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Why You Should Separate Your Transactional and Your Marketing Email Sending

Tuesday, March 4th, 2025

A typical healthcare organization sends at least two distinct classes of email messages: business or transactional emails and marketing emails.

Transactonal email consists of all of the individual, personal messages sent by sales, support, billing and other departments to specific people. These messages are generally more time sensitive and it is very important that the recipients actually receive them. These messages should not be delayed by any kind of spam filtering software, if possible.

Marketing emails are messages sent in bulk to many people at once. Examples of marketing messages include company newsletters, new product offers, promotions and ads, status notices, etc. You will need HIPAA compliant email marketing for this if you are marketing into the healthcare market

Separating your transactional and marketing emails can help ensure they are reliably delivered. Using different email servers and maybe even a unique domain name can improve your email deliverability. This post will look at why.

Separate Transactional and Marketing Email to Improve Deliverability

Successful marketing includes building your brand reputation in the eyes of your current and would-be customers or patients. However, by its very nature, sending marketing email can damage the reputation of your email address, domain, and email servers. It doesn’t have to, but it can … and it can happen in unexpected ways.

Spam Complaints

The larger your marketing mailing list is, the more people are on it who do not really want your email. This is a fact of email marketing, even if you abide by the CAN-SPAM Act and have an “opt-in” list.
The more often you send email to your mailing lists, the more often these people will be annoyed by your email messages.
Some of these annoyed people will complain that your email is “spam,” instead of using the unsubscribe link. This is because they are either too lazy to opt-out, annoyed by the message, don’t believe the opt-opt will work, or never even bothered to look to see if they could opt-out.

This all contributes to the generation of spam complaints. Receiving many spam complaints can cause email servers to start blocking your emails. This can be based on either your email content, your sending email address, or your sending email server IP address.

It is best to keep your complaint rate to a minimum by monitoring your complaint feed back loops, opting out anyone who complains and maintaining active mailing lists that contain only opted-in parties.

Spam Content

By its very nature, the types of email that fall into the bulk email marketing category share many common characteristics. Email filtering software is sophisticated and can often tell the difference between a marketing message and a business message. Sending many messages with spam-like qualities to a recipient server can result in your email being delayed, filtered, or blocked.

Spam-like content detection can be something as simple as the text of the required section of your email that indicates how to “opt-out.” Many legitimate messages can be classified as spam-like simply due to the nature of pattern recognition.

Email Delivery Throughput

Transactional email messages are classified as “transactional.” They are unique messages usually sent throughout the day to individuals. Marketing email messages are called “bulk” emails, meaning the same message is sent in large batches to multiple recipients in short time frames.

The sending of marketing messages can place a significant burden on your outbound email sending servers. Sending many messages within a short time frame can degrade performance and cause your business email to be delivered much more slowly if they are sharing the same outbound service.

Many marketing emails cannot be immediately delivered to the recipients and are placed in a queue to retry over time. For large marketing email lists (and especially in cases where your sending server is getting blacklisted) this can result in large email queues which slow down the delivery of both business and marketing email if sent from the same server.

Blacklisting

An all-too-common side effect of marketing email is having the sending email server blacklisted. When your server is blacklisted, by say yahoo.com, then all email to recipients at that domain will fail to be delivered. If you are sending transactional email through the same server as your marketing email then your transactional email to these same folks will also fail. This is the most critical reason why you should use separate servers for transactional and marketing email.

But how could you get blacklisted?

If your mailing lists have bad email addresses on them. E.g. non-opt in, purchased, spam trap, spidered, or other addresses that you should never email.
If your mailing addresses have lots of invalid email addresses on them. E.g. the list is very old and includes defunct addresses.
Your email content is frequently flagged as spam-like.

It is true that the larger your list and the more you send, the more likely you are to get blacklisted, unless you are careful about managing your subscriber base.

Shared Email Services

If you share outbound email servers with other customers of your provider, then your sending can be impacted by their behavior. If they are sending spam and get the server blacklisted, then that affects your emails as well. The only thing that protects you in these cases is the policies of your email provider. Better yet, use a dedicated server from LuxSci and don’t share your email servers with anyone else.

Recommendations for Successful Emailing

In order to reliably deliver your business and marketing emails, we recommend:

Using a different domain name in the “From” and “Reply” email address for your transactional and marketing emails. E.g. info@widget-wiz.net for your marketing email and info@widget-wiz.com for your business (e.g. sales) email. These can go back to the same person and same INBOX, but having different domains allows blocks on your marketing domain to not affect your business domain.
Using good deliverability tactics and best practices for your marketing email messages.
Sending your marketing email messages through email servers separate from your business email so that black lists and throughput issues do not affect your business email.
Ensuring that your email provider has good policies and controls in place so that other customers do not affect your email’s deliverability.

LuxSci customers:

Can benefit from dedicated email server infrastructure that sends fully HIPAA compliant email
Can use separate High Volume accounts for bulk email. These are sent from separate servers from our business email accounts and are designed for processing mass emails.

Want to learn more, contact us today!

Tags: blacklist, bulk email, business email, deliverability, email marketing, high volume, marketing, marketing email, Transactional
Posted in Business Solutions, HIPAA Marketing
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Patient Engagement: Why Email is an Essential Channel

Saturday, February 22nd, 2025

In today’s increasingly digital world, email is often overlooked as a channel for patient engagement. Email may not appear to be as innovative or exciting as texting, video conferencing, or mobile applications. Nevertheless, email is a powerful tool that remains widely popular and accessible to most of the population, making it an essential channel for patient engagement through HIPAA compliant email marketing.

Email Adoption Rates

Because of its ubiquity, email should be prioritized as part of your patient engagement efforts. In fact, 92% of Americans have email accounts, and 49% check them multiple times daily. Compared to 80% who text, 72% who are social media users, and 85% who have a smartphone, email has one of the highest adoption rates among digital engagement technologies. Even among older populations and disadvantaged communities, email has been widely adopted.

Best of all, email can be secured to meet HIPAA requirements and protect patient privacy, all while providing a personalized patient and customer communications.

Patient Preferences

Communicating according to patient preferences is one of the most important ways to improve engagement. Many people prefer email communication because it’s less intrusive to their daily lives. The pandemic rapidly accelerated the demand for digital services, and healthcare was not exempt from these shifting preferences. A survey conducted by Redpoint Global found that 80% of patients said that they prefer to use digital channels to communicate with healthcare providers at least some of the time.

In today’s digital world, failing to communicate according to preferences can have significant consequences. Accenture found that 34% of people said they would switch medical providers or be less likely to access care in the future because of a poor experience.

Securing data to comply with HIPAA regulations and obtaining patient consent for marketing communications is essential to engaging patients with personalized emails. Email communications are easy to opt-in and out-of, giving patients complete control over how their healthcare data is used.

The Advantages of Email for Patient Engagement

Email has several advantages, but the two most important include the ability to personalize and scale communications. Patients don’t want to receive the same generic newsletters or messaging. They expect their healthcare providers to provide information that is relevant to their health journey at the right time. The power of email lies in its ability to be customized and personalized at scale. Email APIs can pull data from your CDP, EHR, or CRM into dynamic templates. Messages can be triggered and personalized based on pre-determined actions or criteria. Organizations can create fully automated email workflows to streamline operations and meet patient needs.

By using dynamic personalization and automation, your staff can spend less time with their fingers on keyboards and more time focused on care delivery, patient engagement and better outcomes. Trigger-based email flows can remind patients of appointments, collect insurance information, ensure proper medication adherence, and send other relevant healthcare communications, including new product offers. This frees up time for staff to focus on other tasks and relieves some administrative overhead.

The Results: Improved Patient Engagement

HIPAA compliant email is one of the most effective channels for driving customer behavior. For every $1 spent on email marketing, the average ROI is $36. Email can also provide near-instant performance analytics, so it’s possible to tell what messages are resonating and which are not. In addition, A/B testing makes it simple to test components of your message on a small scale and then send out the winning formats. Trying out different email subject lines, calls to action, imagery, and other messaging is easy. Because of these features, personalized email messaging can provide better conversion rates, patient engagement, and return on investment than other digital channels.

Conclusion

Email is a powerful channel that can benefit your healthcare organization, and your patients and customers. It is often preferred for one-to-one communication and can also be an effective marketing channel. Learn more about how to address communications challenges with HIPAA compliant email by contacting LuxSci today.

Tags: email automation, email engagement, email marketing, hipaa compliance, patient communication, patient engagement, patient experience, patient preferences, patient retention, patient satisfaction, personalization
Posted in HIPAA Marketing, HIPAA Compliant Forms, HIPAA Email Compliance
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6 Email Marketing Best Practices for Healthcare

Friday, February 14th, 2025

Email marketing can be a powerful tool for healthcare organizations, but it requires careful planning and execution because of compliance requirements for HIPAA marketing. In this blog post, we will discuss email marketing best practices to help healthcare marketers achieve their goals.

1. Define Your Campaign Goals

The success of any email marketing campaign depends on the goals you want to achieve. However, because healthcare organizations are often not selling products to their patients, marketers can be confused about how to set measurable goals for their campaigns that aren’t tied to revenue generation.

Healthcare marketers can use email marketing campaigns for various purposes, including patient engagement, education, new product or service offerings, and retention. Some possible objectives of your campaigns could be:

New patient acquisition
Re-engaging lapsed patients
Spreading awareness about vaccines, treatments, or medical conditions
Increasing treatment or medication adherence
Collecting survey responses or patient-reported outcomes

All of these campaign objectives will correlate with different metrics. Identifying the campaign goal and the corresponding metrics you need to track is critical before selecting the audience and crafting the content.

2. Select Your Audience

Gone are the days of sending giant email blasts to your entire contact list. The best email marketers are creating highly targeted campaigns for specific audiences. Healthcare marketers using patient data in their audience targeting efforts are at an advantage. They can use patient information to create distinct audience segments. Targeting a patient population with common attributes makes it easier to craft a relevant message to drive clear results. For example, marketers can create more relevant campaigns when they can divide their patient population into subgroups based on shared characteristics like diagnoses, risk factors, and demographic data.

3. Personalize Your Content

Once you have clearly defined your goal and your audience, it’s essential to use personalization techniques to craft relevant messaging. Healthcare consumers expect more personalization from their providers and want to receive messages that tie into their past experiences. Generic, irrelevant messaging is more likely to annoy patients than get them to act. Healthcare marketers are lucky to have a wealth of data points to use in their messaging, but they must be aware of patient privacy and take steps to secure PHI in their messaging. When you have taken the appropriate steps to secure patient data, including protected health information in email messages is possible. This improves the patient experience and makes it easier for healthcare marketers to achieve their objectives.

4. Use A Clear Call-to-Action

Your emails should include a clear call-to-action (CTA) that encourages your audience to take the desired action. These actions may include scheduling an appointment, downloading a resource, logging into a patient portal, filling out a survey, or contacting your organization. Ensure that your CTA is prominent, stands out from the rest of your content, and ties back to the goal of your campaign. Most importantly, implement appropriate tracking technologies so you can see how many email recipients followed through on the CTA.

Don’t include too many calls to action in one message! Including multiple prompts may confuse the recipient and make it more difficult for your team to understand how the campaign performed.

5. Review Your Data

Finally, it’s essential to monitor your email metrics to evaluate the success of your campaigns. Some key metrics may include open rates, click-through rates, deliverability, surveys completed, successful logins, appointments scheduled, and other relevant metrics that tie back to your goals. Use this data to refine your email marketing strategy, trigger follow-up campaigns and marketing activity, and optimize future campaigns. Use APIs or webhooks to ensure your email campaign statistics are tied into marketing dashboards to get a holistic view of how your campaigns are performing.

6. Choose an Email Marketing Solution Designed for Healthcare

Finally, to use the tactics recommended above, it’s necessary to use a HIPAA-compliant email marketing solution. Segmenting audiences and personalizing content requires the use of protected health information. Therefore, it must be secured in compliance with HIPAA requirements. Also, make sure you select a platform that can protect data both at rest and in transit to utilize the power of your data fully.

LuxSci’s HIPAA compliant email marketing solution was designed to meet the needs of healthcare marketers and enables the use of PHI at scale. Contact our sales team to learn more about our capabilities and email marketing best practices.

Tags: email analytics, email marketing, ePHI, hipaa, hipaa compliance, patient engagement, personalization, phi, secure email, segmentation
Posted in HIPAA Marketing
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What is HIPAA Compliant Email Marketing?

Tuesday, January 14th, 2025

Incorporating HIPAA compliant email marketing into healthcare marketing practices offers a powerful avenue to engage patients and promote services by using a specifically designed healthcare marketing solution that is 100% HIPAA compliant.

It is imperative to ensure that email marketing communications comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to protect patient privacy and secure protected health information (PHI).

If you are one of the 92% of Americans with an email address, you are likely familiar with email marketing. It is a tried and true marketing strategy that delivers a superior return on investment compared to other digital channels. However, when healthcare organizations want to utilize these strategies, out-of-the-box solutions are not a good fit. Healthcare organizations must utilize email marketing platforms specifically designed to meet HIPAA’s unique privacy and security requirements.

When Do You Need a HIPAA Compliant Email Marketing?

Healthcare organizations are required to use a HIPAA compliant email marketing because their messages often contain electronic protected health information (ePHI). This includes information that is both individually identifiable and relates to someone’s healthcare.

Individually identifiable information includes identifiers like a patient’s name, address, birth date, email address, social security number, and more. By default, every email marketing communication includes the patient’s email address and is, therefore, individually identifiable. Not only does the definition of ePHI cover people’s past, present, and future health conditions, but it also includes treatment provisions and billing details. This information is often contained in email marketing messages.

While the law does not cover anonymous health details or individual identifiers sent by themselves, you must be careful and abide by HIPAA regulations when the two are brought together. You will need a HIPAA compliant email marketing service whenever you send ePHI. As we will see, even if you think an email may not contain ePHI, it is still best to be cautious.

Types of HIPAA Compliant Email Marketing Communications

An excellent example of an email blast that must comply with HIPAA is a newsletter sent to a clinic’s cancer patients. At first glance, the email doesn’t contain any specific PHI. It doesn’t mention Jane Smith’s chemotherapy treatments, other specific patients, or their medical information. However, upon closer look, it may violate HIPAA regulations.

Every email in this campaign contains a personal identifier- the patient’s email address. In this example, only cancer patients received the newsletter, which also tells you personal medical information. A hacker could infer that anyone who received this email has cancer, which is ePHI and protected under HIPAA. If you use a medical condition to create a segment of email recipients, the email campaign must comply with HIPAA.

Sometimes, it can be challenging to identify if an email contains ePHI. If you sent the same practice newsletter to a list of all current and former medical clinic patients, it may or may not contain ePHI. Even if the newsletter contained benign info about the practice’s operating hours or parking information, if the practice is centered around treating a specific condition like cancer or depression, it may be possible to infer information about the recipients regardless of the message.

There are a lot of gray areas, and it can be difficult to determine if an email contains PHI. We recommend using HIPAA-compliant email marketing for any promotional materials to reduce the risk of violations.

The Benefits of Using a HIPAA Compliant Marketing Platform

After reading this, you may think the answer is to avoid sending PHI in email campaigns. However, by keeping your communications bland, generic, and broadly targeted, you miss out on significant opportunities to engage your patients.

Using a HIPAA compliant email marketing solution, you can leverage ePHI to send much more effective messages. In the above example, cancer patients actively receiving treatment at your clinic are much more likely to be interested in your business updates. Targeted emails receive much higher open and click rates than those sent to a general list.

Sending the right information to your patients at the right time is an effective patient engagement strategy. Think about it using an e-commerce example- when a retailer sends you product recommendations based on past purchases; they use your data to influence future purchasing decisions. By utilizing patient data to create highly relevant and personalized campaigns and offers, you receive a better return on investment in your efforts.

What is Required for HIPAA Compliant Email Marketing?

Finding the right HIPAA compliant email marketing platform can be challenging. Most of the common vendors aren’t HIPAA-compliant at all. Others claim compliance and will sign BAAs to protect your information at rest but still will not enable you to send PHI via email. Finding a provider that suits your business needs and protects the email messages requires careful vetting.

Generally speaking, a HIPAA compliant email platform must meet three broad requirements:

The vendor will sign a Business Associates Agreement that outlines how they will protect your data and what happens in case of a breach.
The vendor protects the data at rest using appropriate storage encryption, access controls, and other security features.
The vendor protects messages in transit using an appropriate level of encryption with the proper ciphers.

LuxSci’s Secure Marketing email platform has been designed to meet the healthcare industry’s unique needs. Our platform was built with both security and compliance at the forefront. With Secure Marketing, organizations can send fully HIPAA compliant email marketing messages to the right patients at the right time and receive a better return on their marketing investment.

Tags: email marketing, email marketing platform, hipaa, hipaa compliance, HIPAA-compliant email marketing, marketing, personalization, phi, segmentation
Posted in HIPAA Marketing, HIPAA Compliant Email Marketing
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Healthcare Marketing And HIPAA: Are You In Compliance?

Tuesday, January 14th, 2025

Healthcare marketing is essential to growing your business successfully, but when you work in regulated spaces, there are serious compliance considerations. Whether responding to an online patient review or trying to increase patient engagement through marketing campaigns, misunderstandings in marketing best practices can lead to patient privacy breaches.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which controls what and when patient information may be shared for marketing purposes, was enacted before the electronic age. As a result, it can be challenging to find information regarding appropriate marketing practices using modern social and software technologies.

HIPAA and Healthcare Marketing

A large part of HIPAA regulates what is appropriate for the use or disclosure of patient information. There are certain instances where the use and disclosure of protected health information (PHI) is allowed without patient consent. These instances include sharing PHI for treatment, payment, or healthcare operations.

However, before you can use patient information for marketing efforts, you need to receive explicit written consent from the patient. The consent form must be specific to the marketing efforts you will use the patient’s PHI in. For instance, if you would like to share patient testimonials, photos, or videos on your website or social media accounts, the patient must sign a consent form stating that you will use their information in this way.

HIPAA-compliant marketing also largely depends on an employee’s understanding of the law. Employees responsible for handling PHI must be trained to use and disclose PHI within the scope of their job role. Improperly trained employees can expose your practice to HIPAA violations and costly fines.

8 Common Misunderstandings of Marketing and HIPAA

1. As long as patient consent is obtained, HIPAA doesn’t matter
Some organizations think they can use any marketing tool with a signed patient consent form. Still, the tool has to be HIPAA-compliant. Even if patients agree, it does not remove the organization’s obligations to secure PHI under the law. If protected health information is improperly accessed, it is still a breach and can lead to severe financial and reputational consequences.

2. Marketing emails do not need encryption
Many marketing emails imply a relationship between patients and providers and, as such, can often be classified as protected health information. PHI must be encrypted in transit and at rest to comply with HIPAA.

3. Personalizing marketing emails is a HIPAA violation
Marketing emails can be personalized as long as the proper safeguards and precautions are in place to protect patient privacy and meet compliance requirements.

4. Marketing companies do not need to sign Business Associates Agreements
As of 2013, the HIPAA Omnibus rule expanded HIPAA obligations to include business associates and subcontractors. Marketing agencies and vendors that process PHI on behalf of a covered entity must comply with HIPAA regulations, which include signing a BAA.

5. The only way to protect PHI is to use patient portals
TLS encryption meets HIPAA transport encryption requirements and provides a better user experience. Marketing emails sent with TLS encryption are more likely to be opened than those sent to a patient portal.

6. Using BCC is enough to keep patient identities private
BCC is NOT enough to protect patient identities. Although the end recipient cannot tell who else received the message, the entire list is visible as the messages are transmitted from server to server. The messages can be eavesdropped on by someone with technical abilities.

7. Always respond to social media reviews
Be extremely careful when responding to online reviews. Publicly confirming information about a patient’s health or treatment status is a HIPAA violation.

8. Healthcare marketing isn’t necessary or worth the hassle
Healthcare consumerism is rising, and patients are willing to change providers if they are unsatisfied with their experience. Educating and informing current and potential patients about your services is essential to improve new customer acquisition and retention.

How to be HIPAA-Compliant

The most crucial step is vetting marketing vendors and HIPAA compliance tools. Any vendor that handles PHI on behalf of a healthcare entity needs to sign a Business Associate Agreement that outlines how patient data will be stored, transmitted, and disposed of. Don’t choose a vendor who is unfamiliar with HIPAA’s stringent requirements. Also, watch out for quasi-compliance. Some self-identified “HIPAA-compliant” vendors can protect data at rest but not in transmission or require patient waivers to achieve compliance.

Next, always use encryption and default to security. Identifying PHI is often tricky, and the legal burden should not fall on the marketing team. By selecting technology that encrypts every marketing email, you can rest assured that messages are secure and compliant. A bonus tip- do not send marketing messages to an encrypted patient portal. Instead, send marketing messages with TLS encryption directly to patients’ inboxes. You will see much higher response rates and engagement.

Finally, to create the most effective marketing campaigns, use PHI to create segmented audiences and send them personalized content. These tactics are widely used outside the healthcare industry because they deliver results. *Remember that any tool you put PHI into must be HIPAA-compliant.

How LuxSci Can Help

LuxSci’s Secure Marketing tool is an email marketing platform designed to meet HIPAA requirements. It allows marketing teams to segment audiences and personalizes emails to engage patients and improve marketing ROI. If you are already using a third-party email marketing platform, no worries, we got you covered. LuxSci’s Secure High Volume Email solution can integrate with any third-party platform to make sure those emails are also HIPAA-compliant.

Tags: business associate, business associate agreement, email encryption, email marketing, ePHI, healthcare marketing, mutual consent, patient consent, personalization, social media
Posted in HIPAA Marketing
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