How to create a successful e-newsletter

Step one: have a goal

So you’ve decided to create an e-newsletter for your leads and patients – great! But what’s the point?

In order to make the time and effort of creating and maintaining an e-newsletter worthwhile, you need to have a plan – and that plan needs to have a clear and achievable goal.

So before you put pen to paper and start writing your newsletters, take a moment to think about what you what to achieve with them; are you looking to create a connection with your patients and your leads; promote the practice brand and offerings; or increase your treatment uptake rate by sending out regular offers and treatment promotions?

Step two: plan your content

Once you’ve solidified the point of the newsletter, it’s time to determine what the content you’ll populate the newsletters with.

If you’re going for a more general goal, to improve your relationship with patients and leads, then general advice is to make content 90% educational and 10% promotional. With that in mind, think about creating short ‘content blocks’ that hit regular topics or themes such as:

• Practice and treatment news
• Team updates
• Events, dates to remember, offers
• Tips, how-to’s, and tutorials
• Positive reviews and testimonials.

Step three: craft your subject lines carefully

While technically the ‘Subject Line’ is part of the newsletter content, it deserves a special mention.

An email’s subject line can make or break that email’s open rate. 35% open emails based on the subject line only, while 69% report an email as spam based on the content of the subject line.

So don’t just pick a subject line like “Dental Practice Monthly Newsletter” – give it a bit of jazz; make it snappy; make it enticing.

It can also pay off to add personalisation to the Subject Line, as this has been shown to increase open rates. You should have at least the first name for any newsletter subscriber, so take advantage of your merge tags and reference the recipient’s name in the subject line.

Step four: think about design

Research shows that the average time spent reading a newsletter is just 51 seconds. In order to hold on to that short attention span, the email needs to look appealing and eye-catching.

Try to keep content short and easily scannable – avoid the use of single, lengthy paragraphs and instead intersperse your email with content blocks and brief blurbs.

The human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text, so using images can be a great way to break up a big piece of text or copy. If you’ve got pictures of the practice, the team, your recent complex treatment before and after pictures – use them! Just avoid too many stock images of smiling models or actors – especially if your goal is relationship building.

Step five: be consistent with your sending

As with all marketing, consistency is key to success – if you’re promising a regular, weekly or monthly newsletter, then make sure you commit to that schedule and send the newsletter on a regular basis.

From a compliance perspective, you also want to make sure that it’s nice and easy for a recipient to unsubscribe from the e-newsletter – yes, it’s hard to accept that someone isn’t loving your content, but it’s essential for your brand, reputation, and compliance with GDPR to make that available. Most deployment services will automatically add this in.

How can DenGro help?

Here at DenGro, we specialise in how to communicate with your leads – and your patients. If you’re inspired to create an e-newsletter and need a sounding board for your ideas and plans, just give us a shout by emailing support@dengro.com or open a chat window in the bottom right-hand corner.