Now, of course you want to keep your staff on top of providing the best customer service (as that is what you are doing to ensure cleanliness and above average dental care). But in your promotional materials, promoting how clean your office is will get better results - if you surveyed and that's what the majority of your patients said. It's just an example but I hope you get the point.

The point is you have to survey. An incredible marketer and executive that really had the tech of surveys down was a man named L. Ron Hubbard. He discovered that surveys save you from flying blind in your business marketing strategies and are the best way to find out what you should be offering, to whom and how. In fact, he developed an entire survey technology on how to learn what people’s emotional responses were that caused them to act.

When you don't really know what to put in your direct mail marketing it's because you haven't done your research. You use surveys in order to get a response to your direct mail marketing campaign. You want people to act in response to your promotion.

Surveying can be simple – as simple as looking through your invoices to see what you sell the most of. Then you can ask those patients who come in for that service, what they liked about having that service. Or you could see where most of those patients come from and then market that service to that general zip code or area. Get the majority response and you have more data than when you started.

Here is another example of what a dentist did in Texas who used survey results to attract patients to his practice. First there was an assumption: what people feared the most about going to the dentist was having a needle inserted into their cheek and a cavity removed from their tooth. However, surprisingly it was not the actual dental procedure that most often terrified the patients.

According to the surveys, the site of a needle and the sound of the drill were the two most feared elements of dentistry. Now he promotes that he does “painless injections”. And when you see what his painless injections consist of, it is just the way he performs the injection along with a very sharp, very small needle. But he used surveys to hit the right button and then he educated his prospects about his procedures. (Taken from http://www.qualitydentistry.com/dental/information/painless.html)