Email Marketing For Dentistry - Why And How To Do It

What makes email marketing perfect for dentists?

Email marketing for dentistry has a lot of specific perks, such as:

• Builds patient loyalty

You can use email marketing for dentistry to update your audience on new services. Even better, you can use it to target the patients who haven’t made any appointments in a while with promotions. 

Since every patient contributes to your bottom line, retaining them is key to staying profitable. 

• Improved patient engagement

Email marketing for dentistry is all about value. Offering more value to your patients even after they leave your office is a great way to make sure that they end up staying your clients. 

We recommend keeping in contact with your patients with follow-up emails after appointments but you can also email them content that contains practical advice. For example tips on caring for their teeth and improving their dental health. 

Most patients will find this information useful and are more likely to return to your office because you’re staying at the top of their minds.

• Gives your practice more credibility

In your follow-up emails after appointments, you can provide your patients with the opportunity to offer feedback. If you do make an effort to use that feedback to improve your practice, your patients will appreciate the fact that you value their opinions.

We also recommend inviting them to leave Google Reviews. Since most new clients look at online reviews, having enough positive feedback improves your credibility and validates your service. You can also use emails to request testimonials you can then add to your website to give new clients more confidence that they’re choosing the best dental care professional in the area.

• It’s affordable and offers a great return on investment (ROI) 

The best thing about email marketing for dentistry is that it offers incredible results without busting the bank. It’s one of the most cost-effective ways to advertise your services and attract and retain patients. 

But get this: email is the form of marketing that offers the best ROI. In 2022, for every dollar you spend you can expect a return of a whopping $36. It’s a steal!

How to create an email marketing plan

Every marketing strategy should start with a basic plan or an outline you should follow. We recommend following these practices to increase the chance of your marketing effort becoming a success: 

1. Establish goals

First, you need to have a clear set of goals about what you’re trying to achieve with email marketing for dentistry. This gives you a measurable method of evaluating how effective your effort was. 



For instance, you might want to increase your revenue or improve existing patient relationships. Or, you might want to attract a specific amount of new customers by the end of the year. Whatever your goal may be, it needs to be measurable if you’re to assess how successful your campaign was.

2. Identify key dates of your business year

What does this mean? Because you need to map out most of your emails in advance, it’s helpful to have an outline of all the important dates and time frames for your dental practice.

Are there slow months? Do you get more patients after holidays when people tend to develop cavities? Having this information ready can help you plan emails and find the optimal times to send them.

Let’s say you want to offer a time-sensitive promotion for any dental work. You should send out an email announcing it about two weeks before as well as a reminder a week before. Finally, it’s very useful to send a last chance type of email a couple of days before an event. 



Planning out your business year doesn’t only apply to special discounts or promotions; you can use it to craft season-specific content. For example, a good time to provide parents with articles regarding their kids’ dental health is in February for National Children’s Dental Health Month.

3. Expand your mailing list

You need to increase your target audience if you want to see top results of email marketing for dentistry. The best thing you can do is to offer something in return for your potential customers agreeing to sign up for your email list. 

You can offer something in the form of valuable content like a blog post or an ebook, but you can also offer exclusive discounts or gift cards for subscribing.

Once you decide on the type of your offer, you’ll have to create a form where your potential audience members can provide their email addresses in exchange for a free perk you’re offering. If you have a website, you can create a pop-up form that, as the name suggests, pops up when someone is browsing your page. 

Another option would be to use an inline form that you can put anywhere on your website. It’s a less intrusive option that is embedded directly into your site’s code so people can sign up as they view a specific page.

For email marketing for dentistry to be successful, you’ll need to put your form out there by proactively asking for emails. Let’s take look at a few examples:

• Promote yourself on other websites through guest posts. Don’t forget to add a link to your full page!
• Promote your form on social media. For example, if you get a lot of traffic from your social media content, don’t forget to add a link to your form in places like your Instagram bio.
• Use paid ads to drive traffic to your form. This is the fastest way to get your form in front of your target audience.
• Don’t forget to promote it offline. You can ask patients in person when they register in your practice if they’d like to subscribe to your mailing list.

Decide on the type of content you want to send out

So you expanded that list and now you’re stumped on what you’re going to do next? There are different types of emails you need to incorporate into your email marketing for dentistry efforts: 

• Welcome emails

This email sets the tone for the entire relationship moving forward, and it’s also your first opportunity to get your new subscribers to take action. 

You can invite them to follow you on social media, book an appointment, or direct them to your downloadable content if you have any.

If you want even more bang out of your welcome email, you can include a special offer. This is the best way to incentivize new subscribers to respond to your call to action.

• Educational emails

These types of emails not only provide value to your subscribers but also build the credibility of your practice. People will connect with you a lot better if they view you as more than just a dentist.

Educational content is your time to shine and position yourself as a go-to expert on dental health for your subscribers. If you knock it out of the ballpark with your educational content, your subscribers are more likely to turn to you for expert advice in case they come up with any issues.

• Reminder emails

You’re probably aware of how no-shows can be annoying, especially if you don’t charge a no-show fee. 

Here’s the beauty of email marketing for dentistry: you can make this a non-issue with reminder emails that will keep your clients accountable. Even if they do cancel the appointment, you’ll have ample time to book another patient instead. 

This is also an opportunity to offer additional services to your patients and prompt them to book another appointment. For example, if a patient has a check-up in two weeks, you can offer them an air abrasion treatment.

• New service emails

Email marketing for dentistry is great because you can use it to inform your subscribers about the new services or products you’re introducing in your practice. For instance, you can send out an email that explains the new service and the benefits it offers so you can build a bit of hype around it. 

We also recommend capitalizing on urgency by offering a time-limited discount for a certain number of patients who book an appointment. 

• Targeted promotional emails

Promotional emails have the potential to inform the purchasing decisions of your audience, or at least nudge them in the right direction. This makes email marketing for dentistry an effective way to re-engage inactive patients. 

What’s even better is that you can also leverage it to improve your relationship with your loyal patients through special rewards. You can also look at your competition and try to match their promotion for a chance to snag a new patient.

4. Automate your emails and send them out regularly

To get the most out of email marketing for dentistry, you’ll have to automate your emails. It might sound a bit complex at first, but it’s fairly easy to do with proper email marketing automation software. 

For example, you can send out automatic emails after triggers such as a sign-up occur. This way you won’t have to monitor new sign-ups to send out a welcome email manually. 

This is helpful if you’re serious about email marketing for dentistry because in order to to have a successful marketing campaign, you’ll have to be consistent with your efforts. You’ll want to deliver top-quality information at least once a month to stay on top of the mind of your audience.



The automation software will make the entire ordeal easier for you as you’ll also need to brainstorm constantly to come up with new topics that your customers will find engaging and valuable.

5. Monitor your results

Email marketing for dentistry is useless if you don’t have an insight into how your campaign is stacking up against your goals. 

Thus, you should understand how your email campaign is progressing by monitoring these KPIs - key performance indicators:

• Click-through rates: the percentage of users who click on the links in your email
• Conversion: the percentage of users who were interested in your offers
• Unsubscribes: number of users who opt out of your emails.

Can you find help with email marketing for dentistry?

While that was arguably a lot of information, it’s still feasible to learn it all yourself and set up a successful email campaign. After all, you finished dental school so hard could it be?

The problem isn’t learning the stuff - it’s finding the time to do so and putting it into practice. It’s important to note that to be good at email marketing for dentistry, it will require a significant amount of time and trial-and-error (not to mention resources) before you get it right. 

The good news is that you can always delegate this task to a professional marketing agency if you want to improve your efforts.

A team of professionals will provide you with quick results of email marketing for dentistry. 

Here at Oamii, we’ve got you covered. We can work 24/7 with you to craft the best possible strategy that will grow your practice and give you the best ROI possible. We’re more than familiar with how email marketing for dentistry works and can help you achieve all of the goals you set out for us. 

If email marketing for dentistry sounds like something you want to do, but haven’t got the time, contact Oamii Marketing. We take the confusion out of marketing and help you see actual results. Feel free to fill out our online contact form, or call us at 561-228-4111 today!