Dental postcards are an effective way to promote your dental practice to a targeted geographic area and/or demographic of patient you would like to reach. It can be an excellent way to cost effectively increase new patient activations.
If you are current incorporating a postcard into your offline marketing, it pays to do a vendor review to find out if you can save money. Red Star Marketing is happy to assess your current plan to see if we can create a more effective mail program.
We do our best to make your dental postcards as simple as possible. Below are the 5 easy steps to our process:
1. Commit
Decide if you want to run a mailer: for greatest success, commit to sticking with it until you can reach dental prospects 5 – 8 times over an 18 month - two year period of time
2. Dental Mailer Setup
Complete all paper work to set up your account and billing information:
- Participation agreement
- Finance credit application: pre-approval to use merchant services
3. Postcard Design
It is important to design your dental postcards in a way that quickly expresses your offer, while making it easy to recognize the branding of your office. Here are a few items to make sure you include:
- Sit down with rep or designer and layout dental postcard
- Be aware of space deadline and creative deadline as well as final proof deadlines
- Objective of postcard: Introduction? Announcement? Use in a strong headline
- Come up with an offer or two – “less is best”
- Images: Picture of doctor, team or outside photo of dental practice works well
- Use logo and colors to match current branding
- Include housekeeping: Practice name, phone, address, hours, finance options and web address
- Make proof corrections and reproof, including final approval sign off
4. Select Mailer Routes
Who are you going to send your postcard to? We know that most patients come from a 3-mile radius of your office; however, by carefully selecting zip codes and/or mail routes, you will be able to better target the patients you want to attract.
Select geographical areas/routes to mail (example: Zip Code 66220) or demographic specifications to target (example: annual household incomes of $50K (HHI))
5. Follow-up
Notify everyone in the practice about the dental postcards or mailer program:
You want to make sure your team isn't caught off guard. Share your marketing channels with them to educate them on how you are working to attract new patients. This will empower them to communicate effectively with their patients on your behalf.
- Dental postcard mail date and place card example or final proof at reception area
- What offer is running and how to respond to calls, including disclaimers, expiration date, etc
- Track calls with a call tracking number or by using a call tracking form at each reception area
Related Article: The Power of Dental Postcards
