Digital Marketing with An Add-On Postcard: Putting a New Spin on Traditional Direct Mail

Are you looking for an innovative Digital Marketing strategy to help take your dental practice to the next level? If so, then you won’t want to miss Chris Pistorius on the No BS Dental Marketing Podcast! Chris is a Digital Marketing expert with years of experience in the industry, and he is here to provide you with up-to-date strategies and insights into what works best for dental practices.

He will be talking about techniques and blending the old but new postcard targeting method that can be used as an effective add-on marketing tool to reach potential new patients. With his knowledge and advice, you can create an effective Digital Marketing plan to get results quickly. 

This episode features Chris Pistorius, your host, who offers valuable insights on topics such as retargeting, personalization, brand recognition, mobile optimization, and more. Chris has over 13 years of experience in the dental industry. With his wealth of knowledge and expertise, he understands how to navigate the ever-changing digital landscape easily. His podcast is designed to provide cutting-edge insight into Digital Marketing for dentists.

If you want to take your Dental Digital Marketing strategy up a notch without getting overwhelmed by complex terms or unnecessary costs, then don’t move the needle; this podcast is for you! You’ll get the information you need from an experienced professional who knows what works best in the dental world. Tune in now and start boosting your Digital Marketing success today!

Other subjects we covered on the show:

  •  Code is used on websites to detect the names and addresses of visiting people.
  •  Chris Pistorius talks specifically about retargeting with direct mail to engage interested leads who have already visited the practice’s website. 
  • Rules can be set for which person should get postcards and when depending on their engagement on the website. 
  • Lastly, to learn more about postcard retargeting, visit the Kickstart Dental Marketing website for a free strategy session.

AND MORE TOPICS COVERED IN THE FULL INTERVIEW!!! You can check that out and subscribe at https://pbp.li/tnobsdmp19.

If you want to know more about Chris Pistorius, you may reach out to him at:

Transcript

Narrator: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Dental Marketing Podcast, a podcast that helps dentists win in the online world of modern day marketing. Each week, we cover the most cutting edge marketing tactics and strategies that are working right now across our client base to drive leads, phone calls, and more new patients for dentists.

Now here’s your host and founder of Kickstart Dental Marketing, Chris Pistorius.

Chris Pistorius: What’s up everyone? This is Chris Pistorius again with the No BS Dental Marketing Podcast. Now on this show, as you probably already know, we talk about straight to the point, no BS tactics, tricks, and strategies to help you grow your dental practice. Now, there’s no fluff here, just great to the point information that you can get and start using today to help you increase your bottom line.

So if you’re a dental practice owner, a manager, a front desk professional or whatever be sure to check it out, [00:01:00] and click the subscribe button so that you can keep up with all the latest tips and tricks that we discuss. Now today I want to talk about something that’s a little new, but it’s a little old.

Okay? So it’s gonna be, this is gonna be a situation where we’re gonna talk about an old traditional outbound media source called direct mail, but we’re gonna put a digital twist on it, and we’re gonna make it super specific, and we’re gonna make it so that it’s a way smarter and more efficient and cost effective way to do direct mail.

Okay, so we’re gonna talk today about retargeting with direct mail and this is an incredibly successful thing for us at Kickstart Dell Marketing, something that we do and we’ve been using and it’s affordable to do. I think it’s something that you can do to really help your bottom line. So let’s get into it a little bit.

So, When we talk about retargeting typically, we talk about trying to engage in people that are already interested or have been to your website before, or they’ve been to your [00:02:00] Facebook page before or whatever. We know at some point they’ve engaged with you and looked at your website about you know, maybe inquiring about being a new patient, right?

Well, these are high value targets. Now the problem is that 98% of the time. When a new potential new patient goes to your website, they don’t take action the first time that they’re actually on the site. They’ll leave and get distracted. They’ll put it off. Everybody likes to put off a dental appointment, right?

But you know, they get distracted. They move on and you know, sometimes they forget about you and sometimes they’ll circle back. You know, sometimes they wanna check out your reviews and what other people say about you. Sometimes they’ll just check out your competition. So in an ideal world, we’ve gotta make sure that if we spend the money marketing wise, to get somebody to find you online and then go to your website. We wanna do everything we can to possibly get them to go ahead and schedule that appointment right?

So that’s what we talk about retargeting. Now, you may have heard about retargeting before in a digital aspect where you know, maybe you’ve gone on, I’m sure this has happened to you. You’ve gone on to a hotel’s [00:03:00] website for instance, and you’ve kind of looked at their rates and then you left and maybe went to another, you know, hotel’s website.

And then later in the day you, you’re on Facebook or Instagram or Google or whatever, and all of a sudden an ad pops up from that hotel’s website you on, right? And you’re like, oh, wow, I was just there. Right. Well, that’s retargeting. That’s digital retargeting. And we do that as well for our clients here, and it’s extremely powerful.

But now there’s a way to do retargeting, but with print media, postcard marketing. Okay? And so that’s what I want to get into and essentially it’s a, it’s a medium that, you know, we talk about postcards and how they don’t work. You know, I hear that a lot from dental practices, and you’re right, sometimes they don’t work, sometimes they do work.

It really just depends on a lot of variables, like what kind of list you have, where you’re going after, what it is you’re trying to achieve in the practice, and what kind of patients you’re trying to bring in. Are you receptive to using offers in postcards? Right. There’s a lot of different things and it can get expensive to test and figure out your right path with direct mail.

 Typically I recommend against a lot of direct [00:04:00] mail. But the strategy that I’m gonna talk to you about today with this print retargeting, I think is an incredibly good idea to start kind of tipping your water or tipping your feet into the water with direct mail. All right, so essentially what we’re able to do now is that we can put some code on a website, okay.

On the back end of your website, for instance. And what that code allows us to do is if somebody just goes to your website and there’s looking around 30 to 50% of the time, we’re able to detect without them having to fill anything out. We can detect their name and their mailing address just by them visiting your website 30 to 50% of the time.

Just kind of depends. Okay? Now, what that does for us is that we know somebody went to your website and they’re checking you out and they’re looking at your services, they’re looking at the doctor’s profile, whatever it may be. That’s an interested lead. 

We’ve gotta make sure we’re engaging them. So not only will we do our digital retargeting and you know, everything we can to convert them, but what will happen is the 30 to [00:05:00] 50% where we can get their name and mailing address.

After they leave your website, within two to three days, they get a postcard in the mail from you. We design a postcard for our clients. It’s a six by nine oversized. It’s a little bit more expensive to mail, but it’s worth it because the conversions are better on a bigger kind of six by nine postcard than they are.

But we’ll design it for you. We’ll make it look great. But that prospect that just went and checked out your website will automatically in two to three days, get this postcard in the mail from you. Like, oh wait, I was just on their website. Yeah. I do need to actually schedule an appointment with them and it doesn’t really matter if you put an offer on there or not.

Probably get a little higher conversion if you can use some kind of an offer. I wouldn’t go like Groupon on ’em and give stuff away cause that’s gonna build, that’s not gonna build loyalty for you. But there are some tact ways to do offers and not give away the farm. Right? 

We do this for fee for service practices that they don’t even accept insurance and they don’t want to do offers, and they still have, you know, no problem with it. You’ve just gotta sell the value of the practice versus an offer. [00:06:00] Right? But anyway, the reason why I think that this is so engaging is not only is it relevant or relevant, but it’s targeting somebody that’s already interested in you, first of all, so you’re not just sending out thousands of these things, right?

And hoping that maybe 1% will actually respond to the offer. These are people that are gonna be way more likely to respond and I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a second. I’m gonna show you a couple of examples of what this looks like as well. But what we’ve experienced in the fact the last few years with this digital marketing craze, right, and I’m right in the middle of it. 

We’ve seen more people go from postcard market and not just dental, but all industries to digital, email marketing, retargeting, digitally, you know, all that stuff. And it’s, it’s kind of an interesting thing we’re seeing. We’re seeing less “Junk Mail”, air quotes, junk mail in your mailbox, in the physical mailbox. What that means for me is that’s less competition, now. So many companies have moved out of that physical mailbox to digital that now. I think the physical mailbox [00:07:00] could be a great opportunity for us as. So there’s less people competing for that, for that mailbox and those eyeballs, right? And then you put in the fact that this person’s already interested in you and then they just got a reminder from you that makes it even more powerful.

So those 98% of people that don’t take action the first time they go to your website and actually schedule an appointment, This along with other strategies, could really be a big difference maker for you and so this is how we set up a lot of our clients that are interested in doing something like this.

But what I wanna do is I wanna share my screen here. And I want to actually show you what some of this stuff looks like. So what we’re looking at here is a demo website that we’ve set up. This isn’t a real practice, but it’s a just a demo website that shows a lot of characteristics about a, not a typical, but a good looking dental website.

But anyway, we put code on the back of your website. So if I just go to this site, right, and I’m just browsing through it 30 to 50% of the time. I’m gonna know your [00:08:00] name and where you live. Okay? And then we’re gonna go into our portal here. Okay? Now this is set up for my website and this is just a demo.

I haven’t sent any cards from this account, but I didn’t want to use a client account for this. But essentially what this shows us is day by day, right? I think I did this for the last month or so, how many visitors came to the site, and then how many of those were addressable, meaning how many of those could we actually get the name and address from?

So like Tuesday, yesterday, the 14th, I had 74 visitors to my site, 16 of them, I can send a postcard to, right? And it goes on and on. So like for instance here on the seventh, 110, I could do 47 of them, so around 45% or so, right? So it breaks it down by how many of these cards are going out per day, okay?

Now what’s interesting about this is that we set these up so that it’s not just, you know, every person that comes to the site that we can get an address for, we don’t just [00:09:00] automatically send a card. What we do, is that we set up rules so that, for instance, my rules set up on my website is that they have to go to more than one page on my website before we’ll actually send them a card.

Okay. And what that does is it, it helps me prove engagement, right? If somebody accidentally goes to my site and then leaves really quick, they may or may not be interested in our marketing services, right? But if they go to our website and then they go to another page on my website, that means they’re, it’s a more realistic probability that that’s actually somebody that is interested in our services.

And that’s somebody I want to talk to, and that’s somebody I wanna send a card to, Right? So we can set that same thing up for our clients. There’s a lot of other rules and ways that we can do it as well. Like for instance, how much time they spend on the website. Right? Or what specific pages they go to. There’s a lot of different things that we can do.

We can center it around, you know, just dental implants or just specific services that they get cards, but this is a really affordable way to do direct mail. Right? I think hopefully you see that, where we’re not sending out [00:10:00] thousand and since it’s costing us thousands of dollars, typically how we do it and how we charge our clients is that, you know, we charge them to design the piece sometimes get their approval for it.

And then it’s just, how many cards went out, you know, X amount of cents or a dollar or whatever it may be. Everyone’s a little different. But if you have questions about pricing or how specifically this could work for you, my shameless plug, just go to my website kickstart dental.com.

Hit the free strategy session button and you’ll talk with me personally. And we can go through this and I can really get into more details for you.

Narrator: Are you looking to grow your practice but are a little unclear on what the best way is? Let us help you out. We have over 13 years of experience in helping practices just like yours, increase new patient growth. Just go to kickstartdental.com and sign up for a free strategy session where we will give you some great insights on how to take your practice to the next level.

Chris Pistorius: But I want, I do wanna show you over here on the right, it’ll also show you [00:11:00] what pages that these people went to, right? So, like, services here, I had six people, you know these are my top pages, essentially.

Where they came from and where they were addressable. So it shows you a lot of good details. You can also look at, at a monthly. So you can see what all the visits look like on pages for the month. So like my top page is services, right? 

So that’s a good thing. I mean, these are probably dentists or you know, whatever, orthodontists, you know, whoever they’re actually interested in what we’re doing. Okay? Now there’s another one here that I don’t, this is a demo account, so I haven’t sent any cards from this one, but this will actually show you what cards were mailed. 

Now the information, like the name and the address of the person is confidential, so we can’t give that out that stays hidden, but it will show how many cards were mailed.

It’ll show you a description of it and it can even show you like where they were mailed. So that you can make sure that we’re not sending these off to another state or somebody that there’s no way they’re gonna be interested in your local services [00:12:00] within your specific city. So it gives us a good idea in making sure that stuff’s getting tracked where it needs to go. Okay?

So that’s a pretty comprehensive plan, it shows you what’s going on. It’s affordable. It’s just going one piece at a time. There’s not like a huge setup fee and you know, you have to spend thousands of dollars. This can be a really good add-on service, right? 

If you’re already doing some marketing somewhere, this would be a a perfect add-on just to help with those conversions long term.

Now an example kind of card here, I think let me see if I can find it. This isn’t a great example, but this is more like an appointment reminder, but we like to use postcards that, that have this kind of theme, kind of like a don’t forget, because remember, these aren’t just blind people that don’t know who you are.

These people have already been to your website, right? We want to send them something here that has your name on it, your logo on it reminds them that they were on your website. Right? To get to reengage with you. And then we’ll usually put a, a call tracking phone number on this, like a local phone number so we can track how many people called directly from [00:13:00] this.

And we can even put a special website URL on it. So if they go to your website from this it’ll have a tracking code on it so we know that it came from this as well. So a couple great ways to be able to really determine whether it’s working or not. Then also if you use offers at all, we can just use that particular offer for this card. And that’s another great way to track it. Then if we have all three of those things, we can hone in and improve pretty well on, you know, what’s working and what’s not. So that’s really it. That’s, that’s the big idea. It works great. We’ve used it here in our agency. Again, this isn’t something that you would just do by itself and expect, you know, massive results, but this added and blended with what you might be doing already.

Whether it’s SEO or paid ads on Google or whatever it may be, this could be a great little add-on service to help those conversions out. So again, if you have questions on this, you don’t have to sign up with us or anything just let me know. 

Go to our website, kickstartdental.com

Hit the schedule a strategy session button that’s with me directly.

[00:14:00] And I’ll take you through it A to Z absolutely for free. Just let me know. I hope this has been helpful. I hope you take action with this stuff. And if you’ve heard my podcast before, you know that really the biggest thing about any of this is taking action. Right? Just go do it. Don’t think about it, sit around cuz your competition’s going to, and you know, you don’t want to get involved in ostrich marketing where it’s kind of bury your head in the sand and just hope for the best.

Right? These are things and ideas that are working now in your industry that can really make a difference for you in, in your bottom line. So anyway, I’m gonna stop there. Again, if you have questions, please let me know. But thanks so much for listening in today. You know, and if you like today’s episode, please hit that subscribe button because we release new episodes like this every week to help busy professionals like you to get the most outta your dental marketing money and strategy.

So thanks again and we’ll see you soon on the next episode. 

Narrator: Thanks for joining us this week on the Dental Marketing Podcast. Make sure to visit our website, www.kickstartdental.com/podcast, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes, [00:15:00] Spotify, or via RSS so you’ll never miss a show. While you’re at it, if you found value in the show, we’d appreciate a rating on iTunes or if you’d simply tell a friend about the show.

That would help us out too. If you are ready to grow your practice, then you might want to schedule a free strategy session with us.

Just go to kickstartdental.com and click the free strategy session button and give us 15 minutes of your time to change your practice forever.

Be sure to tune in next week for our next episode and thanks for listening to The Dental Marketing Podcast by Kickstart Dental Marketing, where dentists go to win online.

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