One of THE Most Critical Parts of Direct Mail
The classic components for effective direct mail campaigns fall into three buckets: creative, offer, and LIST.
As a dental entrepreneur engaged in local marketing, having a precisely targeted list is essential – essential to results and essential for effective cost management. No one wants to waste marketing dollars mailing to an area with patients who are not likely to respond!
You might have a good idea of which neighborhoods surrounding your practice you’d like to target, build awareness with, and attract more new patients from, but are those the households primed to respond? Do you have a following there? Does your marketing content resonate with the targeted area demographic and buying preferences?
You have access to powerful insights that will enable you to truly define your core market, niche areas for testing, and areas to avoid altogether – all while building a targeted list that is second to none. At Patient NEWS®, we go to extreme lengths to precisely select households for list development. We use the information you need to help you understand your immediate market and how to best position your practice to maximize new patient flow.
Instead of running zigzags, here’s what we do.
- Starting with your current market share, our technology geo-plots where your existing patients live in proximity to the practice and reveals where new patients are coming from. This allows us to identify quality potential new patients based on existing patient spend to ensure your list includes like-audiences that are primed to respond.
Using powerful geographic information software (GIS), we can see exactly where your ideal, high-value patients reside before launching a targeted campaign. Each household can be broken down into spending categories, which helps us clearly identify your core, potential, and niche clusters. These are your practice hot spots.
- Drive time mapping connected with your active patient market share clearly shows how far your core market will travel to visit your office. This insightful data informs your marketing decisions, benefits your ROI, and prevents unnecessary targeting and spending on niche areas that are clearly outside of your draw area and would only be targeted with unlimited testing budgets.
- Market share between you and other dentists. Using the comprehensive data gleaned from the steps above, we now understand where your ideal patients are located, which high-value pockets to target, and the amount of time potential patients are willing to drive to see you. Using competitor mapping, we can identify which households will have a clearer path to your practice and which areas are saturated with more alternative dental choices.
Keep in mind that practices with a ratio of one dentist per 600 families are generally in a competitive market, which makes identifying open pockets vital. With our targeted process and strategic planning, you can pounce on and secure those markets to continually attract a steady stream of valuable new patients.
- Esri market segmentation. Factoring in traditional psychographic, behavioral, geographic market segmentations, and more, the next step is to look at your area’s Tapestry Segmentation. Using Esri, the most powerful mapping and spatial analytics technology available, we pull insights on demographic and buying characteristics to target ideal new patients more efficiently. These tapestries uncover household characteristics (including age, education, home ownership, willingness to buy specific products and services, and overall purchasing power), as well as insights on how each audience prefers to receive information.
With 67 unique tapestries within 14 life modes, we can identify the most relevant-to-your-area buyer personas and outline the information we can utilize from our analysis, which helps us create customized messaging that will resonate with your target market.
- Patient demographic breakdown. Practice ZEBRA® tracks your active and new patients by generation. This allows you to see the demographic mix for active patients and new patient flow, but it also tracks the production contributed by each generational group. This informs the selection of the targeted households, as well as the messaging that will be included in marketing campaigns. You might love your GenX patients, who contribute 40% to overall production and have a higher annual value, but current marketing is attracting Millennials, who have a lower average annual value. We need this data to create a great marketing campaign.
- With solutions for every phase of the patient journey, our Patient NEWS experts provide core campaigns, including websites, SEO, PPC, and targeted direct mail newsletters that help our clients stand out and grow! By positioning your practice or DSO as the dental authority in your area, we’ll help enhance your brand reputation, attract more high-quality new patients, gain insights into your production and ROI, identify areas of opportunity, help your team bolster their conversion numbers, provide continuous KPI analysis to improve results, and so much more!
- And note that these finely crafted and analyzed lists – with household names for variable data that are personalized to each household – are updated and re-ordered every month for the most accurate data for our clients’ targeted neighborhood newsletter mailings.
Schedule a free consultation with us today to learn more about how our all-inclusive direct mail programs – with precisely targeted list development – can help you attract and secure more ideal new patients!