The most important rule when marketing, is that your advertisements must be measurable. Unfortunately, many dentists fall into the trap of running ads without measuring their results. If you don’t measure the results, how can you be sure you are spending your money wisely?

If you’re measuring your marketing campaigns, the decisions you make about when and where you are going to market your dental practice become much easier to make.

Since direct mail is still popular among dentists, let’s discuss how a dentist can measure a campaign’s results.

Before starting a direct marketing campaign, you need three things:

  1. A unique phone number (not the same number as your office), that forwards to your dental office. 
  2. A unique URL or landing page with Google Analytics installed. This website will also display the unique phone number you have purchased for this campaign. 
  3. A unique email address that forwards to your office email.

Call Rail, is a company that you can use to purchase unique phone numbers that can be forwarded to your office phone. Call Rail also offers its customers an online analytics dashboard.

If you own your own domain name, you should purchase a second domain name for a direct mail campaign. For instance, if you have YourName.com set as your primary website, purchase YourNameDDS.com for your second domain. On your advertisement, instead of writing YourName.com, use your new YourNameDDS.com domain name. Your webmaster can then setup a landing page on a subdomain of YourName.com such that when a potential customer types YourNameDDS.com into their browser, they are forwarded to Subdomain.YourName.com. Your webmaster will have installed Google Analytics on the subdomain so you can easily measure the amount of traffic your advertisement generated to your website.

On your landing page, provide a unique email address for these visitors to contact. You’ll then be able to measure the effectiveness of this particular advertisement by counting the emails and phone calls you received and then how many of these leads were converted into new patients.

If doing it yourself sounds too complicated, DentalMarketing.net is an all in one solution for dentists.