In today’s episode, I am joined by a special guest to answer this commonly asked question:
Is direct mail dead?
Travis Lee, an internationally known expert for creating highly successful marketing campaigns, answer this question and others.
In the interview, Travis reveals:
- Why some of the largest digital companies (like Google) rely on direct mail
- How you can ‘multiply yourself’ and have a personal, one-to-one conversation with a prospective patient without leaving your office or picking up the phone
- Two of his “go-to” campaigns to revive lost patients and acquire new ones
Join us!
Full Transcript
Intro: What do you get when you combine simplified practice marketing, proven ROI strategy, and Van skate shoes? You get Mark Thackeray, of course. So lace up, grab your green smoothie and get ready because this is Dental Marketing Secrets, and this is Mark.
Mark Thackeray: Hello and welcome my friends to episode number eight of the Dental Marketing Secrets Podcast where we provide actionable tips that you can take and apply immediately to grow your practice, to serve more patients and to leave a greater impact in the community. That is what it’s all about. My friends, my name is Mark Thackeray and as always I am so stoked to be here with you in this very moment on another fine, glorious day, wherever you are and however you may be listening. Thank you for spending your time on Dental Marketing Secrets. It will be time well spent I can tell you that.
Mark Thackeray: In today’s episode I am joined by a very special guest and he is going to answer this commonly asked question. Is direct mail dead? Is it finally dead in 2019 is it still valid? Travis Lee joins me in today’s episode. He’s the founder of 3D Mail and an internationally known expert in creating direct mail campaigns that generate positive returns of anywhere from 200% to 3500% for his clients.
In this interview, Travis reveals why some of the largest digital companies like Google rely on direct mail, how you can multiply yourself and have a personal one-to-one conversation with a prospective patient without leaving your office and without picking up the phone and two of his Go-To campaigns to revive lost patients and acquire new ones. So let’s get started. Let’s join Travis.
Mark Thackeray: Cool. Well, thanks again Travis for joining me on the call. Very excited to have you. For those of you who don’t know, Travis is, is someone that I’ve looked up to and I haven’t actually mentioned this to him before, but he’s someone I followed in the past because he has worked with the likes of Dan Kennedy, and Dan Kennedy is one of my mentors from afar – brilliant marketing mastermind. And Travis has followed in his footsteps in that way.
Mark Thackeray: He’s, he focuses on direct mail, direct marketing results, things that provide an ROI for your business. He’s internationally known as the expert in getting direct mail delivered, opened and read as co founder and president of 3D Mail. He generates huge returns for thousands of businesses each year who use his innovative and effective marketing strategies. His unique yet tested marketing methods, have helped add millions of dollars in sales to wide variety of businesses from the small scale kitchen-table-run sole proprietors to national and multinational businesses that are mailing literally millions of pieces of mail every single year.
Mark Thackeray: His techniques and strategies move seamlessly between B2B well as B2C worlds and consistently provide positive returns of 200 to over 3500% for his clients, which is so cool. So exciting. He, like I mentioned, he’s the GoTo guy to many of the top marketers in the country for 3D mail ideas and implementation, including Dan Kennedy, his long list of clients and business ventures, bill Glazer, Chris Cardell, and literally a whole host of other of the top other top marketers throughout the country. He is, he’s also a sought after speaker speaking to thousands of business owners every single year throughout the country.
Mark Thackeray: Since 2008 he’s created some of the most successful direct mail campaigns specifically designed to give small businesses and entrepreneurs a leg up against the competition. He is the creator of the 3D mail direct marketing system through which his company provides specialized direct mail and ready to use sales letters to thousands of clients around the world and when he’s not working, Travis loves spending time with his family, his wife Jen son Carson and daughter Whitney and his golden retriever Kona. He loves traveling, snow skiing, camping, boating around the beautiful Pacific Northwest. And I’m going to have to add, he’s going to have, he’s going to have to come down to Utah and ski in the Utah mountains down here. Is that right?
Travis Lee: I we, I no joke. We have a trip planned to park city in February.
Mark Thackeray: Oh, it is tremendous down here. I absolutely love it. I’ve skied other places, but I’m partial. I’m a local here.
Travis Lee: yeah, I’ve actually never skied the a skied salt Lake, so there’ll be a lot of fun. I’ve skied forever. We just have never made it down to salt Lake, so it’ll be a lot of fun.
Mark Thackeray: Awesome. That is exciting. Well, thank you Travis again for taking the time to, to hop on this podcast. Very excited to have you and really pick your brain and showcase some of the things that are going on with direct mail and what’s really working right now.
Mark Thackeray: So I got to start with this question though because I know a lot of our audience will be asking this cause I get it a lot. Why on earth is, you know, direct mail or right now in 2019 is it still viable? It seems like it’s gone away. So what is your response to that? Why do, why direct mail right now?
Travis Lee: Well, you know, in a world that’s continually going more and more online when it comes to what I want to do with my business is, is we are getting more and more clustered, more and more flustered, more and more overwhelmed with online. So let’s take it out of the online world and let’s go are taken off of that, taken on the off the online world and let’s move it to the analog world or the paper paper and ink world, if you will. But to be honest with you, there’s a, there’s a lot of reasons why. First off, you know, as a whole, the post office may have a bad rap, but it’s not going anywhere. Right? And as far as when people think of the post office, they think of, you know, the inefficiencies of, of their, of the retail side of the business, right?
Travis Lee: Cause you know, they gotta have post offices, you’ve got to go buy stamps, right? And so when we think of the post office and think of all the horrible, that’s what we think, but when it comes to their core competency, which is moving something from one side of the country to, to another for a pre known price that is constant and consistent in a very, very effective and efficient manner, there’s hardly anybody in the world better than him. In fact, there’s not, right? So if you could, you know, so when it comes to their core competency, the top competency, they’re great. So that’s number one, right? Post office ain’t going anywhere. And I’ve got ’em I won’t bore you guys with too many stats here, but I’ve just got a handful here that we’ll kind of talk about from the latest, um, latest marketing studies.
Travis Lee: And the first one is 50% of consumers say they pay more attention to postal mail than email, right? So that’s number one. Number two, 62% of consumers say they enjoy checking their mailbox. So when I go speak and give this a similar talk Mark, I have a show of hands and I say, how many people enjoy checking their inboxes? And it’s 0% right? So 62% say they enjoy checking their mailbox. 65% say they receive too much email, 92% retrieved mail every day and 77% read and it at the same day. So those are big numbers there. And then the last one is 59% of executives. So those of you who have a maybe a professional world where you’re marketing into, say you’re an orthodontist trying to get referrals from other general dentists and so on and so forth, right? So 59% of executives say they prefer printed resources to online resources.
Travis Lee: Now this is not here to bash on online media. Here I am giving a presentation on a podcast over a zoom interview platform, right? So this is not to say that this is not a bash session on all things internet. That is to say though, the switch to everything online is, is way too exaggerated. Those who think it’s only the online world and only that in which we live on are ignoring some very simple and basic facts that we know to be true.
Travis Lee: Now when it comes to offline marketing, and frankly the biggest reason why direct mail is still alive and well is there’s just not a ton of competition at anymore because of all the things we’ve talked about, right? So you know, if you were a dentist doing a ValPak mailer, you might be one of eight dentists in a local ValPak mailer. Now you might be one or two. And that’s just one example, right? That’s just one media type of direct mail.
Travis Lee: When it comes to being in direct mail with your direct competition, say for outside of, you know, bought media like a coupon in certain thing, there’s just less competition, right? So that’s all of those reasons. Why is that when others are doing all this other stuff, oftentimes the overlooked media is the one that can, can still produce great results for you.
Mark Thackeray: Absolutely. And, and we’ll get into some, some case studies that talk about that, some that I think you have. And I’ve got my own too as well. That where tested just to see, cause that’s, that’s really one of the biggest things that we all need to be doing in our business is to continue to test and evaluate those results and make changes so that we can optimize what we’re doing.
Mark Thackeray: One of the things that really stood out to me that actually Dan Kennedy, I first heard about it from him when he was talking about direct mail is that it’s really unique because it allows you to sell in a vacuum, right? I mean If you could have the ability to engage a prospect through a mailer, it could be a postcard, it could be a letter, whatever the case may be. Now you have their full attention. Right. And there’s not this, they don’t have these tendencies to click on anything else. You know, like if you’re on your phone for example, and you serve a Facebook ad where they can just scroll down and go to the newsfeed and go see what their friends are doing or go see a different ad, or even, heaven forbid, open up Google and search your competitors. With a direct mail campaign, it really gives you that chance to have that private conversation with them. If you’re engaging them properly. Right?
Travis Lee: Yeah. I mean, you’re exactly right. It is one of the few mass media where we can truly have a one on one conversation right now, again, to point out, I mean, digital is giving us the ability to do that, right? So now the zoom conversation, Mark, you and I are 800 miles apart, but with no phones or having this conversation. So there are other ways that are inching towards that. But in terms of a way to multiply yourself, right? The ability to have you know what I like to compare to hundreds or thousands of salespeople out there beating a path for you, right? That’s the kind of sales environment that gives you, it gives you that one to one. Me talking to you, us having a conversation type of hype of event, which is, as you said, you hit the nail on the head. It’s one of the very few environments in which we can do that. Save for going door to door, which I don’t think most of us can scale any kind of business like that in most cases anymore.
Mark Thackeray: Right, right. Exactly. So, so tell me about, talk to me about this Travis. Why 3d mail? Okay. So we heard in the intro that you’re the owner of 3D Mail Results. Why talk to us about 3D mail? What that is, why 3Dmail?
Travis Lee: Yeah. So when we say 3D mail, we are literally talking three dimensional mail. So if you think about most of the mail that you get every single day, let’s talk, we’ve talked about postcards already in our short amount of time. We’ve talked about letters, we’ve talked about ValPak, all of that shows up, literally flat, right? There is no third dimension to it. Others have called it lumpy mail and others have called dimensional mail. 3d mail is our trademarked a version of it, right? Those other ones are trademarked as well. But essentially what it is, is you’re doing one of two things. You’re either putting something inside of an envelope that gives it a lump, right? So that, and we call these enclosures, right? Okay. So I have a few examples here. We’ve got a boomerang and it goes into a, into an envelope and I’ve got a great story about how we’ll use a boomerang later.
Travis Lee: But we put a boomerang inside of an envelope. So now as soon as someone picks up the letter, they know there’s obviously something inside. We use the boomerang to get lost patients back. So we say, we want you back, right? So we send out that letter. We can talk about that one more later.
Travis Lee: What else do we have? Oh, we’ve set little bags of stranded money, right? So these are about the size of a business card, the little bags filled with real money. We actually get this from the federal reserve. We have to order it about twice a year from them and we get hundreds of pounds of it. Um, and as you can imagine, dealing with, uh, entity like the federal reserve, some kind of can take, you want to pull your hair out, right? But yeah, so anyway, we have these little bags full of shredded money and we buy them.
Travis Lee: And like I said, a hundred, you know, 50 or 75 pound bags and we buy two dozen of them at a time or something like that. And we put them down into little like business card size bags and this, now we use, so for a dentist or somebody like that, we would use this for say as an end of year, use your benefits campaign, right? So you’ve got your list of people who have a who, who do have insurance but you know, they haven’t been in yet so they haven’t used it, right? We send them now a little bag of shredded money along with a letter and say, don’t waste your money. You’ve, you know, you’ve prepaid for this. If you don’t use it, you lose it. So we, we do that kind of campaign. Those are, those are what we call enclosures. Now the next thing we have are what we call self mailers.
Travis Lee: And these are really cool. These things actually don’t go inside of anything. They actually mailed themselves. So, um, if you want to go as we’re following along, go to three D mail results.com you can see pictures of all this stuff, the number three, letter D, mail results.com. So what do I mean by a self mailer? So I’ve got one in front of me here. So same idea as the shredded money, but this time we send them a real vinyl bank bag. So if you can imagine in your head like you remember that the Kashi used to have to take down to the bank at the end of the day, right? So it’s vinyl, it’s got a zipper on the top right? We actually put a letter inside there, same idea, user lose it, benefits, that’s the promotion we’re running. And we actually put the bank bag in the mail just as it is with the mailing label and postage on it.
Travis Lee: So as you can imagine, somebody receiving that in the mail, it’s going to be the only time in their life they’re ever going to get a real vinyl bank bag in the mail. Right? So imagine the, what they’re going to see and feel and act and you know all the things that are going to go on in their head when they get this thing and it shows up in their mailbox. So that’s, that’s it in a nutshell. Again, three D mail results.com you can kind of file follow along as we talk about this. But the bottom line is with, with the direct mail that we do is it looks and feels different than everything else. Your patient, your prospect, whomever it is, is at that day, that week, that month or the year, which is the biggest thing we want to do. We want to get attention. And if we can get attention with any and all of our marketing and advertising, now we’ve got a chance.
Mark Thackeray: Absolutely. Absolutely. And that’s the hardest thing nowadays, right, is if we have, we’re literally bombarded with four, they say four to 10,000 different advertising messages every single day. Yep. You know, and, and it’s up to us. It’s our, it’s really, it’s our responsibility to, like you said before, cut through the clutter and help them understand what the benefits are for them. Right. So anyway, we can do that. And this is a fantastic way, is by including something that make this letter, makes this package unusual so that it stands out. It doesn’t just get looked over or tossed aside.
Travis Lee: Yeah. And that’s what we, that’s exactly what we wanna do. We, and it doesn’t matter what any kind of advertising or marketing that you’re doing. Right. I don’t care if it’s television, radio, I don’t care if it’s billboards. If you’re still in the yellow pages, if you’re Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and I don’t care what it is. If people don’t stop and pay attention, you don’t got a shot. Right. And so what we’re trying to do here is take a media direct mail that we know doesn’t have a ton of, of of competition like it once did that there’s still a lot of mail being mailed out. I, there were other stats I could’ve given you mail volume as a whole is up year over year. Every year it has been since 2009 right. So, well we want to go ahead, sorry.
Mark Thackeray: All right. I was just going to say that’s the thing. You see companies that are strictly digital companies. I get mailers from Google, you know, for their ad words. I get mailers, you know, I’m all of these companies that you would think only advertise online because that’s their bread and butter, but they’re utilizing the power of direct mail because of those reasons. Like you said, it’s a great way to get attention, but also there’s less competition there.
Travis Lee: Yeah, it’s amazing how many of these digital companies have been some of the world’s largest mailers over the years, right? Compaq, HP were giant. Dell were giant mailers to begin with, right? Google is one of the biggest mailers out there. I wear UNTUCKit shirts, right? That’s a, that’s a brand I love. A brand born online, direct to consumer. They send me a catalog about every single month. They are right now running a Christmas campaign and I’m actually going to write about it in one of my case studies. They have sent me two direct mail pieces and two emails all tied together, all delivering a consistent, persistent and consistent message, right? So even these brands that were born online said what do they all say? Why can we give you, save you so much money? Cause you’re going direct to us. We’re all built online and it’s also seamless and easy.
Travis Lee: Right? UNTUCKit now has like 32 stores. So, I mean you’re exactly, you bring up a file, you bring up a great point, right. But if Google ad words were so good, would Google ad words need to advertise and mail or would they just do Google ad words? Cause they know there’s people that they cannot reach online and they know that so they use it.
Mark Thackeray: Absolutely. And I love that idea of the vinyl bank bag. I actually spent a number of years working at the teller in a bank in college. So I, I love that idea. Yeah. And then did the fact that gets something like that in the mail. Oh man, that’s gotta be so exciting. And really, it really just positions you as someone different as someone who’s thinking not only outside the box, but you’re spending time thinking about your customers or in this case your patients.
Travis Lee: Right? Yup. Yup. And, and you know, to use that UNTUCKit example, right, where they’ve sent me a couple direct mail pieces, a couple of emails with all they’re doing is marketing to their existing client base, right? They’ve got a database where you’ve got a patient database, so to run an end of year campaign for people who have not used their benefits and you know it and you’ve got them on record. And if you can pull those addresses out and you can pull those emails out and maybe for some of the high value ones, maybe you do, you know, maybe you’ve got a family of six, boy, it sure would be nice to get that family of six and wouldn’t hit, right? Maybe you pick up the phone and call and even, right. So when you can use all the media at your disposal, it’s one of those things where each one helps the other, right?
Travis Lee: So because you sent a direct mail, your emails are going to get open more, but because you send emails, your direct mail is going to get looked at more and it really has this snowball effect especially within your own patient base. Right? Especially if you’re just marketing in that little world.
Mark Thackeray: Exactly. Exactly. And I’ve seen that a lot with our, with our clients that I work with where if you take that more strategic approach where it’s, yeah, you’re, you’re offering multiple touches through different media channels. You know, it could be email, it could be direct mail, it could be a, like you mentioned some of the more traditional media, it could be the phone call, all those things. Right? I mean, it allows you to really build a stronger relationship, um, because you know, if you’re, if you’re just using one media than it breeds contempt, you know, I mean, it’s, it’s easy to get, you know, fed up with just, Hey, I get this email every single day. I’m sick and tired of these guys. Even though you may have had a good relationship with that company prior to that, but it’s just overload.
Travis Lee: No, you’re exactly right. Dan. As you’ve mentioned a couple of times, Dan has my favorite, one of my favorite phrases of him is one is the worst number in business. One of anything. So one way to get clients, one way to get clients to refer to you. I’m not a big deal in dentistry of course, but any one big, any one big customer or client, right. You see that more in the B to B space, right? So if you do work for Microsoft and then they cut you off, you’re in big trouble. Right. But still it’s one of anything. That’s what you don’t want.
Mark Thackeray: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, okay, tell us, Travis, how did you get this started? What, what made you get into this in the first place?
Travis Lee: The funny question and then I’ll, I’ll keep it relatively brief, but uh, my father started a business, actually didn’t start it. He took it over as general and then later owner. And so he had been a student of Dan Kennedy’s forever as well. And so he had used this kind of stuff to grow that business. And that business was a wholesale distribution company and we sold mainly to small chain and independent retail stores, right? So the independent dog store, the independent men’s wear store, the independent jeweler, um, perhaps, uh, perhaps a small chain, maybe they’ve got 20 or 30 locations, right? But we used this kind of stuff, right? Shredded money. We used real dollar bills, fake dollar bills, $2 bills. I mean, we’ve used all this stuff, right?
Travis Lee: And you know, we got to the point where, you know, we were going into, you know, places like Dan Kennedy’s mastermind group and bill Glazer’s mastermind group and people, you know, would ask us, Hey, where do you get these ideas? What do you do? And our answer was, well, we usually go to the dollar store and if we can find 5,000 of anything that we want, we buy it at least kind of figure out a way to use it, right? Um, and it got to the point where, okay, we had now sourced these things fairly well and we had a big, so semi instructive here for some of you, right? We took core competency to seize of one business and transformed it to another business, right? So we, we could buy, well, we could break bulk, we could hold, we could buy and hold inventory and then we could ship it out on a smaller level, right? Straight up distribution business. Right? But we did that pretty well.
Travis Lee: And so when people started coming to us and asking, what, where were we got? And we said, well, what do you need? What can we find you? It turned into, um, you know, this, this offshoot wholesale distribution business, right? And since then, we’ve actually sold that business that sold to the retail stores for a lot of reasons I won’t get into, but we kept the direct mail business and now we’ve become a full fledged direct mail business. So we’ve got the, what we call chotskies and 3d mail stuff, right? But then we also do, I think we’re going to send close to 3 million postcards this year, right? We’re going to send regular letters, right? But so our whole front door is this 3d mail thing, right? So we’ve got this kind of inch wide mile deep, if you will, niche that we’ve carved out for ourselves, right? So I guess some of the marketing lessons there are, what are you good at and what are the, where do those things transform to?
Travis Lee: And, and then what little space can you occupy that has a lot of depth to it. Right? Um, but that’s, that’s our kind of our story is that it, we used it so effectively that people ask more and more and we decided to start a business around it, right? So, uh, it was kinda nice to have demand built in.
Mark Thackeray: Yeah, absolutely. Well, in just the fact that you use that yourself, right? It’s not theory, it’s not anything like that. It’s stuff that you’ve applied, you’ve gone down in the trenches to grow your business, and it’s worked so well that you made that into its own business of helping other clients, helping other businesses achieve that same type of success. And that’s really kind of what the, the true question shouldn’t be. It’s not, you know why direct mail is, is it should be looking more at a, what type of ROI can I generate? Right? Travis Lee: Oh yeah. Yeah.
Mark Thackeray: So talk to me about that in terms of you’re looking at direct mail and it’s, it’s all we, we mentioned in the intro, I mean, you’re getting great results on this, on these campaigns. So yeah. Talk about how direct mail and how it generates those type of results.
Travis Lee: Yeah. Well, so with any kind of marketing, right? If you’re doing true direct response marketing, right, and you’re counting dollars in and dollars out by and large. Now there, you know, and we’ll talk about some of the exceptions, but by and large, if you don’t get enough money to pay for the advertising, then it’s not worth doing, right? That’s right. Right? So we got to know how many dollars are going in, how many dollars are going in and going out. Now having said that, you know, that’s what we’re really concerned about with, with all of our marketing is what’s the return on investment right now?
Travis Lee: That’s not to say we don’t care about costs. I live in the real world too. I don’t have an unlimited funds of money. I can go and pull out of the bank, right? So there are real costs of this, but generally speaking, we can know if we spendX amount of dollars on a campaign, we can realistically, without having tremendous success just with having average or good success, can we get a positive return on that? And there are several different campaigns that we know in a lot of different industries because I certainly don’t work only with dentists. Right? Right. There’s a lot of stuff that we know that can have a positive ROI if not right away relatively soon. So here’s what I mean by that. We’re talking and maybe about a loss leader saved maybe to get somebody into the chair. Right? So it’s the, it’s the gallon of milk in the back of the grocery store, right?
Travis Lee: Because once we get them in, so we may not make a ton of money on the first visit. Right? So I told you about the, the retail supply company that we had. We had one campaign that we knew worked like gangbusters, but it worked like gangbusters after month nine. And here’s what I mean by that. We knew, you know, so we actually, when we were finally able to get somebody to place an order with us, right? We actually lost money on that first order because of the cause of what we gave away to get it right. In terms of the cost of the freebies we were giving away in the specials we were doing and the cost of the direct mail pieces, but we knew that if we could get them to month nine they would be a positive client every their, every time they order thereafter.
Travis Lee: Right? So for us it wasn’t necessarily important to make money right on that first order because we sold a disposable product. We knew that if they were made, so their retail stores, right? So if they remained in business and if we did our good, good job of marketing and sales, marketing and sales after that first order, they were going to where they were going to be, we were going to be so far ahead in the long run, it didn’t matter. It was, it was, you know, the ROI was incredible. If you look at our very first direct mail campaign, right? We had one client, we could attribute about one point $2 million to alone right now. That was over the course of 20 years. Right? But the original, the original cost of acquisition was probably 50 bucks. Would you spend 50 bucks to get like one point $2 million?
Travis Lee: I think so. Right? If you’re a dentist and you want to get that patient in the chair, right? You’ve got that cost of acquisition. But, um, well let’s talk about new movers. Mark, you and I talked about this a little bit on the pre-call, right? So two, so one of the things that we know works really darn well for a lot of, a lot of local healthcare businesses like dentists, like orthodontists, like chiropractor’s, like general practice, uh, general practice, medical doctors, that kind of stuff, like those types of deals. We know that a whole bunch of people when they move are gonna move those different things, right? They’re going to get a new dentist, they’re going to get into optometrists, yada, yada, yada. Well, if we’re able to get that person in the chair the first time and it may cost us a hundred bucks to get them in the chair and they may be only paying us 150 bucks for a new patient visit or something like that, right?
Travis Lee: Whatever kind of promotion we’re running, we’re losing money on that person. But if we can get them in every six months and we know that we’ve got a five year value, so we get 10 more visits out of it every visit after that as a profitable visit, right? So now we’ve got to think in terms of the lifetime value of a client or in your case of patient as well, right? One of the things that we oftentimes do is when we do these new movers, we often will target only married people or married people with families. Why do we do that? Because chances are if we get mom or dad in, we’re going to get the other one in or we’re going to get the kids. And if that, if we want to do, if we want to do children, right? So we multiply, so we actually can multiply our response that way as well. Um, so there’s lots of different ways to do it, but you’re exactly right what we want to look at as our return on investment. And it may not be positive on that very first visit, but it’ll be positive every time thereafter. And that’s where the money is going to be made. As long as you’ve got something and, and by and large, most of the people on this podcast are going to have a, not a disposable product. Like I had a recurring maintenance product, if you will, that be in the patient themselves. Absolutely.
Mark Thackeray: Absolutely. And it really requires you to look at your business a little bit more. And I wouldn’t say scientifically, but just to take a closer look at what you’re doing and really understand the numbers behind it. Right? I mean, understanding, okay, what does this patient worth the first visit? What does it typically worth? Second visit? And like you said, what is that calculating that lifetime value of a patient so that now once you understand that you can, you know exactly how much you can afford to invest to acquire that patient, right? It’s not this, it’s not just this, Hey, I’m hoping to make you know, $15,000 off this one campaign because that’s typically not going to happen.
Mark Thackeray: But, but if you can understand that, Hey, if I invest, you know, 5,000 and I and I generate a hundred new patients that end up staying with me for five years, the production value of that is going to be our, it’s going to be multiple. It’s probably multiples of 10 or 20 that original investment.
Travis Lee: Yeah, and you articulated that just right? You need to work backwards. You need to say that. Now if you’ve got a brand new practice, you might have to use some industry practice norms, right? But if you’ve been around for three, five, 10 years, you have these numbers. You just need to go look them up, right? What’s our average retention? What’s our average patient value? Multiply those things to get a lifetime value. What I will often do is then say knock 20 or 30% off of that for budgeting purposes. Just say, Hey, we may or may not. Maybe they end up 120% of that, but let’s, let’s reign in the numbers so we can, let’s be real here.
Travis Lee: Um, right. And so now maybe it’s and so whatever that number is, that’s what I’m willing to be. How much of that am I willing to spend to get a new patient? Right? So if it’s $200 a year for 10 years, two grand, am I willing to spend $200 to get that person, the patient? If I get that patient in the chair and I willing to spend $100 of it? Right. And so you’re exactly right. You can work backwards to get the number that you need and then spend accordingly on the front end. Right. We basically did that every time. We found that a good number for us.
Travis Lee: Again, when we had that retail supply company cause the campaign works so well, we knew that if we sent out a thousand letters a month and we did, she typically did them in two batches of 500 that that wouldn’t put us out too much money on the front end. Knowing that nine months from now we will now be positive with that person. Right? And so now if we look at over a nine month horizon, we’re now, if, if, if everything holds to form by month 10 we’re making money on all those from 10 months ago. So we’re constantly feeding our own marketing budget, right? With the people we got. So we were kind of on a nine month lag, if you will. But once nine months go by, we’re feeding that beast and we’re feeding that money. And we knew that about a thousand pieces every month was a great target for us. Now you only do the only know that when you target, when you do this for several years, right? So that would be the challenge for you. You know, what can we do for new movers to get people in? What can we do? Maybe we do, um, you know, more, um, I don’t want to say higher end stuff, but more expensive stuff, bridges and that kind of stuff.
Travis Lee: So you’re doing a, you know, you may be, uh, uh, targeting an affluent retiree or somebody like that, right? Is there a way to create a campaign now that we can target those people and that we just pay the loss patients that we talked about with the boomerang, the, the use it or lose it benefits. Once you create these campaigns and you can kind of fine tune them as you go, you can, you’ll, you’re going to know every time I run this campaign I’m going to get X amount of money and that means X amount of money now and Y amount of money going forward. And it really does turn into, you know, pretty simple algebra that if I sat down with my 10 year old boy with my 10 year old son, I could probably explain it to him. Right? It’s not that difficult, but you think about it that way.
Mark Thackeray: Right. And that’s, that’s the fun math though. You know, I mean it’s, it’s the, okay now we can really take this knowledge, apply it to grow and scale predictably. Cause now we have, we’ve looked at the system, we’ve looked at our process and proven over a period of time that Hey, this is in your case it was nine months cycle, you know, and if it’s, if it’s nine months cycle and this is how many I’m producing because of that or thanks to that. Okay. If I just, and like you said, it’s kind of a self-feeding process. It’s self-sustaining system now you can look at that and scale predictably that is such an empowering position to be in because you feel like now it’s really left up to you how far you want to take this.
Travis Lee: Yup. And that’s what you’re looking to do as a marketer of your business is to find and that Dan Kennedy calls it great. I’ll steal it from him cause I can’t think of a better way to put it. These little oil Wells, right. In some oil Wells, you know, you can dig every month for a new mover, some oil Wells, you can only dig once at the end of the year for the user lucid campaigns. But you’re digging these Wells and you know, based on history what, you know, if I spend, if I target, you know, hundred and 80, you know, use it or lose it, insurance people, I’m going to getX amount of those to come into the office that’s going to result in X amount of business. Right? Uh, you know, we do a lot of work with auto repair shops and to a certain degree, you guys are similar in that, um, you know, an auto repair shop for them.
Travis Lee: The, you know, the oil changes, the loss leader, right? They make a few bucks on it, but it’s when they get in the habit of continuing to bring their car to you and now they need that 60,000 mile tune-up, now they need that 90,000 mile tuneup. Now they need the brakes checked, right? Heaven forbid, we don’t want any of our patients to ever have an issue. But when they do, we’re there and now, now we’re now working. Those are the times, it’s like my guy that I told you who you had, we could trace about one and a half million dollars to, you know, there was a lot of little orders, right? And then there was one big hundred thousand dollar order, five leads, right? So you’re going to get those two, you got to keep in your ecosystem. You got to get ’em in. Right?
Mark Thackeray: Absolutely. Absolutely. So we’ve talked about a number of, of uh, B to C, uh, examples, right? Of things that we can do to our existing patients. So a lot of times I get questions from a orthodontist specifically, well, I work B2B, you know, so does this, does this still work in that environment?
Travis Lee: Yeah, it’s a, it’s a little funny because my consumer facing patients are confused. Consumer facing companies. My, my, my customers, Oh, that may work with businesses where, you know, you’ve got to get attention of a CEO or a CFO or another doctor. And then I’ve got my B2B guys who say, Oh, that may work to consumers because you know, it’s going to their homes. And what we find that it works equally well in both places, right? There are some things to consider, which I’ll get it to in here in just a second, but by and large, people are, people are buyers or buyers. I was talking to a gal this morning on a, on a call similar to this and she had a great, she had a great term for it. I’ll, I’ll steal it from her. She called it H to H, market marketing, human to human, right? It doesn’t matter if you’re marketing towards it.
Travis Lee: If you’re an orthodontist or a periodontist and you’re marketing to a general dentist, I don’t care what it is, they’re still a person on the end of that line. Not a, not a business, right? There’s still a person. Right? Um, and really sometimes if you are marketing to those people, so again, if you’re an orthodontist trying to get attention from other, from other general practice, general practice dentists, you ain’t the only one doing that. And this stack of mail is this big. So how are you going to get attention? How are you going to get it past the office manager? How are you going to get it past the spouse who is pilfering 90% of the mail before it gets to the doctor anyway, right? How are you going to do with it? Well, so you’ve, in many cases, you’ve got to do something a little different and a little unique to get to those people, right?
Travis Lee: You know, but that’s the biggest thing is, is you’ve just gotta be different if it doesn’t get looked at, open read, listened to, if they delete your email before they open it, I don’t care if they scroll past your Instagram ad before looking at it. None of that matters unless we get eyeballs on it, right? So it’s the same idea. And in fact, in many cases, I told you we’d cover a couple things in the B to B space. It oftentimes pays for itself in a multiple times over, right? Because now all these other ways we’ve been talking about how to go get one more patient. If we’re lucky, maybe we get two or three because we got mom in and now she brings the spouse in and maybe they bring their kid in, right? So we’re really talking a one to one transaction.
Travis Lee: If you can go and get these people who could send you three patients a month, five patients a month, 15 patients a month, whatever the number is, well now you’ve got a multiple value on there, right? So again, we’re going to play that same game. If I can, if I can reasonably expect one patient a month for this guy to refer to me, right? Well that’s 12 a year. Let’s do the math. Let’s make the math nice and easy. Let’s say that’s 10 let’s say each patient is worth $1,000 that’s $12,000 how much of that $12,000 am I willing to give to get in front of a dentist or get in front of a an influence who are could refer me a ton of business? Boy, I’d tell ya a whole lot of that 12,000 I’d be willing to give maybe, maybe even all of it if I know my lifetime value. Now again, there’s some of that that might be, you know, an orthodontist, the lot, you know, you get the money out, you get the money in a shorter period of time, right. Because hopefully they don’t come back, hopefully. Hopefully. So you gotta take that into consideration. But that’s a very good point is to think about this strategically, even to your referral partners, right? All that kind of stuff.
Mark Thackeray: Yeah, that reminds me. So I had a photography business fresh out of college that I started and I worked a lot with wedding vendors, right? So I did a lot of wedding photography and it’s very similar to an orthodontist who wants to get referrals from other general dentists. So I was looking to build relationships with other wedding vendors. So coordinators, venues, etc. So those are the things that I did. I would send them, I would mail them, I did two things, primarily. One, I’d mail them a newsletter and I called it something different cause I didn’t want it to appear like a traditional newsletter that was or stale or anything like that. So I called it something different and just made it very entertaining, very fun to look at, mostly visual just so that I could be in front of them on a regular basis without necessarily picking up the phone and say, Hey, do you have any referrals for me?
Mark Thackeray: And then the other thing I did was once I worked with them, I would send them some type of 3d mail piece. You know, I remember one particular client, she was a wedding planner up at one of the ski resorts up here at deer Valley. Very high end resort and had been a great referral partner for me. And so I remember once I got to know her, I knew that she was from Louisiana was a big LSU fan that was, you know, they loved watching football. And so I got one of those big inflatable, they’re like the inflatable football players that you punch and then they pop back up and the sand in the bottom. And so I got a big LSU one and I sent it over to her and she was just elated. And she of course you never forgot about that and never forgot about me. And was always a great source of referrals for me and that, you know, that may be cost me 50 bucks, a hundred bucks, whatever. But, but because of that relationship, she, she probably gave me 20 to 50,000, well, it probably more like $50,000 worth of business in a short couple of years. So it’s, it’s an easy way to build and maintain those relationships and, and like you said, to stand apart from everyone else.
Travis Lee: Yup. Yup. You’re exactly right. I couldn’t, you know, you know, we’ve been talking about larger numbers. Just the one off thank you gift that is something tangible is a great way to do this kind of stuff. Right? I mean it, it’s all smart.
Travis Lee: At its core, it’s all relationship marketing, just as you said. Right. Can we make somebody comfortable enough to come to our practice to refer to us? That kind of if we can make them comfortable to do that and if we can. And a lot of times if we put a smile on their face because we’re sending them a Pilbara, we’re sending them a bank bag or sending them a boomerang or whatever it may be. That’s a cool way to do it.
Mark Thackeray: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So let’s, we’ve got a few minutes left here. So let me ask a couple of final questions for you, Travis. So if you, if you were in, let’s say your, you’re a dentist and what are of the first things that you would try with 3D mail to generate new business? So I mean you mentioned a couple of those ones already. Just in terms of the new movers, you mentioned the user lose it kind of benefits end of the year campaign. You also mentioned the last patients campaign. If you were in their position, what would you start with?
Travis Lee: You know of the, so some of the ones we’ve talked about, the easiest, and this goes for almost any business, I think the easiest, quickest money to test direct mail in general, specifically 3d mail is with, in your guys’s case, a lost patient. But what we would call a lost client campaign, right? Go find the list of people who have not been in the practice for 12 months, whatever your cutoff time is, and do a concerted effort to get them back in.
Travis Lee: And that would go for darn near any business you can think of under the sun, right? Pull them out of your database, right? So that now, now we can put them, what I like to save, we put them in their own little cocoon, right? So they’re going to maybe get a boomerang from us and then they’re going to get an email with a subject line of …did you get my, did you get my boomerang mate? Write something fun, right? And now they’re going to get a, and maybe it’s a picture of the dentist or the staff and they’re all holding their boomerangs, right? And it’s, did you get our boomerang? We send it to you. And it’s because we, so the gist of this is… “as you know, dear Mark, we want you back. As you can see, I’ve, I’ve enclosed a boomerang into this, into this package I’ve done. So for two very important reasons. One, I had to get your attention and make sure you saw this. I thought this was a fun, clever way and it would make you laugh a little bit. And number two, we haven’t seen you in 22 months or 14 months or whatever it is. And we really want you to get, come back to the family, right?”
Travis Lee: Well now if you send a letter like that, if you send an email with some kind of mention of the boomerang in the subject line, hopefully that email hits you and you can time this pretty darn well. That email hits a few days after the boomerang gets there, right? And now maybe if you do text messaging or if you do, again for if you want to make outbound phone calls, I’m sure most of the people in this on this call that are listening and if they’re in a practice that is doing any kind of proactive sales or marketing they’re making, they’re making phone call reminders or checking reminders and that kind of stuff.
Travis Lee: This now is a great way to use those people, right? So you, you know, I’ve got a list of 200 patients that should do that. I need to do call reminders to where do I even start? Well, let’s start with these 50 that got the boomerang right? And, and do that. So that’s number one. That’s the first one I would do for any and all businesses, right? That’s professional practice. I don’t care what it is. Everyone has lost patients, lost clients, lost customers. Go out and get them.
Travis Lee: And now if I were going to go get new blood, I would do one of two things. I love the new mover idea, right? I didn’t get to these stats, but at something like 68 or 72% of all people who move are going to change a dentist and optometrist. They’re gonna, you know, and it, the numbers, you know, are, are pretty substantial, right? So we know we, and so what I like to do when I have my direct mail is I like to put myself in the best position to win with just having OK stuff and want to be just an okay list. Just an okay offer, right? We’re not talking about getting the, the, the best copywriters in the world to write our letters, write that. That’s most of us. We can’t afford that. Heck, I can’t afford that. Right? Right. So when we think of direct mail, we have to think what lists are available of people who have a high probability of meeting in wanting what I have, right? Well, based on numbers, we know that someone who moves is gonna change a whole lot of stuff. And one of them is their primary care dentist, almost always, right? So let’s like try to go get that person.
Travis Lee: Let’s take this another step up. Let’s say we do implant dentistry, right? So now what’s a list that I can have maximum success with? Well, it might be a, an affluent older person, married, it might be a life event, right? So maybe spouse recently died, spouse recently divorced or something like that. But these are all lists that are available now who are, who make up people that are more likely to need my services than just Joe Schmo off the street, right? So if I was a cosmetic dentist, I would be getting a list of all the rich divorces, right? And that would be who I, if I was in cosmetic dentistry, you better believe that was the list I’m going to be mailing every month, right? And I don’t need to mail a whole lot of them to get one or two patients and, and pay that thing many, many, many times over.
Travis Lee: Right? So that’s what you want to look for. You want to look for who is more susceptible for what I do right now. And what list matches up to that. So those are a few of them right there. Right. And again, depending on your specialty, you know, there’s a litany of them depending on if you’re a general dentist or if you do specialty work, that kind of stuff, right? Obviously for, for someone who do, who does wisdom teeth extraction or who does orthodontia braces that Invisalign kids entering high school kids entering their teens, that’s a list that you can get, right? So there’s, that’s what you want to look for. Mark Thackeray: Well those are great. Those are great. I’ve used both of those examples. Lost patient campaign, new movers campaign, and I’ve also done a use it or lose it benefits campaign. And it’s been interesting as I’ve tested some of those.
Mark Thackeray: So let’s take that final example with the year end. Use a user dental benefits campaign. I tested, okay, so a mailer, a standalone mailer to a portion of the list and digital ads served to just a portion of less than that. And I did a combination of the two where they received a mailer plus some type of digital ad. They were served a digital ad during that timeframe. And it was so interesting to see that, you know, and it just blew me away, but I thought the combination of the two would work the best. But the one that outperformed the others was the just the direct mail one by itself. So I got not only a higher conversion rate, but the production value was much greater from just the direct mail then from either the other two options.
Travis Lee: Well, and you see, that’s interesting that you mentioned the, the digital stuff too. What is great about most of these social media platforms is they really get the idea of microtargeting like the direct response guys do in the offline world, right? They have all really done the David Ogilvy direct response marketing and put it on the online. That’s all they’ve really done. Right? Right. And so we could take a list of rich, recent divorcees, divorcees, and we can get that mailing list and we can upload it to Facebook or Instagram and we can match them based on their name and address and now we can serve them to different media. Right? So, you know, you know, so there’s, there’s lots of different ways to skin that cat. It’s interesting that you said the, the standalone direct mail piece work. I would’ve thought that the, the a multitouch approach would work. It just goes to show none of us really know anything. You gotta try it. You gotta test it, right? We’re, we’re, some of us are making more educated guesses than others, but the bottom line is put it out there and if it makes money, you do it again.
Mark Thackeray: I know. Exactly. I always do what’s working. So true. So true. Well, Travis, I just want to say thanks again for taking the time. So many, so many great ideas in here. If you took even just one of those and implemented, it could mean so much business for your or your practice. How many new patients, so much production value just through one of these ideas. So I really appreciate you taking the time just to be with us today. Where can, where can our listeners find out more about 3D Mail? Where can they, if they want to get in touch with you, what’s the best way to do that?
Travis Lee: The best place to go is to get my free book on how to successfully use 3D mail in your business. It’s called The Definitive Guide to 3D Mail: Exploding the Results of Your Direct Mail Advertising. And you can get that at 3Dmailresults.com/book. And it has all different kinds of ideas on letters to use. We give you what’s called a swipe file. So you actually give you some of the letters, right? We give you like 46 different letters you can use using 22 of our different items, right? It’s, it tells you, it talks a lot about some of the stuff we talked about today and knowing your numbers. But then that’ll also get you a little booklet on how to use this. So you get the book, you get the swipe file, 3dMailResults.com/Free. It’s completely free. There’s no catch, there’s no like it’s free, but you got to pay two 99 shipping, none of that. I just need a mailing address. We actually physically mail you a book.
Mark Thackeray: Wow. That is awesome. And that’s actually one of the things that I love about you guys, Travis, is that you guys include these sales letters, these templates that people can download and edit or just use straight up as, as they are already, you know, because that’s, that’s been a big hangup for a lot of clients, a lot of practices that I’ve talked to, they just, they don’t know how to get that started. So that is a huge, huge resource there. And that’s so much value. So, so yeah, go to that. I’ve got a copy of that book myself. Soooo many things in there. Go there and check that out. But once again, thanks again Travis for first taking the time to be with us today and we’ll have to have you back on soon sometime soon.
Travis Lee: Sounds great, Mark, thanks for having. Thanks for inviting me. You bet ya have a good one. Yep.
Mark Thackeray: That is it, my friends. Thank you for joining us today on Dental Marketing Secrets. If you have any comments, questions, or feedback, I would love to hear from you. Simply email me at markthack@gmail.com.
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