As a dental practice, you likely have a beautifully designed website and branding, complete with the best web practices, fully optimized for SEO, resulting in your practice's website on the first page of results for relevant searches. You also regularly post on different social media platforms and reach out to your patients for reviews. You think you've done everything but are still looking for new patients. How else can you bring in more new patients?

It's no surprise that mobile usage in recent years has increased drastically. Today's mobile users often consider phone calls and text messages secondary functions on their devices, while everything from using social media apps, browsing the web, and of course checking emails are their primary uses. As of March 2017, data shows that 54% of emails were opened on a mobile device. That number continues to increase.

If you're using email newsletters as part of your practice's marketing strategy, it is important to create mobile friendly e-blasts so your message is delivered and properly displayed to all your recipients. To make your newsletter mobile friendly, here are a few tips to help guide you during design.

Reputation management helps shape the perception of your practice online, by helping curate the information you put out about the practice and the industry. Managing online reviews and how you respond to them is core to reputation management, but everything from social media management to SEO links back to the process of managing your reputation online.

Quite often, practices choose not to build an online presence because of the hassle of not only managing it inconsistently, but also the fear of getting a bad review or interaction that may be difficult to tackle. Keep in mind though, whether your practice chooses to build an online presence or not, customers have access to third party platforms like Yelp and Google reviews to leave reviews however they like it. Wouldn't it be better to build and manage an online presence to help tackle all reviews and not let them negatively impact your practice? Additionally, not having online reviews mean you could be missing out on potential new patients, or losing potentials to another practice with well curated reviews.

Today, a dental practice needs more than just a basic website. At a bare minimum, you need to make sure that the website is user friendly, mobile compatible, SEO optimized, and has a has basic functionality to help interact with potential and existing clients.

Based on our experience, we have rounded up a few things your dental practice's website should have, which would make it a good experience for users.

What is considered a good customer experience? An interaction with a professional employee who is courteous and helpful? Getting through to a customer service representative within the first minute of a phone call? Or being greeted by a call agent who isn't annoyed? How about getting free stuff? The truth is, customer experience is not a customer's single interaction with your business. According to Harvard Business Review, "(customer satisfaction is through) cumulative experiences across multiple touchpoints and in multiple channels over time."

Giving your customers a complete package leads to higher satisfaction rates for your business. Here are a few ways through which you can boost your business's customer experience.

A Call to Action (CTA) is a button or other link, usually found on a website landing page, or shown prominently in an e-blast. It is responsible for goal conversions. Goal conversion is a measurement of some action, an individual has done interacting with your site or e-blast.

If your website doesn’t have Call to Action buttons, or you feel they you are not achieving your goal conversions, here are a few tips for an effective CTA button.

Brand Ambassadors can be celebrities, social media influencers, or brand enthusiasts, who are hired to represent a brand in a positive light in public.

However, quite often, brand ambassadors are customers from your target demographic, who voluntarily promote your brand by publicly speaking, blogging, tweeting, and/or instagramming about how much they love your product or service. These customers are an expression of the character of your brand, as they embody the same beliefs and values as your brand. Their job is to stay in regular contact with your customers, promoting the brand to them, and providing you with invaluable feedback on what your customers think about your brand.

If you’ve been thinking about starting up a brand ambassador program for your company, here are some tips that might help you.

On September 23, 2016, Google announced Penguin’s 7th and final update, calling it Penguin 4.0. Penguin is a filter that captures websites who use black hat webspam practices to boost their ranking on Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Black hat webspam practices are aggressive SEO tactics that include techniques like keyword stuffing, invisible text, and paid links, among others. Once the Penguin filter catches it, Google then penalizes those sites by lowering their rankings.

With this new update, Penguin is now part of Google’s core algorithm, along with 200 other unique signals or clues it relies on to rank websites on SERPs.

In this digital age, an online review can spread like wildfire. According to 2015 survey findings by a UK based search company, 92% of consumers read online reviews and 40% of them base their opinions by reading the first few reviews. This means, if a bad review is up in the top three, it could have a negative impact on your company. One way to combat a negative review is to respond to it.

The way you respond to a bad review will directly affect your business’ reputation. So, it’s important that your message is informative rather than reactionary.

Do you remember Amy’s Baking Company who appeared on Kitchen Nightmares? Instead of responding to bad reviews with a level head, they ended up arguing and threatening customers online.

AirBnb is an online platform that allows you to rent, or rent out, unique accommodations from around the world. Whether you’re looking for a spare room or an entire home, cottage, mansion, villa, castle, island (I know right?) to get away, you can find truly extraordinary accommodations.

The concept of such a service originated in 2007, when founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia couldn’t afford to meet rent for their San Francisco loft, and decided to rent the extra space. Their first three guests were attendees of a sold out design trade show, and their first attempt at turning their extra space into a bed and breakfast involved air mattresses and Pop Tarts for breakfast.

When a new product makes waves in the market, it’s really hard to miss its impact. Pokémon Go, an augmented reality or ‘Real World Gaming’ app released in July 2016, is definitely one of them. Offered in more than 30 countries within the first month, the game is definitely making its mark.

If you don’t already know, the main focus of the game involves players having to get out and roam the streets, landmarks, and specialized locales, to find and capture Pokémon.

With players in multiple age ranges, many reliving nostalgia from playing Pokémon when they themselves were kids, alongside a new, younger crowd, a lot of businesses are looking to tap into this market to grow their business.

In 2016 so far, the online markets’ user penetration in e-commerce has been 38.5% alone, and is expected to rise to 49.72% by 2020. Considering how the world services are moving online, consumers prefer going for brands they know of, as they feel comfortable giving them their personal information like, email address and credit card information. Based on a study by Nielsen, 60% of global consumers with Internet access prefer to buy new products from a familiar company.

Now that we know why having a brand is so important, the real question is:
HOW TO BRAND YOUR COMPANY?

You’re sitting in a boardroom meeting and your boss tells you to come up with another marketing channel to promote your brand. An email newsletter! That’s what you all agree upon, in order to stay in close contact with your customers, to offer contests and promotions, and of course, to serve as a reminder of your brand. Without a doubt, an e-Newsletter does have many benefits.

It all sounds easy and simple. But, creating an email newsletter is a great marketing tool ONLY if done right. For optimal results, here are 5 basic things you should be doing before you send out your e-Newsletter.

Thinking about launching a survey and wondering how long it should be? If it’s too long there is the fear that people might not be interested in finishing it. If it’s too short then it might compromise the data you’re trying to collect. The question about the perfect survey length has been debatable for a long time.

First off, the length of your survey differs with the audience base. Is it a general audience, a panel (a group of people hired by a company to fill surveys in return for some monetary value), or an internal group like employees? For example, the general public, without any incentive wouldn’t want to spend more than 10 minutes of their time on answering questions. The panel on the other hand is getting paid to fill the surveys. And for internal groups like employees, it is often made mandatory.