Is direct mail still effective? What kind of dental mailing campaign is best for me? How granular can I get with my targeting of households? These are all good questions you may be asking if you’re considering sending out mailers for your dental practice. We’re here to tell you that direct mail is not obsolete and is still helping dentists around the country bring in new patients at attractive acquisition costs. Let’s go over the types of mailing lists that there are to choose from!
Saturated Mailing List
If you’re a general dentist in an area with an average income range, a saturation mailing campaign is our top recommendation. It hits all households within your custom mailing area, giving you the ability to reach many potential new patients with a variety of dental needs. A saturation mailing list also allows you to hit homes closer to your practice as you haven’t set any limiting demographic parameters that require you to expand your mailing radius in order to reach enough households. Don’t worry, though—we filter out businesses and P.O. boxes to better ensure that your dental direct mail piece will reach the hands of relevant leads.
There are exceptions to this recommendation for general dentists with severe income disparities in their area. But with the exception of those rare areas with extreme heterogeneity of household income (and also for dental specialists), we’ve found saturation mailings time and time again to have lower patient acquisition costs. If some neighborhoods around you are affluent and others are substantially below average, you might benefit from a targeted mailing list that allows you to only send to households that meet your desired baseline for estimated average household income. Another option may be to shift your saturated mailing area, if possible, so you can still qualify for the lower postage rate of a saturation campaign without having to mail to areas that really don’t fit your target audience.
Targeted Mailing List
A targeted mailing list is appropriate for specialists who need to target a specific demographic of patient. For a pediatric dentist, we customize the mailing list to include only households with the presence of children. If you’re an endodontist or prosthodontist and dental mailings make sense for your practice’s marketing strategy, then your mailing list may benefit from filtering for age.
Pricing of Each
If you’ve browsed around our website, you’ve likely gathered that we value transparency. The cost of a direct mail campaign with us depends on the piece you send out, the type of mailing list you need, and the number of households you want to hit (and for how long). We offer three different sizes of piece, two types of mailing lists, and both standardized as well as customized campaign sizes to hit your desired number of households—that’s a lot of variables! Monthly payment amounts for our quarterly programs start at ~$1,800.
As to be expected, targeted mailing lists are more expensive than saturation mailing lists. Similarly, our large 8-panel mailer is more of an investment than our supersized postcard. To make a long story short, we’re committed to crafting the perfect direct mail campaign for your dental practice because it’s certainly not a one-size-fits-all style of marketing! Our mailer size options are:
Practice Cafe’s direct mail pieces are completely tailored to your individual practice and ideal patient base. From content, to design, to the mailing area we determine with you, there are no two pieces we create that are exactly alike! Some of the customization options when you design a mailer with us include:
- Length of the campaign (annual or flexible quarterly)
- Size of the piece
- Photography
- Unique content around your service focuses
- Design
- Offers and promotions
- Mailing list
If you’re still unsure about dental direct mail and what type of campaign will fit your practice’s needs and goals, we encourage you to give us a call to chat with one of our friendly direct mail experts!
