How Social Media & Email Marketing Can Get Holiday Specials Noticed
The holiday season will soon be upon us. With traditions of festive food and family time comes the yearly increase in spending. As we work on our wish lists, many brands are ramping up their marketing efforts to advertise goods and services with one purpose: to get our attention. Just as department stores proliferate their limited-time specials online, so should your dental or medical practice!
Marketing to prospective patients during the holiday season tends to be an especially rewarding endeavor. Whether people are looking for gifts to give or receive, there’s no doubt they’re more willing to splurge on products or elective treatments during the holiday season that they may have hesitated to pursue in the past. For the best chance at reaching your target audience, there are two channels, in particular, where you should direct your practice’s focus: social media and email marketing.
Why Promote Specials via Social Media & Email?
Promoting your practice’s specials via sponsored social media posts and email blasts can motivate interested readers to learn more about what you have to offer. This is especially true nowadays, when the average person checks their email and social media accounts numerous times per day. If you strategically place information about your specials where people are already looking, it’s likely they’ll not only become familiar with the deals you’re promoting, but also click through to decide whether they want to make a purchase. Herein lies the importance of optimizing your social media and email marketing efforts.
Social and Email Marketing Offer Measurable Success
Your advertising is only as good as the number of people it reaches, and how relevant your special is to these individuals. For online marketing, the following factors will have a significant impact on your ROI:
Social Media Benefits to Holiday Marketing Plan
Social media offers (often free) tools to target the right demographics, create branded visual/written content that captures attention, establish a sufficient advertising budget for each platform, and run your campaigns at the most opportune time. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook allow doctors and dentists to hyper-focus on a specific type of user, advertising their holiday specials directly to a given audience with the goal of growing a subsection of one’s patient base. Not only does social media marketing offer tangible metrics to evaluate and improve upon, but social channels also:
- Give your holiday specials unlimited reach — In a 2024 report, 48 percent of social media users said they are interacting with brands more frequently than before, a clear sign that brand-consumer engagement continues to grow in both value and reach.1 One of social media’s greatest strengths is its ability to share and proliferate content quickly. For healthcare practices, this means building relationships with a wider range of patients by maximizing the visibility of treatments, products, and seasonal specials.
- Build brand loyalty — In a recent global survey, 89 percent of business leaders reported that brand influence is extremely or very important to organizational success, underscoring how trust, reputation, and digital engagement now drive loyalty and perception.2
- Allow practices to stay competitive — A solid digital presence gives modern healthcare practices an opportunity to set themselves apart from local competition. Strong, strategic, and seasonal branding across all of your social channels can lend you more authority and credibility in your market, increasing the likelihood of patients choosing to entrust you with their goals.
Email Marketing Benefits to Holiday Marketing Strategy
The keys to successful email marketing include having a quality email list, enticing recipients to open and read your email, offering useful information for subscribers, and making it easy for users to access and/or pay for specials and gift cards online. Holiday email campaigns can be invaluable for a number of reasons:
- Driving engagement and conversions — Email marketing reaches specific consumers who have already expressed interest in your services. During the holiday season, the potential for conversions is often higher than it is at any other point in the year; in fact, Keywords Everywhere reports that 68% of shoppers pay closer attention to brand emails during this season.
- Ensures your brand is top-of-mind for consumers — Email marketing allows promotions and deals to land right in a potential patient’s inbox, allowing you to emphasize your treatment specials and keep your brand at the forefront of consumers’ minds.
- Creates room for personalization — Customizing your email marketing plan with content that relates to your audience’s needs can be highly effective in turning hesitant consumers into longtime patients. Your subscribers will be more likely to click-through to your services if they resonate with your brand and advertising materials.
People Are Already Scrolling for Savings
Ever wait until the very end of the year to schedule your annual dental and medical appointments? You’re not alone. As the last couple of months before the New Year, the holiday season is a very busy time for men and women scrambling to attend last-minute appointments and achieve end-of-year goals. This provides healthcare practices with ample opportunity to push deals, discounts, and treatment packages that will certainly pique the interests of consumers looking to save big, especially when these offerings are presented on the very platforms where potential patients spend much of their time.
Part of the reason why email and social marketing are so effective has to do with the increasing mobilization of our world. Recent data shows that mobile devices now drive 57% of global e-commerce sales, a dramatic rise from just a few years ago.3 Since most social and email interfaces are specifically designed with a user-friendly mobile experience in mind, it makes perfect sense that these platforms can act as the perfect venue to take advantage of mobile-leaning trends in consumer spending.
Reach a Wider Audience
With social media ads and email marketing, not only can you reach your current patients, but the content can be easily shared, allowing patients to help you spread the word to the rest of your community. You might even want to consider adding a referral component to encourage them to share the post or email. For example, you could offer an additional benefit to your patients if they share the information and a friend or family member books an appointment. Furthermore, you could create a social media contest that encourages viewers to share the specials content and/or tag friends on the post in order to be entered to win a specific prize.
Practical Strategies for Holiday Social Media & Email Campaigns
- Coordinate messaging across channels. Your social media and email campaigns should work hand-in-hand, reinforcing the same message at different touchpoints. For example, if your holiday promotion is a discount on whitening treatments, design your email subject line, Instagram graphic, and Facebook caption around the same core idea. Consistency not only strengthens recognition but also increases the likelihood that patients will remember and act on your offer.
- Use countdown and urgency tactics. The holidays are naturally time-sensitive, so lean into urgency. Add countdown timers in emails, “last chance” language in subject lines, and limited-time offer stickers in Instagram Stories. Patients are more likely to book quickly when they know time is running out.
- Segment and personalize. Segmentation can make your campaigns far more effective. Use email lists filtered by procedure interest (for example, non-surgical vs surgical) and match social ads to those interests. Personalized subject lines, holiday greetings with a patient’s first name, and targeted ads based on demographics make recipients feel seen and valued.
- Leverage visual storytelling. Holiday-themed graphics, before-and-after photos, and patient testimonial videos work beautifully on both email and social. You can optimize your Instagram reels and TikToks to showcase a “holiday glow-up,” while emails can embed patient quotes or seasonal infographics. The key is to make the content both festive and authentic.
- Test and optimize mid-campaign. Try different subject lines, creative elements, and call-to-action phrasing to see what resonates. For instance, “Gift Yourself Confidence” might outperform “Holiday Special on Implants.” Social ads allow you to test different visuals against the same audience, while email platforms can track which subject line gets more opens. Adjusting during the campaign can ensure you maximize ROI before the holiday window closes.
- Don’t forget mobile optimization. Since a majority of holiday browsing happens on mobile devices, make sure both your emails and social ads are mobile-friendly. That means concise subject lines, clear CTAs, fast-loading landing pages, and vertical video formats for social. A frictionless mobile experience keeps patients engaged and reduces drop-offs.
- Extend the campaign beyond the holidays. Finally, think about what happens after the campaign ends. Collect data on who engaged but didn’t convert, and retarget them with New Year’s promotions. A patient who clicked on a holiday ad for BOTOX® Cosmetic but didn’t book might be more receptive to a January “fresh start” campaign.
I’ve Optimized My Email and Social Marketing Campaigns. What Now?
In addition to these optimization basics, it can be extremely helpful to send your social media and email blast readers to a well-crafted landing page. Many practices choose to have a general “Specials” page on their website, which they frequently update with their latest deals. For campaigns you plan to put a larger emphasis on, you may want to consider a custom landing page dedicated to a specific special or theme of specials. For example, take a look at the “12 Days of Christmas” page below, designed to introduce readers to this dental practice’s holiday deals.
On this custom landing page, visitors were able to find specific deals they could redeem on various days throughout December. This is just one of the many possibilities that can take your holiday campaigns to the next level.
While it is critical to spend time crafting offers that are desirable to your patients and provide enticing value for their investment, in the end, successful holiday specials come down to how well they are promoted. With the right planning and execution, your social media and email marketing can be the tricks to getting your specials noticed!
Want help with promoting your campaigns this holiday season and into the new year?
Contact us to speak with a representative about how you can make the most of your advertising efforts.
References
Marketing Dive1
Agility PR Solutions2
Red Stag Fulfillment3
Editor’s note: The original version of this post was published on November 30, 2017.