By Lucy McCarthy, Marketer at Hive Business.

Sending an email campaign or newsletter is an excellent tool for keeping your patients up to date with the latest news from the practice and helps reactivate stale leads.

I discovered just the other day that my colleague receives an e-newsletter from their child’s primary as well as SMS reminders. Gone are the days of relying on your child to pass on the messages or handing over a hard copy of a newsletter, now you never need to miss another non-uniform day or bake sale, you can get all the information you need straight to your inbox.

If you’re considering using a regular email newsletter for your dental practice, you first need to consider why you’re sending it and what you’re trying to achieve. If you’re at that stage you need to read this to help you plan your campaign.

If you’ve planned out your campaign and know what you’re looking to achieve, I have some top tips for putting together your first campaign to ensure you’re getting the most from this marketing channel:

Find a reputable platform

We use MailChimp to send campaigns and updates to our subscribers. It is a simple to use platform that enables you to communicate your message to your subscribers.

You can set it up for free (up to 2,000 subscribers) and send 12,000 emails per month. It has some restrictions but as far as free accounts go, it’s a great place to start.

Make sure you are compliant

You have to make it clear what you will do with your patient’s information when you’re collecting their personal details and your contacts must give consent to receive marketing communication from you. Respect their wishes if they tick the box that states they don’t want to hear from you via email; you’ll quickly ruin your reputation and trust with your patients if you send them unwanted emails!

Within the email, it is essential that you allow your subscribers to unsubscribe if they want to. You’ll need to include your address and details of how the subscribers joined the list; it’s also good practice to include your GDC number. Most email platforms ensure you do all of this when you set up your account. MailChimp has plenty of guidance in their FAQs to ensure you’re compliant.

Be consistent

You won’t be able to learn very much from campaigns with no consistency. Decide on a schedule and stick to it. It is pointless sending out sporadic emails at different times.

Be realistic, it’s likely there are lots of other tasks you’re facing day to day. I recommend starting with a quarterly or bi-monthly update and then when you have analysed the results you could up it to a monthly update, but only if you have engaging content to share with your patients.

Include excellent content

The best thing to do is to gather some newsletters you’ve received that you think work well. It is likely that they don’t have masses of information on there as most people want relevant information and fast.

The ideal ratio for blogs and educational content compared with more informal content should be around 90:10. There also has to be a good balance between educational and promotional content.

There is nothing like putting a face to your dental practice to encourage people to get in touch. This medium is perfect for building your brand and increasing your patient retention levels. If your readers are bombarded with content about dental treatments they will likely disengage – mix it up and monitor it so you can get the balance right between dental content you want them to read and information about your team, the practice and offers.

Add engaging links

If you have a blog or an article you’d like to share, add the content to your website and include links to it within the email.

This is a great way to understand what your database enjoys reading and it means that you can then segment your list to target them, for example, you could create a campaign for “everyone who clicked on the dental implants link”.

Test your email

There is nothing more frustrating than sending out an email campaign for someone to forward it back to you highlighting a typo – it happens but is easily avoided if you have a proofing process.

Likewise, if you are sending out a link for an offer and the following month you don’t remove the link – you may have a mob of unhappy patients on the phone trying to claim the offer that is no longer valid… if this happens to you, you can either honour the offer or send out another email to your database to correct them (if you do this, I suggest you replace the offer with something else!)

Before you rush to send your campaign, make sure you proof it and test the links. MailChimp allows you to send out a test email so you can send it to your inbox (and a few other people who are happy to check it for you) so you can make sure everything is ready to send to your database to avoid any embarrassing mistakes!

Of course, all marketing activity needs to be part of a wider strategy but if you would like to discuss how this tactic could work for your practice please get in touch 01872 300232 or email us at hello@hivebusiness.co.uk.