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SMS Marketing Software Basics for Dentists

by
Swell
July 5, 2022

Your patients love texting. Pew Research says that 99% of Americans own a cellphone and 98% of text messages get opened.

Since marketing is all about meeting consumers where they are and showing them how you can solve their real problems, it only makes sense to use texting as part of your practice’s marketing plan.

What is Text Marketing?

According to G2, 66% of Americans say they would like the option to interact with a business via text message, but only 23% of businesses actually offer that option. 

Text marketing is simply reaching out to your prospective and current patients via texting (if they opted in, of course). 

If you haven’t collected opt-in information before, start including a checkbox in your intake paperwork that lets patients agree to hear from your office occasionally. 

You can use text messages to share things like:

  • Holiday greetings
  • Promotions for new patients
  • Review invitations
  • Appointment reminders
  • And anything else you’d like to share with your patients!

SMS marketing software can make it super easy to set up mass messages to go to your list of patient and prospect phone numbers. Just make sure to provide only useful and wanted info and avoid over-texting. 

What About Webchat?

When your patients aren’t on their phones, chances are they might be online. Webchat is another popular method businesses use to stay in touch with their customers – and it can work for your dental practice, too.

You can install a webchat on your website that allows patients to ask a question and have it directly routed to your staff to answer.

Live chat is a popular way to win over prospects, with 79% of businesses reporting that adding a webchat led to increased conversions (Kayako).

It can also be a place for patients to reach out. Hubspot reports that 28% of survey respondents said they would resolve an issue with a company over a live chat.

SMS Marketing Software Makes Texting Patients Easy

SMS marketing software helps automate your texts so you can set up campaigns and let them run in the background. When patient texts come in, you’ll see them all in one dashboard and can assign them out to the right team member to respond.

Consider these two ways you can put automatic texting to work for your practice using software:

  1. Set up automatic appointment reminders, which can reduce missed appointments by 26% (Aviaro).
  2. Send review request invitations that go out at a set interval based on appointment type and feature a link right to Google where your patients can write a review. Businesses with more than 80 reviews earn 54% more in revenue (Review 42).

Swell allows dental practices to automate their text marketing, improve their patient experience, and rise in the rankings online. Try Swell.

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