How to Measure Dental Office Direct Mail Effectiveness

Workforce Dental Staffing recently discussed how direct mail may be the most effective marketing system for dental offices because it has the highest response rate of any campaign type. However, understanding how effective it is can be hard without existing knowledge of how to promote oneself. So, how should you collect and analyze dental office mailing campaign results to ensure you get the most out of them?

Below, we explain what it means to track everything you send out and the response it gets. Use our guide to calculate your ROI, so that you can continue investing wisely and learn what it would look like if you continued to scale your marketing up. Transform your efforts into appointments with our direct mail success tips and discover what dental office marketing with Taradel looks like today.

Understand Your Goals and Align Them with Patient Growth

After you have set goals for how fast you want to grow, turn that into a solid monthly booking target. Having this in hand means that the whole clinic is on the same page about the finish line and the drive to achieve it. 

Then, figure out how much you can spend for each new patient you make by working with someone like Taradel to estimate your budget, considering things like the:

• Promotion design
• Lead costs
• Printing
• Postage

You can use this moving forward to assess your ROI and whether specific strategies are matching your ongoing goal. Set a maximum cost per patient that makes sense for your practice's revenue, so you know you are not overspending for specific potential patients.

Over time, pausing whole low-performing zones or demographics may also benefit you unless you want to test a hypothesis in that region. Alternatively, if people live closer to your offices, the cost of acquiring them and the faster income resulting from their appointments could lead to timely ROI benefits.

Capture Response Data Seamlessly

When you send out mail, use unique phone numbers or webpage URLs, usually resulting from QR codes for easier access, to allow you to see which campaign individuals came from. Understanding this helps you to learn which aspects of your efforts are more successful, helping you pivot in those directions if they lead to clearer returns.

Then, whenever someone calls or signs up on the website, you can feed that into your patient database, ensuring that you retain the fact that they are likely to contact you if you send them future mail.

If you choose to use promotion codes, remind receptionists to ask for them when patients book. These will give you more precise and more up-to-date campaign data than the patient bringing it in later. You can feed all of this data into a dashboard daily to see which of your campaign efforts are driving signup, and with which you may need a follow-up.

Merge Different Marketing Touchpoints in Your System

No matter where patients decide to contact you from, link your call-tracking and web form data. You can then use this to see your potential patients' whole journey, from receiving your mailer to making and coming to an appointment.

Set up an automated follow-up system to detect if someone signs up to your site or enters an email address but doesn't convert, such as by booking an appointment. You can then send them a reminder in an hour, a day, or later, depending on your needs, to help them consider your dental office before other options.

Evaluate Campaign Success Precisely

Make sure to track your mail campaign effectiveness carefully, including:

• Response rates
• Conversion rates
• Offers accepted
• Location heat maps

Chart how quickly people respond after you send out the mail drop to determine the best timing for sending out future mailshots, or follow-up and reminder calls. Depending on demographics, these can often have varied results, as people respond to them differently based on whether they are at home when the mailshot appears. So, make sure to compare the results with other data you collect.

Analyze Dental Office Mailing Campaign Results and Trends

Many factors may influence how often and how quickly people respond to your mail drops. As such, plot response and conversion rates as a part of a dental marketing analysis to spot upward or downward trends that take into account:

• Back-to-school times
• National holidays
• Seasonal impact
• Age segmentation
• Distance to your clinic
• Age of customer
• Length of time a customer has been signed up at your dental office
• Length of time since the customer has last used your services
• The amount the customer has previously spent at your dental office
• Frequency of visits to your office
• Whether they received multi-channel marketing

What you can analyze is limited only by the data you bring in. So, ensure you have as much as possible to get the most out of it.

Optimize Continuously for Better Results

Make sure to refresh your mailing list regularly,roughly once every three months unless you have data that says it needs to be done faster. Doing this will remove outdated addresses and include new individuals who have moved to your area. 

You should then perform A/B tests, adjusting one aspect of your mailshots, receptionist script, or landing page, to see if one brings in more conversions. Then, keep the version that performs better, iterating continually on it.

Lastly, create targeted lists for specific services, such as orthodontics or children's dental services. You can then focus the mailer on these offers, making them feel more personal and more likely to comment on a specific customer pain point you can solve if they contact you.

Create a Winning Mailer with Taradel

With the above marketing strategy tips, you know your next steps to analyze dental office mailing campaign results. Whether you are setting your original goals or iterating on your efforts, you know what you will need to do next. 

If you don't have time to take all these steps or need help getting started, Taradel can assist you. Our expert marketing team knows exactly what you need to do to give yourself the best chance of a higher ROI, now and in the future. So, plan your campaign with us today and get customers like never before.