Newsletters are a fantastic tool that can offer mutual benefits for your practice and your patients, but do you use them to their full potential – if at all?
Here are some simple dos and don’ts for putting an engaging newsletter together for your patients with a focus on the content needed to boost treatment uptake.
1. What makes your patients tick?
When starting on a newsletter, the most important consideration is to remember who you’re writing it for and what they want to hear. It’s easy to write about new equipment at the practice, but how will your new CEREC machine benefit your patients specifically? You’ve got a new hygienist service available that you want to promote – how will this service improve a patient’s dental health?
These are the questions you need to be asking yourself when building your content.
DON’T
- Use medical jargon – keep your content on par with your audience’s knowledge of the dental industry
- Create robotic articles – keep your content fun and focused and try to reflect the personality of the practice. Cut down the waffle!
2. Let’s get personal
Personalised content can be the difference between an engaging tool and a faceless document, easily dismissed by your intended target audience. If you are looking to promote a particular
treatment, why not consider introducing the team member involved in carrying it out? Putting a friendly face to a name will help you engage more and will help with nervous patients.
DO:
- Use candid, but high-quality photos of the team – blurry, or poorly lit images of your staff are not a good reflection of the quality of service you offer!
- Use case studies from members of your practice – a great way of promoting treatments without sounding too ‘salesy’. Ensure your case studies are focused on how the treatment benefited that patient’s quality of life post treatment.
3. Are you making the headlines?
Headlines are a key engagement component when writing content
for your newsletter. Be honest with yourself – are your headlines a little bit unimaginative? Ideally, you need to be enticing your patients in to each article with snappy, concise headlines that
pique your audience’s interest.
DO:
Use techniques such as:
- Rhetorical questions, i.e. ‘Have you ever felt conscious of a crooked, crowded smile?’
- ‘How tos’, i.e. ‘How to get a whiter brighter smile in just one hour!’ These techniques in particular hold a promise of vital information or a solution that the reader won’t want to miss, with the added
mystery of not spelling it out in the first sentence.
4. We want you!
The last word in any marketing literature you create for your practice is your call to action. Don’t let your hard work and great content go to waste by not including a prompt to get in touch
with you for more information on that specific article/promotion. Signposting the way for your patients to react to your articles is a great way of increasing treatment uptake directly from the newsletter.
DO:
Improve your call to action by including:
- Incentives – Run a small promotion on a particular treatment for a limited time to help patients react with more urgency in order not to miss out.
- Tracking – When asking the patient to get in touch with you, ask them to quote a code from the newsletter so that you can track how many new treatment leads the newsletter has given you.
Fancy setting up your own newsletter for your practice?
The Practice Marketing Team at Practice Plan can support you in a number of ways, including the full design and content creation of a newsletter. You can access practice marketing support by contacting the team on 01691 684151 or email promotions@www.practiceplan.co.uk