Patient News Publishing offers a full suite of print products to help you effectively market your dental practice. This includes award-winning newsletters, postcards, brochures, and referral cards as well as specialty and seasonal items such as cover letters and calendars. Internal products help you stay in touch with existing patients to inform and educate them while promoting new services. External communication programs allow you to approach potential new clients in your neighborhood to help your practice grow with high-quality new patients. All of our marketing products are tailored to help achieve the specific goals of your practice.

Ideally you should allocate a percentage of your marketing budget to both methods. Most practices receive a high percentage of new patients through referrals and word-of-mouth so it's important to make your name visible to many people, including your existing patient base and the community surrounding your practice. Our expert consultants are here to help you determine the best combination for your needs.

Most businesses allocate approximately 7% of their gross annual revenue, so anywhere from 5-10% would be appropriate. The amount you allocate is dependent on how long your practice has been running and what your top-line revenue goals are. Our experts can help you determine what your range should be, based on your monthly and annual revenue.

Experience. We have been working in healthcare marketing since 1992 and we have produced thousands of successful newsletter and postcard campaigns. In fact, in client surveys over the past 5 years, we have received a satisfaction rating over 95%.

Quality. Our experienced copywriters produce award-winning content that is sourced from our relationships with experts in the dental industry so our content contains the latest information and is relevant to you and your patients. Our unique and easy newsletter creation system puts the control in your hands through superior flexibility and customization of every communication you send.

Innovation. Your mailing campaigns are personalized with one-to-one printing of the recipient's name which increases recognition and response by up to 44% over other direct mail options.

Flexibility. Each mailing is unique, customized, and timely. While other suppliers provide just one or limited designs for your annual campaign, we offer multiple designs to choose from including full customization. The ability to customize your content will increase response.

Response. As active DMA (Direct Marketing Assocation) members, we put extensive research into all of our products to provide increased readership and response to your marketing campaigns.

Service. We offer extensive support to each client, including your own exclusive Account Manager as well as value-added business materials to help you in every aspect of building your practice.

Guarantee. With our Risk-Free Trial, you will have full access to review our program so that you are fully satisfied with your options before you proceed.

All newsletters share the fundamental purpose of communicating with your patients and your community. Beyond that there are lots of points of differentiation and you need to consider what will properly represent your practice. Who are your readers and what do they expect from your practice? Is your newsletter provider an expert in direct mail, graphic design, and industry-specific research and editorial? Do they understand the marketing needs of your industry and the importance of such details as personalization and mailing practices that will increase responses? Patient News Publishing is all of these things and so much more!

A patient newsletter is an ideal tool for almost every practice. Newsletters keep your name regularly in front of clients — they strengthen relationships, increase referrals, increase brand awareness, improve satisfaction and loyalty leading to higher lifetime client value. Remember, people are busy. They forget about important things like their recall appointments, or the fact that they want to whiten their teeth before their daughter's graduation or wedding, or that they want to ask you a question about veneers. Your regular newsletter keeps you top-of-mind with your patients. You need to make sure your patients know about all the services you offer, before you lose them or that special purchase to a competitor who is advertising regularly in your community.

Changes in the economy affect the decisions you make for your practice and the decisions patients make about their purchases and even their healthcare. Newsletters are an effective tool in these situations. In this instance, a focus on content is important. Questions to ask yourself are, is it timely to promote elective services in my area, or should we include more education about the importance of oral health, mouth-body links, and regular visits? With the “real estate” provided by a four-page newsletter, you can still include a variety of topics including elective services, but perhaps your primary message will change slightly. We have hundreds of articles and suggestions to help you. There is one definite answer to this question: it’s definitely not a time to limit your marketing exposure. If you focus on improving customer service and generating more new patients, you will continue to build and strengthen your practice. Remember, businesses who market through a recession can be up to 10 times more successful than those who cut marketing expenses. And at Patient News Publishing, we’re committed to helping you market smarter, not harder. Ask your Account Manager what will work for your practice.

Every practice will experience naturally occurring attrition of approximately 15% per year. Patients move or leave a practice for one reason or another. Can you afford to lose 15% of your revenue year after year? Run your new-patient reports for the past 12 months and make sure you are generating enough new patients per month to not only counteract this naturally occurring attrition, but to also help your practice generate the revenues you want. If not, look at what you are currently doing and change it.

This will depend on the focus of your practice, your branding, and the demographics in your area. Our most effective direct mail program is the combination of a 4 page newsletter, which establishes your practice as the local expert through quality educational content, followed by a postcard, which reminds patients of your special offer generating more calls to your practice. Whether a newsletter or postcard campaign is your preference, the key is frequency, so you will want to budget for at least 6-8 mailings per year.

You must track the calls that come to your office to determine how many are a result of your direct mailer and how many of those calls are converted to a visit. You need to track all calls so that you can determine if your front line staff require more training to ensure calls are consistently being converted into appointments. Run a new patient report from your computer system to see how many new patients you generated per month for the past two years, and compare with how you're doing now. We continue to help you track new patient growth, and watch for spikes when different content is sent out so that we can adjust each mailing piece.

We will help you with a full and detailed geographic and demographic analysis of the area surrounding your practice and your existing patient base. As women make more than 85% of all healthcare buying decisions, your PNP direct mailer message has been tailored to the female reader and in fact, in the US, your mailer is even specifically addressed to the female head of household - by name!

This is the latest breakthrough in improving response to direct mail campaigns. This is the addition of data relevant to the recipient, like their name, printed throughout a campaign, or images that mean something to the reader. For us at PNP, our research determined that the addition of "name only" increased response rates by up to 44%, and the use of full color and a special offer can increase response even further.

We know that women make most of our healthcare buying decisions, so all content has been tailored to that reader. In addition, in the US, we have upgraded our direct mail list service to provide you with the female head of household name, which we incorporate throughout your newsletters and postcards. Response has escalated and clients report generating anywhere from 20-200 new patients per month as a result. This service is automatically included in the US, and we can provide this service in Canada when you opt for our first class postage upgrade.

Your Account Manager can provide you with instructions to download your head of household, or guarantor, list from most popular software programs. Your list can be easily emailed to our secure website. We warehouse your list for you, so you can simply email us with your new patient names for each mailing, and there's no extra charge for these list services.

Different initiatives should be part of your marketing mix. Having a website is great, as long as there is user benefit, and print can enhance your online presence. Please note that having a website shouldn't take precedence over your direct mail campaign or patient newsletter mailing program. Print drives traffic to a website, your newsletter or postcard provides tangibility, credibility, and an appeal the Internet does not offer. In fact, close to 90% of the 18-49 consumer group welcome, read and respond to printed mailed materials. And we'll even help enhance your website offering by providing a growing library of newsletter articles and we provide a free PDF copy of each edition for you to post!

It's all part of your marketing mix, so yes continue your presence in your local yellow pages, but you could consider downsize to a black & white listing so that a prospective patient can still find your name when looking there, but saving you on important marketing budget dollars. Mailing into the homes surrounding your practice makes the job of finding your practice easier for your prospective patients by delivering your message to their door. Studies prove that yellow pages shoppers are more likely to break appointments because they are looking for the most convenient, quick or inexpensive option. Once they hang up from your office, they continue their search and if they find an appointment sooner, your practice is out. There is also extensive competition within yellow pages. Your name, mailed into prospective patients homes on a regular basis, makes your practice stand out from the crowd, and big yellow pages ads become less relevant.

Call 800.667.0268 today for a free consultation, and take advantage of our Risk Free Trial.

You'll receive our detailed marketing binder filled with tons of valuable information including various newsletter and postcard layout designs, article library listings, image libraries, title ideas, trigger messages, profile questionnaires, detailed pricing and mailing information.

You'll receive our own newsletter, our Quarterly Update, including current and back issues.

Also included is a free patient list mailing cleanse and free geographic demographic analysis.

Your own Account Executive will provide tutorials and a detailed review - you can even receive a fully customized newsletter draft for your practice - and then you decide whether the program is right for you. If it is, your deposit will be credited to your program, and if not, it will be fully refunded to you. Click here to grow your practice.