DentaltownUK April 2017 - 75

The action required by every visitor should
be clear, call us today, email today etc.
It's so simple to include calls to action, but
they so often get missed.

Engagement

To get the best engagement on your
website to effect the highest conversion rate
we have to understand the person's motivation
when they land on your site, this is typically
broken down into the following:
1. People that have identified a problem
(crooked teeth, missing teeth, unhealthy
mouth, unhappy with their smile etc) and
are in the process of searching for
information, either looking for various
treatment options or looking for different
service providers.
2. People that have been through the
information searching stage and are ready
to book an appointment but are still
wavering and therefore need an incentive
3. People that have been through the
information searching stage and are
actively ready to go.
Once we understand that not everyone
that visit our website is ready to immediately
request an appointment we can begin looking
to create engagement mechanisms for each of
these people.

People searching for information

E-mail campaigns

These people should be provided with a
free download in exchange for a name and
e-mail address. We can then help them
understand how to solve their dental problem
in a PDF download and a series of automated
follow-up e-mails. Every e-mail that we sent
we should gently drive patients towards
requesting an appointment.
People wavering about requesting an
appointment
There should be some form of incentive or
gentle push on the website to encourage
patients to take action, free consultations
(within limits) or refunds of initial assessment
can work extremely well at reducing risk and
encouraging patients to take action.

By using the above engagement
mechanisms we can drop people into
automated e-mail campaign:
1. They download information about specific
problem, they are then sent a series of
gentle e-mail messages informing them
about their particular problem and
directing them to request an appointment.
2. They request an appointment, once they
come to the practice they are then led into
a patient e-mail list.
3. Once they become a patient at the practice
and are on the patient e-mail list they are
gently asked to leave a review for the
practice.

People actively ready to go

As well as being excellent at driving traffic
to the website (traffic optimisation) social
media can also be used for conversion
optimisation by lowering risk and increasing
trust.
Social media posts should hand out useful,
free and relevant dental health advice which
demonstrates that you genuinely care about

There should be a request an appointment
facility on the website, this does not
necessarily need to feed into your practice
management software but it should give the
patient the ability to request an appointment
at the ideal day and time, you can then get
back to them with exact details.

Social media

the local people. When this is included
among testimonials and reviews by happy
patients, the social media stream becomes an
excellent mechanism to lower risk and
increase trust; key factors in a successful
marketing campaign for service industries
such as dentistry.

Summary

When all of the mentioned mechanisms
are put into place, one ends up with a robust
online marketing machine which works
without sleeping, continuously attracting
traffic to the website, engaging with that
traffic and then feeding the traffic back into
the website again and on to social media.
Everything works together as one cohesive
unit in order to help the local people with
their dental health and build your dental
practice.
When deciding who should be helping you
with your online marketing it's important to
ensure that the service provider works in all
of the areas mentioned otherwise you can
easily end up with a fragmented and
ineffective online marketing campaign. n
dentaltownuk.com \\ APRIL 2017

75
http://www.dentaltownuk.com
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of DentaltownUK April 2017
