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Orthodontic Marketing Automation: A Look Into the Future by Damon Janis

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In the 1980s, orthodontists were switching in droves from manual and paper patient-ledger systems to computer systems. By the late 1980s, computerization was a requirement for any successful orthodontic practice.

Do you know any orthodontists who are not using a computerized practice-management system in 2015? That would be inconceivable, and for good reason. A computer system offers massive efficiencies in handling patient, treatment, scheduling, and billing information.

Orthodontic marketing automation in 2015 is in the same place as practice-management systems were in the 1980s. The day is soon coming when running an orthodontic practice without marketing automation will be inconceivable.

What is orthodontic marketing automation?
Orthodontic marketing automation is communication with your prospects and patients when they are not in your office. These communications can be in the form of emails, text messages, letters, packages, postcards and phone calls. It results in building trust with your prospects and patients, increasing referrals, and growing your practice.

The automation system manages these communications 24/7. It never sleeps, never lets anyone or anything drop through the cracks, never takes a vacation and never complains.

Here are a few of the tasks that an orthodontic marketing automation system performs:
  • Automatically nurtures prospects to schedule their first visit to your office
  • Follows up with patients who originally said no to treatment so they say yes
  • Gets patients to submit testimonials that you can use in your marketing to build credibility with prospective patients
  • Prepares patients for their upcoming treatments and gives them information for post-treatment
  • Solicits referrals from patients and rewards them for their loyalty
Life-cycle marketing for orthodontists
All businesses, including your orthodontic practice, implement life-cycle marketing. Once you consciously recognize the steps of life-cycle marketing, you can strengthen your business by intentionally automating what you are already doing. This makes your business more efficient and effective.

Life-cycle marketing is customer interaction that follows this pattern:
  1. Attract prospects
  2. Capture leads
  3. Nurture prospects
  4. Convert sales
  5. Deliver and satisfy
  6. Up-sell customers
  7. Get referrals (which starts again at step 1)
Orthodontic marketing automation enhances and implements these life-cycle marketing steps, reducing the burden on your staff.

What is required?
To put a marketing automation system to work in your practice, you’ll need two elements:
  1. A data bridge to gather patient, referral, scheduling, and treatment information from your practice management system and put it into your marketing automation system.
  2. A marketing automation software platform. Once your patient, referral, scheduling and treatment information is inside your marketing automation software, this tool schedules, programs, and performs all the automated tasks in your marketing campaigns.
How does marketing automation work?
Marketing automation works by executing campaigns. You design campaigns and determine the logical flow of the communications (who should get what information, when they should get it, what to do when they respond, and when to stop communicating).

This is called your MAP, or marketing automation plan. Once you have it defined, you can then build out the campaigns in your marketing automation tool and test them to make sure they function the way you designed them.

When your system is up and running, monitor the system to ensure it is working the way you intended. You can also look at analytics to get insights into how many people are going through the campaigns and what they are doing.

As you monitor the results of your campaigns, you likely will want to update them so they perform better. For example, you may find that sending printed letters rather than emails is a more effective follow-up for patients who didn’t accept treatment when they came in for their initial visit.

You can also explore different scenarios. For example, instead of only sending printed letters to patients who said no to treatment, you can program the system to send a task request to your staff to call the patient on the phone. You can also prerecord a personal voice message from you, the doctor, and have it automatically delivered by your system to every patient that fits a specific criterion. You may decide to have a monthly seminar on the benefits of orthodontic treatment, and as part of the follow-up sequence, invite prospective patients to sign up for the seminar. Since campaigns are programmable, you have an infinite number of scenarios you can implement.

Everything you do in your marketing automation system is measurable, and you can leverage its power by continually refining your campaigns, trying new things, and keeping the things that work the best based on the quantifiable results you are getting.

If you want to know how marketing automation will be useful to your individual practice, go to www.IsAutomationForMe.com. A short quiz will ask you specifics about your practice and will give you a score, along with a detailed report explaining how effective marketing automation will be for you.



Damon Janis is a co-founder at Dentma, a marketing automation company. He has spent the last 25 years working with software systems, including marketing automation systems for dentists and orthodontists. He holds five patents for a software system currently used by millions of people around the world for managing and accessing network resources.


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