 phone calls only converts the national average, which is about 23%, or about six new patients. Six new patients is about a $9,000 return. I spent $5,000 to make $9,000. That's a less than 50% return on investment, and that's not so good. Or it could be even worse, in which case you start to think postcard marketing is no good. Which brings me to my last point: are you set up to actually be successful? You could apply this to any marketing, and I would say that 30 to 40% of the time, marketing doesn't work, especially in a dental practice. I've seen people do implant funnels and get all these forms, because an implant funnel usually filters out anybody who doesn't meet the criteria you've set. So when you get a form, that's somebody who has run through some degree of prequalification before you reach out to them. If you don't reach out to them, or you take three or four days to respond, or the person reaching out isn't very good, you're not going to get any conversions, and you're going to think, this implant funnel stinks.
People have a tendency to want to justify their ineffectiveness, which I understand. I'm not saying it's a bad human trait, but this is generally what happens. You try to find out what went wrong, and you hear, "These patients weren't really serious about getting implants," and so on. You're going to hear all kinds of explanations, because nobody wants to say, "I did a really bad job making this call, and I don't know what I'm doing, and I blew it." Nobody wants to say that, but that's effectively what happens in a lot of cases. So your point of contact, whoever's answering the phone or reaching out, if you are getting form responses as new patient responses, is probably 50% of your marketing, folks.
I've made episodes about this. As a matter of fact, the second episode we did on this podcast was about the receptionist. I think I made two others. I didn't note it down before I came up here to record, but I've gone over it before, so I'll just say it again briefly. The national average is 23% conversion. That was a study of 10,000 phone calls. That's 100 calls for 23 new patients, which is horrible. You want your receptionist to live in the 70 to 80% range of conversion. That's where you want them to live.
How do you know if they're doing a good job? How do you know whether it's the postcard or the marketing or your receptionist? You have to have a few controls in place, or you're never going to know, and it's all going to be opinion. If you know me, you know I have a pet peeve about this. If I ask somebody how this is working, and they say, "Oh, lots of people think it's great," or "Tons of people are responding," tons and lots are not numbers. Those aren't statistics. It doesn't mean I'm some cold, brutal number watcher. I just want to know if something's actually effective. So if I do a marketing campaign, I want to know how many people actually responded, and I need to be able to track that somehow.
This is where I'm going to give you a few downloads. I'm actually going to give you three that you can download to use in your practice. The first is a call log. This is where any new patient call coming in is tracked: their name, their number, and where they responded from. That's super critical. Let's say you're using three variations of the same postcard. You want to give each postcard a little code that the patient can tell whoever's answering the phone, or at least give you some data. The postcard's purple, or the postcard's pink, or the postcard has a picture of a lady on the front, something so that it has a unique identifier. That way you can tell whether it's actually working. The call log has to be kept. It is non-optional. Otherwise you cannot track whether your marketing is working. That's the first thing. And don't depend on phone numbers alone. Even if your postcard has a unique phone number, are you going to sit there and listen to each call to see if it was actually a new patient? Someone else could have gotten the phone number somehow. It might be a patient of record who responded to it last time. There are going to be all kinds of excuses why it can't be kept, and none of them are valid. It has to be kept. It's part of the job. Number one, non-negotiable.
The second thing is that your receptionist has to know what to say and how to handle various questions, like when the person asks about insurance or is price shopping. I'm going to give you a download for a new patient scripts ebook, on how to handle incoming calls with the most common types of questions a receptionist gets. You can get it on the episode webpage. It really lays out how to handle different types of inquiries. And, not to overwhelm you with downloads, we also do a free mystery call service. I'll put a link to that as well, where we'll call your office and grade your receptionist for you.
Keep in mind that if they're not converting well, it's not necessarily that your receptionist is bad. They may just not have a really good idea of what they're supposed to be doing. They may think they're the office bouncer or something like that, or they just don't know exactly how to achieve the objective. It's not due to lack of willingness, it's due to lack of knowledge, due to lack of training. So I'll give you those downloads on the episode webpage. You could also do some training with your receptionist, which I highly recommend. We have a whole course on phone skills on DDS Success, our online platform, and we'll put the link to that as well. That's my shameless plug of the episode, folks, but you really want to invest some time and effort into your receptionist, whoever's talking to these patients. A little bit of training, which really costs you nothing but time, can have a huge impact on your business. It's hard to fathom how big the impact could be. For example, going back to our postcard example, you got 25 responses, and your receptionist is only converting about five of those. You do some training, and now they're converting 15. That's 10 extra new patients a month. In first-year revenue alone, that's an additional $15,000. Multiply that by every month, and that's $180,000 a year just from doing a little bit of training. Then you want to make sure your training's sticking, so you probably have some type of service you use to record phone calls, listen to those calls, see how they're doing, and train them. It can make a huge impact on your business, because I want that 70 to 80% conversion rate.
Those are the issues with direct mail. Those are the pros and cons, and whether you should do it or not. My suggestion is that if you're going to do it, do it right. Otherwise it's just going to be a waste of time and effort. It can definitely be a nice add to your practice, especially if you're doing other kinds of marketing, which will actually lower the cost for you in the long run.
One last thing I want to bring up, because this is something people don't think about. You're marketing for new patients, and let's say you get a good amount, say 40 a month, so you're getting almost 500 new patients per year. That's great. But do you do any marketing to your patients of record? You might think, I don't have to market to my patients of record because they're already my patients. That's absolutely not true. I'm not saying they're not your patients, but you absolutely should be marketing to them. Every other business does. If you've bought from stores that still send you marketing catalogs, emails, and so on, you should be doing the same thing with your patients of record. If you want to keep it simple, there are a lot of different things you can do. Number one, if you market to them regularly, it will help increase your retention and help them show up more regularly for their checkups. It will also keep you in their mind for referrals.
If you want to do bare bones basic, you can send out emails and do things on your social media page. But here's what I'd suggest as the irreducible minimum: some type of quarterly newsletter, sent by mail. Snail mail, real mail. You can send an email version too if you want, but very rarely do people, in my experience, read email newsletters. I mean, they sometimes do. You might post it on your blog as well, but send out a snail mail newsletter quarterly. It can be really simple. It doesn't have to be some canned thing you buy from a marketing company. I actually don't like those. I like the ones you make yourself. It could be just a big 11 by 17 piece of paper folded down twice that you mail to your patients of record. It could be a simple, smart article on something dentally related, like how keeping your teeth improves your overall health and quality of life, or something else you find interesting and want to share with your patients. It could be news about the practice: we just got a new hygienist, here's Dr. Smith, our new associate, Jane just had a baby, whatever you want to say about the practice family, so to speak, to your patient family. It could cover any new procedures you're offering, like implants, All-on-4, or sleep apnea. And you might have some type of offer for your patients of record: if you haven't had a cleaning in over a year, come back for a cleaning, or get a discount on bleaching. It's something to keep people active, aware, and in touch.
It's a lot easier today with the internet, but it used to be that if someone moved and had a forwarding order on their mail, it only lasted six months (it still only lasts six months). If I move and I'm your patient and you send me a piece of mail, it'll come back saying I have a forwarding order to my new address, and you should change my address in your system. After six months you would no longer get that. It would just come back as return to sender. Now, with the internet, you can search and find new addresses, so it's a lot easier. But if you're doing a regular newsletter once a quarter, you're going to pick up on moving patients before they have to tell you or before you have to go searching for them online. It's also a good way to keep your mailing list clean. Again, I prefer these homemade to prefab. You can have a designer put it together, and it doesn't have to be amazing. But you should be marketing to your patients of record regularly. It should be consistent: every quarter, this newsletter goes out.
That hits on what I wanted to cover in this episode. If you look at the question, is direct mail marketing dead? Absolutely not. As a matter of fact, I think more people have moved out of the space over the last 10 years, which has created some opportunity if you want to jump back into it. It's useful if you're in the right situation and you do it right. I hope this helps. I put the links to everything I talked about on the episode webpage, and if you have any questions, you can contact us at mgeonline.com or call us at (800) 640-1140. Folks, have a great week, and we will see you at the next episode.