About NDPL and your target audience.

As a dental stem cell bank, NDPL is dedicated to providing an excellent, trouble free opportunity for consumers to save a unique and valuable stem cell found in their teeth. Additionally, we aim to educate the public and dental professional communities about the potential applications of these cells in treating a wide range of diseases and injuries. We are also committed to ongoing stem cell research, and plan to expand our research and development department to generate pioneering research advancements in the field of therapies involving Mesenchymal Stem Cells (MSCs). Through our research and development, our goal is to assist the medical community in medical treatment of the general public.

We have a few target audiences. One group is parents of children who are just about to start losing their baby teeth, and another is young adults and parents of teenagers who will be having their wisdom teeth taken out. Another target audience is dentists—primarily family dentists and oral surgeons.

How do you grow your subscriber base? Do you use our sign-up forms?

Yes, one way we grow our lists are by offering digital content behind a form, such as our infokit, or a newsletter subscription. Other ways include tradeshows, dentist outreach and education, CE courses, and social media. And yes, we use Zoho Forms!

How do you use email marketing to reach out to them (the type of campaigns you send them)?

We use Campaigns for regular email campaigns, but definitely lean heavily on the program for automation. We have a variety of contact types (customers, dentists, leads, etc), and the various contact types in Zoho CRM will sync into specific subscriber lists in Campaigns. From there, I built out customized Autoresponder campaigns that deploy a series of educational and marketing emails at specific time intervals from subscription, and associated them with the appropriate subscriber list.

To a lesser extent, I use Workflow emails, but usually for regular event emails (holidays, etc). I use good ol’ regular campaigns for things like quarterly newsletters, or emails about price discounts, or upcoming events.

Have you used any other email marketing software before? If yes, how did the shift to Zoho Campaigns happen?

The switch to Zoho Campaigns was a bit of a ‘no-brainer’ for me, as I use Zoho CRM and SalesIQ. But in the same breath, it was not a task of high priority for me, because we were using Mailchimp, and I was pretty pleased with their product. However, after doing a head to head analysis of Mailchimp and Campaigns, that was all I needed to make the switch.

How has using Zoho Campaigns helped your business?

Zoho Campaigns is an integral part of our sales and marketing process here at NDPL. With respects to time savings, automating email communication like this literally saves us hundreds of work hours per year.

With Campaigns we can automatically send customized messages out to subscribers under whatever conditions we choose. For example, we have a list for clients who have enrolled, but have not yet sent back their tooth. In CRM we have data fields for these clients like ‘extraction date’, ‘dentist office’, and ‘tracking #’. Using those fields and merging the data into the email content with merge tags, I can send out a highly customized email to the client two days before their upcoming extraction. The result is an email sent to our client that looks like I personally sat down and sent them a very personalized message. Quality, tailored content that would normally have taken several minutes to complete gets automatically sent out regularly, without me even having to think about it. We’ve done this for several standard pieces of communication, and the time savings has really been pronounced.

Another benefit is subscriber list health. With proper segmenting, we’ve essentially eliminated all misdirected (and therefore likely unwanted) email, which of course helps our open rates and engagement. With customization of content, we’re able to connect personally with our subscribers, which also leads to strong open rates, and keeps them engaged and clicking throughout our email series.

What do you think about our new interface and what's your favorite Zoho Campaigns feature?

The new interface happened right as I became quite adept at using Campaigns, so that was a bit of bad timing! But after hanging out in the old interface for a month more, I switched over to the new interface. It’s nice! I’m a fan of the UI improvements.

Your word of advice for email marketing beginners.

Always be reading, learning, analyzing, and aiming to grow as a content creator. If you’re not swimming, you’re sinking!