How Do I Test The Effectiveness Of A Direct Marketing Program For My Dental Office?

Using direct marketing to grow your dental practice can be a very smart decision if you want a continuous flow of new patients.

Notice that I said “can be.”

Unless you are measuring and testing the effectiveness of your direct marketing efforts, you really have no way of knowing if your return on investment (ROI) is good, or if you are just throwing money away.

The good news is that direct marketing can be tracked. And without much difficulty.

What is Direct Marketing?

Direct marketing describes the types of promotion that are delivered directly to your audience, rather than going through an advertising middle man. Television, radio, print ads, and billboards—while effective in the right applications—are distributed to a broad, undefined group of people with the hope that your potential new patients are among them. Direct marketing is much more focused on prospective dental patients.

Common Types of Direct Marketing for Dentists

While each dentist must find their own best mix of direct marketing tactics, there are a few strategies that are most commonly used within dental marketing.

Direct Mail

An oldie but goodie, sending postcards and other types of direct mail to targeted mailing lists has been a staple of dental marketing plans for decades. The availability of highly segmented lists makes it easy to reach a targeted patient base on unique demographics.

Direct mail marketing can be one of the more expensive forms of advertising when you factor in the cost of purchasing a list, but Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) is a lower cost option if you are simply looking to distribute your postcard to a more generally targeted neighborhood or area. 

Email Marketing

Email marketing is the evolution of direct mail. Putting your message in your audience’s inbox is a great way to reach them, especially on their phones. A limitation of email, however, is that you can only send your promotional messaging to individuals who have opted-in to your list.

While there are numerous companies out there willing to sell you a custom list of email addresses, cold-sending to them can get you into hot water. Instead, you need to build your own email list through lead generation initiatives.

RELATED: How to Build an Email List for Direct Marketing

Digital Advertising

If you’re wondering how to build email lists, digital advertising is a great way to do just that. Using targeted, paid advertising on social media channels, or Google’s expansive display network and search ads, can help you reach potential patients. Once you have their attention, you can direct them to your dental website or landing page and gather their contact information.

Which Metrics Should You be Tracking?

One of the reasons direct marketing is preferred by dentists and healthcare professionals is because its ROI can be tracked with a good amount of accuracy. That means you can make educated decisions about your marketing budgeting and spend your dollars where they’ll have the greatest impact.

How do you define an effective direct mail campaign? There are actually multiple levels of success in your marketing strategy.

First, how many people were you able to reach? For a postcard, you may only know the number of pieces delivered. But for digital marketing, like emails and online search engine ads, you can track the number and percentage of people who actually viewed your content. Knowing your reach helps you determine if you are using the right channel to reach your audience, and if your targeting is on the mark.

Next, you’ll want to know how many people took an action related to your message. For dentistry, that would most likely be visiting your website or calling the office to schedule a check-up. Both can be easily tracked if you have the proper website and call tracking analytics software set up. Measuring these actions will help you understand if your messaging is connecting with people and giving them enough reason to consider what you are offering.

The final, and arguably most important, tracking metric is the number of actual conversions your direct marketing produced. Appointments scheduled, items downloaded, and online forms completed are all common metrics for this final stage. If your numbers drop off drastically at this stage, you’ll need to look at your conversion strategies. The necessary fix could be anything from redesigning an online form to training your front desk on phone skills.

Following Direct Marketing Throughout Your New Patient Funnel

The sometimes challenging part of tracking a specific direct marketing campaign is following it all the way through the marketing funnel, and keeping its results separate from other marketing efforts that may be running simultaneously. Clouded data will prevent you from making accurate conclusions about effectiveness, since you won’t be one hundred percent certain as to where your leads came from, or what influenced them to convert.

For digital marketing, it’s actually pretty easy. The data can be clearly seen in the analytics reports generated by your digital advertising platform, website analytics software, and call tracking software. 

Your offline direct mail campaigns follow much of the same tracking methods as fully digital campaigns once the users reach your landing pages or phone lines. Just keep in mind that you may need to use unique URL addresses for your landing pages or dedicated telephone numbers related to your campaign so your funnel traffic can be clearly traced. Scannable QR codes are also an effective way of getting your offline recipients into the digital funnel seamlessly.

Get Started Testing The Effectiveness Of Your Direct Marketing

For you dentists who like to keep tabs on things yourself, even if you are not familiar with the analytics detailed above, a simple spreadsheet can be enough to give you an idea of what is or isn’t working.

On the other hand, if you’re working with an experienced dental marketing agency, they are almost certainly tracking and testing the results of your direct marketing already. If you don’t know how well your campaigns are performing, which ones are working best, or which ones are the most cost-effective, don’t be afraid to ask them to supply you with transparent reporting.

Your marketer should also be suggesting changes to improve your ROI based on what they’ve seen. If they’re not, I hate to say it, but it may not just be your direct marketing that’s underperforming.