Marketing Automation Lifecycle Marketing for Dental Suppliers
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by Dr Aalok Y Shukla Founder Click.Convert.Sell
Objectives: 1. Understand Lifecycle marketing. 2. Understand an integrated marketing & sales approach. 3. Understand the different customer lifecycles in your business.
Why is this important? Marketing has changed. Competition has increased. People take longer to make decisions.
In this guide I explain lifecycle marketing and marketing automation and how it applies to getting new dentists as customers and increasing the customer lifetime spend with your company.
What is lifecycle marketing?
Begin with the end in mind. What does the ideal customer do?
Why Lifecycle Marketing? It is getting harder and harder to attract new customers. Dentists are bombarded with advertisements from magazines, websites and trade shows. There is decreased attendance at trade shows and increased costs so it costs more and more to get less and less customers. In this changing terrain there needs to be a new approach to grow your business. Lifecycle marketing is all about providing the maximum possible value for your customer and in return you get the maximal possible spend from the customer so you both win. By getting your existing customers to spend more with you and by attracting more like minded dentist customers you can grow your business effectively - after all there are only 3 profit levers to grow a business
3 Profit Levers: 1. Get more customers. 2. Get your existing customers to purchase more items of higher value. 3. Get your existing customers to purchase more frequently. That’s it. With Lifecycle Marketing and marketing automation you have the power to increase all 3 profit levers.
Current Scenario In your database you have 4 lists: 1. Dentists who have enquired some time ago at a conference / stand but have never purchased and aren’t being followed up. (Prospects) 2. Dentists who have bought from you in the past but not bought anything for more than 6months from you. (Inactive customers) 3. Dentists who purchase from you regularly and could be a good candidate for premium products / services. (Active Customers) 4. Dentists that buy from you frequently and purchase high value items - (Premium Customers) Your opportunity to grow your business exists in your company’s ability to nurture dentists from group 1 all the way into group 4. There should be a systematic automated process that ensures that no dentist falls through the cracks and is not contacted or followed up. The systematic process is called a lifecycle marketing approach. The automated process is controlled by marketing automation systems such as infusionsoft.
Introducing Marketing Automation.
Sending the right message to the right person at the right time.
Your Hidden Opportunities EVERYDAY you have customers dropping down a group. This means everyday customers are getting less engaged with your company, Group 4 members will be attracted by new companies, active customers will become inactive and prospects that enquired with you will purchase elsewhere. If you don’t have a systematic strategy to get keep & nurture customers then you basically have a default process for losing customers that is at the mercy of your competitors marketing strategies. By organising your database into the 4 lists, and then implementing a process to systematically add value to each group you can gain new customers and increase customer lifetime spend with you thus increasing profits.
Why isn’t this being done already? I’m too busy. I don’t have time. Who should I call? Who should I start with? When do I contact them next? What are they interested in? What can I speak to them first about? All these excuses from your team are valid as they feel they are overstretched , so you need an automated guided process that helps the sales reps know who to contact when and about what.
This is marketing automation. Delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.
How does this work? Marketing automation is powered by two things
Lists. Tags. if you understand these two you can make anything happen
List is self evident, it’s a collection of people with a similar status (e.g prospect, customer, high value customer) Tags is where it gets really interesting and powerful, As according to different patient behaviours e.g a dentist clicks a specific link in one of your emails or dentist watched a video of yours on youtube or better still they only watched half of a video - you can send them different messages - such as “i saw you watched the video on X here is a free voucher for X (but only sent to the people who watched the FULL video) and for those that didn’t watch the full video you could send a message “I noticed you didn’t watch the full video for X - maybe you are more interested in Y - here is more info…” All of this means you can then further categorise people according to what they say are interested in, what they actually read more of and request more of, and how engaged they are with you. This allows you to trigger alerts to staff (e.g after a dentist watches 3 videos on direct bonding self ligating brackets an alert could be sent to a sales rep to call the dentist and ask them if they would like to book on a course for direct bonding etc) This is a very powerful technology which we can help you unleash.
To attract new targeted customers you need to first understand who could be your customer and then target the message / advert to them.
The ideal GDP dentist lifecycle. E.g targeting dentists providing orthodontics.
So imagine you are a company selling orthodontic supplies and materials and you want to get more dentists as customers to increase your market share. How would you do this? Let’s go through this step by step:
Attract Traffic
TradeShows & Dental Press Currently you exhibit at trade shows, advertise in dental magazines, have advertorials in magazines, and you get some contact details and emails of dentists to follow up with. But you could go one better.
You could have targeted information / adverts for SPECIFIC problems / products. e.g a banner at a conference or in a magazine saying - “If you use 6month smiles or CFast for your braces would you like to learn how to earn ÂŁ200 more profit per case and to save 1 hour per patient treated? Learn how at Smarterorthodontics4u.co.ukâ€? or something like that.
The beauty of having more specific messages is that you can create more profitable and relevant solutions that differentiate you from your competition.
This is now a targeted message that is attracting a very specific customer for a product you have (e.g self ligating brackets and a direct bonding braces course) Someone that spends money on cases already and they have a high chance to be a loyal and profitable customer for you if you can get them educated to switch to your system they are much more likely to stay with you and spend more money with you.
Build List & Nurture Relationship
When they opt in for the free guide at smarterorthodontics4u.com (this could be done at a conference on an iPad on the stand immediately with the dentist in front of you for example or they could do it at home after reading an article / advertorial in a magazine) you can then have the web form (where they place their email) categorise the dentist as a “self-ligating brackets prospect� or whatever category you want for them.
The marketing automation software can then be programmed to send them specific information about the product of choice over the next few months, it can also tell you what links the dentist clicked (e.g if you had made a whitepaper explaining how the system works and a video showing how to save clinical time in the treatment and a page showing a dental profit calculator where they can enter the number of braces they do and calculate the extra profit they would get with your system) then the system could alert you if they engaged with all 3 pieces of content within say 24hours.
This would indicate that someone who reads a lot of your materials is likely interested in your product and an alert could be triggered to one of your sales reps to contact them. This gives your sales reps a much more qualified person to contact who is more likely to buy.
By creating tailored educational materials such as guides and videos you can link this with marketing automation sequence so that dentists get highly specific messages that make them ready to buy.
Convert Sales
The dentist gets their interest raised over time through your tailored content marketing like videos / papers / calls and demonstration visits. Then you can offer them a trial of your product and then the system could “tag� them
(this means the software knows another thing about them and can send specific items based on the tag) as “in trial’ which means they could be sent specific information
that could be helpful for someone trying your product, such as in detail clinical guide how to use it, and some stickers with barcodes for the nurses (with say a small chocolate bar attached) or shortcuts to order more product easily.
So what does this look like for an actual customer behind the scenes using marketing automation and infusionsoft? we are going to look at an actual process with a consumer as a client but the steps & principles are the same
Marketing Automation & Lifecycle Marketing for Dentists.
Marketing Automation & Lifecycle Marketing for Dentists.
Marketing Automation & Lifecycle Marketing for Dentists.
Questions and answers over a 12month period.
Marketing Automation & Lifecycle Marketing for Dentists.
She went ahead with lingual braces 12months after her first enquiry. This means I paid for the advert last year, and got a return this year.
Marketing Automation & Lifecycle Marketing for Dentists.
All the people we communicated with in the last few hours automatically.
Benefits The benefits of this type of approach should be immediately apparent and this provides a really exciting opportunity to kickstart company growth.
Next step If you would like to learn more about how to unleash the power of marketing automation and lifecycle marketing for your dental supplier business get in touch for an integrated assessment to understand exactly which life cycles you have and the strategy to get them implemented.
Your Initial Investment: ÂŁ999 by Dr Aalok Y Shukla Co-Founder & Chief Automator at Click.Convert.Sell.