The Superhero of Conversions: How remarketing can increase new patients for your dental practice

Have you ever been online, doing a search for a new pair of running shoes, or maybe a new car mechanic, and you find yourself browsing on those sites, when the dog barks and someone is at your door or maybe you see you have a new message on Facebook and before you know it, you clicked out of newbalance.com and on to something new? We all have, probably multiple times a day.

So what happens to those new pair of running shoes? If you’re like most people you’ve probably forgotten about them. What does this have to do with remarketing? Everything!

On average 95-98% of visitors are leaving your website without taking action. That means most of your visitors come to your site and don’t call your office to make an appointment or fill out your new patient form. Why? Because they either got distracted, maybe they are doing research and comparing various different offices, or they’re just not ready to make a decision on if they want to get their teeth whitened or have that cracked tooth fixed.

But back to our running shoes example. Fast forward 3 days and you’re reading an article on cnn.com and you see the same pair of running shoes in an ad on the right hand side. You notice the display ad on the side and it reminds you that you meant to make that purchase and never did. So what do you do? That’s right; you click on the link and make the purchase. That is remarketing!

At this point you are probably thinking one of two things, wow that is really neat and I want to learn more or how can this help my dental practice and what are some numbers to support this marketing effort. Well, let’s dive a little deeper to help you better understand.

Let’s start with why remarketing is so successful along with some results and then we can discuss the process of how you can launch these campaigns.

INEXPENSIVE – you can start with as little as $50/month.
CONVERSION– remarketing customers are 70% more likely to convert compared to someone who has not been remarketed to.
SUCCESS RATE– 49% of individuals visit a site 2-4 times before they actually convert
COMPETITION– most consumers visit multiple sites before making a decision. If you are the only dentists in your area not remarketing, you are leaving money on the table.

The numbers speak for themselves!

Just in case you need additional convincing on how dental remarketing can help your practice, here are a couple more reasons….Visitors will continue to see your brand and messaging for free, which helps you bring awareness to your practice. Another positive aspect of a remarketing campaign is, you will only pay when visitors click on your ads, but remember we know the individuals seeing your ads already have interest in your practice because they visited your website. This means if they take action and click on the ad they must really be interested!

So how does remarketing work? It’s actually pretty simple. When a visitor lands on your website a cookie is stored in their browser that is later used to uniquely identify them. As that same visitor browses other websites in the days, weeks and months following, that cookie containing the visitor’s unique identifier is used to determine where they’ve been previously, allowing the ad networks to serve them remarketing ads for those previously visited websites.

There are a couple requirements:

1. You must have a website
2. You must have a minimum of 20-100 unique visitors per month

I implore you to consider remarketing for your practice in 2015. It may seem optional now, but I can assure you in another year it won’t be. Don’t wait until all of your competitors have caught on!

Recent studies have shown that visitors who were remarketed to were 70% more likely to take action compared to those who weren’t.

Our agency offers a free analysis for practices looking to take advantage of remarketing and other digital marketing opportunities. For those that are interested in launching remarketing campaigns on their own I’ve provided a few resources below: