Marketing Case Study: Dental Industry

PostcardMania, the nation’s fastest growing postcard direct mail firm, was not seemingly affected by the housing market crash — in fact, they bucked all industry trends… until one day it caught up with them and they had to shift gears, and fast. 

Joy Gendusa, PostcardMania’s CEO, was continuously asked about the real estate crash and if her firm had been affected by it.  Her answer was repeatedly no... but late in the game, seemingly overnight, the statistics changed.  Their top industry, mortgage, had dropped significantly.  

When revenues started to slow for PostcardMania, the consistent rising trend year after year since inception was at risk of faltering.  Not willing to let that happen, Gendusa ordered a full stat analysis of which industries were generating the best ROI from her company’s own marketing efforts.  Now that PostcardMania knew they could not longer reply so heavily on the once tried-and-true mortgage industry, they needed to find another place to shift their budget.  Researching into this further, PostcardMania found that 32% of dentists reordered dental direct mail campaigns, whereas the average is 27% across other industries.  PostcardMania then poured on the coals and marketed more heavily to dentists. 

Another interesting observation was that despite not receiving a marketing education in dental school, dentists appeared to be the savviest marketers among medical professionals.  PostcardMania's results manager noted that instead of hiring office staff to track their marketing numbers for them like other medical professionals, many dentists typically take a very hands-on approach and track the numbers themselves.

It may be no surprise that dentists market more.  Take the American Dental Association — they know how to market!  They’ve set the trend for dental professionals in that arena and dentists have reaped the benefits of the ADA’s efforts whether they are ADA members or not.  For instance, the ADA’s celebrity endorsements say “a mouthful.” 

The ADA’s marketing acumen is not something new.  The ADA has been endorsing products for a long time.  According to americasgreatestbrands.com, the ADA reported on August 1, 1960 that “Crest has been shown to be an effective anticaries (decay preventative) dentifrice [a substance for cleaning the teeth; applied with a toothbrush] that can be of significant value when used in a conscientiously applied program of oral hygiene and regular professional care.”  The response was so electric, as the report goes on to say, that within a year Crest’s sales nearly doubled.  By 1962 they had nearly tripled, pushing Crest well-ahead as the best-selling toothpaste in the United States.  By “bandwagoning” with a brand that was effective, the ADA garnered a large market share of people that started to use Crest, which became synonymous with dentists and visiting your dentist regularly.  They continue to endorse Crest and ding in that people need to visit the dentist twice a year.  Brilliant.

To learn even more about this profession, PostcardMania’s results manager started collecting case studies of dentists’ marketing campaigns and noted that one orthodontist got 8 new patients totaling $22,000 in services from a one-time mailing of 6000 postcards.  They reordered 2 months later.  Another dentist mailed monthly to 10,000 names, 4 months in a row, and got 120 new patients after just the 2^nd mailing.  The results being compiled are ongoing and no specific trend can be seen yet.

To continue helping this industry improve its ROI, Gendusa started writing marketing advice articles for dentists to help them raise that ROI amount even higher.  She advises on how to design postcards that pull responses, how to measure ROI and how to track and tweak their campaigns.  It was also recently announced that PostcardMania has decided to exhibit at the Florida National Dental Convention June 10^th – 12^th in Orlando.    

From the dentists that PostcardMania develop campaigns for across the nation, there seems to be a microcosm of dentists that were not hit so hard in the housing slump.  The full picture has yet to be determined, but is has piqued the interest of at least one direct mail marketing firm.