CLINIC TO PATIENT COMMUNICATIONS (PART 5/5): Measuring the Impact of your E-mail Newsletter Campaigns

It is important to ensure that any marketing or communication campaign you implement at your practice can be tracked to achieve your business and clinical goals, and provide a feedback loop that allows you to learn and improve. 

Using a popular e-mail customer relationship management (CRM) software such as MailChimp or Campaign Monitor enables to track patient engagement metrics such as open, click ,click to open, bounce and unsubscribe rates. This is a powerful benefit of using e-mail as a communication tool compared to printed printed collateral, social media and SMS. As the saying goes, “you can only manage what you measure”. There are also more advanced data analytics tools you can use with such software as you become confident with the basics. 

In reference to e-mail newsletters, tracking metrics and data analytics help the newsletter producer or curator to modify the design and content to improve patient engagement. Key benefits of tracking metrics include but are not limited to: 
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• Personalising content to your patient population including strategic segmentation 
• Informing the clinic on the design, frequency and length of the newsletters
• Refining e-mail subject lines to improve opening rates
• Testing the ideas regarding proposed future health services with your target patient population before investing further resources for official launches 

There are many e-mail marketing benchmark reports you will be able to find online but for the purpose of keeping it simple, we will use the most recent reports from MailChimp and Campaign Monitor.

As a general guide to the healthcare services industry averages for 2019, review the latest e-mail benchmarking reports from MailChimp and Campaign Monitor through clicking on the hyperlinks as highlighted.

HealthAide’s data science team will also provide you with AI-powered data-driven insights from our aggregated data from the data we collect and analyse from all of our customers to assist in personalising the content, patient engagement, business performance and health outcomes. Insights will be specific to your patient demographic profile, type of clinic (GP vs allied health) and various other categories will be factored in. So far in our journey, we have consistently achieved e-mail marketing success rates significantly above industry average benchmarks.  We have researched and market tested themed content with extensive digital media expert input, A/B split testing with the goal to optimise patient engagement and opening rates. This has been an ongoing and dynamic process as we continue to learn from our data analytics and pass on the benefits to our customers.