Why a postcard still gets opened when a text gets ignored

Every practice I talk to has tried texting lapsed patients. Most have given up on mail, usually because it costs more than a text and feels old fashioned.

The cost part is true. The rest is worth a second look.

A note on the numbers you will see quoted

Search for direct mail statistics and you will find a lot of confident percentages about how many households read their mail. Almost all of them trace back, eventually, to the Postal Service’s Household Diary Study, which is a genuine long-running piece of research where households record what arrives and what they do with it.

It is a reasonable source. The problem is that the figures get repeated for years after the report they came from, usually by companies selling direct mail, and the current year’s report is not always easy to lay hands on.

So I am not going to lead with a percentage. The argument for mail in dental recall does not need one, because it rests on something simpler.

The real reason mail works for recall

A patient who has not been in for two years has often changed their mobile number. Or they have the same number and your texts land in a filtered folder they never open. Or they opted out of texts from your practice three years ago and nobody noticed.

Their address usually still works.

Mail reaches the one channel that degrades slowest. For a list of people who have drifted away, that is exactly the property you need. A text is cheap and fast and reaches the people who were already reachable. Mail reaches the rest.

That is the whole case, and it does not depend on anybody’s response-rate chart. You are not betting that mail outperforms texting. You are using it to reach the slice of your list that texting cannot.

Where mail beats texting on rules, too

This is the part nobody mentions. Texting patients at scale in the US requires carrier registration and documented consent. That takes time, and it is a real constraint on how fast a recall campaign can start. We have written about the registration part separately.

A postcard needs none of that. You can mail a patient who gave you their address at intake without a carrier approving a campaign first.

So when someone promises your recall will be live in two weeks, mail is usually the reason it can be. It is the channel that is ready on day one.

What makes a recall postcard work

Having looked at a lot of these, the ones that do nothing have a few things in common. They look like an advertisement. They talk about the practice. They ask the patient to call during business hours.

The ones that work look like a reminder from somewhere the patient already has a relationship with. Specifically:

• The practice name is obvious and the design is calm, not loud
• The message is short and refers to the patient’s own situation, not a promotion
• There is a way to act that is not a phone call, because the patient is reading this at 7pm on a Tuesday
• Every card is trackable, so you know which ones brought people in

That last point is where most mail falls down. A postcard with a generic phone number tells you nothing. A postcard with a code unique to that patient tells you exactly who scanned it and when.

You can see what we send on the homepage. The sample card flips over so you can read the back, which is where all the work happens.

Use all three, not one

The honest answer is not that mail beats texting. It is that recall campaigns which use one channel leave patients on the table, and which channel that is depends on the patient.

Text the reachable. Call the ones who do not reply. Mail the ones whose numbers have gone cold or who never opted in to texts at all.

That is three jobs, repeated every quarter, forever. It is not difficult work. It is just work nobody at a busy front desk has time to do consistently, which is why we do it.

If you want to see what your own lapsed list is worth before deciding any of this, the report takes about two minutes and asks for counts only.