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Email Marketing Metrics: 5 KPIs for Data-Driven Marketers

Wednesday, May 17th, 2023

Open rates only offer a small glimpse into the success of your email marketing campaigns. To determine whether your campaigns successfully drive engagement and behavior, diving deeper is necessary. In this article, we go beyond the basics to look at other email marketing metrics that can help you determine the success of your campaigns.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

One way to tell if your email content engages your audience is by looking at the click-through rate or CTR. Instead, looking at your messages’ click-through rate can tell you more about how successful the campaign is. The click-through rate can be calculated by dividing the number of total clicks (or unique clicks) by the number of emails delivered.

This metric tells you how successful the message content is and whether the recipients find the content engaging. Many split tests are designed to find new ways to get more clicks in your emails, and the click-through rate is an essential metric to determine success. Clicks are significant because they often lead to conversions.

Conversion Rate

For most marketers, the conversion rate is the most vital metric to track. The conversion goal you are tracking may change from email to email. For example, the goal of one campaign may be to increase app downloads. In another, the goal may be to increase appointment sign-ups. Whatever your goal, to track the conversion rate, you compare the number of people who completed the desired action to the number of emails delivered.

To measure the conversion rate of your emails, you may need to integrate your email platform with web analytics. You can do this by creating unique tracking URLs for your email links that identify the source of the click as coming from a specific email campaign. Tracking the source is incredibly important for understanding the ROI of your email campaigns.

Bounce Rate

It’s imperative to keep an eye on your bounce rate. The bounce rate measures how many emails were delivered to the recipients’ inboxes. Bounces can either be soft or hard. Understanding why an email failed to be delivered can help you improve your lists for future sends.

Soft bounces result from a temporary problem with a valid email address, such as a full inbox or a problem with the recipient’s server. The recipient’s server may hold these emails for delivery once the problem clears up, or you can try to resend the message manually.

Hard bounces result from invalid, closed, or non-existent email addresses. These emails will never be successfully delivered. You should immediately remove addresses that hard bounce from your email list because internet service providers (ISPs) use bounce rates to determine an email sender’s reputation. Keeping your email lists clean is essential to maintaining email deliverability.

Unsubscribes

Similarly, you should be tracking who is unsubscribing from email messages. Seeing a small number of unsubscribes from your email campaign is expected. The average email campaign unsubscribe rate is about 0.2%. Nevertheless, tracking unsubscribes on a per-campaign basis is helpful to ensure your content is hitting the mark. If your unsubscribe rate jumps above the average, it may be time to re-evaluate your content or clean up your lists. Unsubscribing indicates that the recipient did not find your messages engaging, and you should remove any contacts who unsubscribe from future marketing messages. There are also legal ramifications for failing to comply. The CAN-SPAM Act requires companies to honor all opt-out requests and enforces penalties for noncompliance.

Spam Complaints

Spam complaints can also affect the future deliverability of your emails, so it’s crucial to track who is marking your emails as spam and remove them from your list. Spam complaints are delivered to ISPs, and receiving a lot of them could impact your deliverability and sending reputation. If you aren’t tracking these requests, you could be emailing people who do not want to be contacted by your company.

Conclusion: Implement Data-Driven Email Marketing Today

Move beyond top-line email marketing metrics to take your email marketing expertise to the next level. You can better engage patients, drive behavior, and improve outcomes by using data-driven email marketing techniques. Contact LuxSci today to learn more about how our HIPAA-compliant email marketing software can help you achieve results.

Tags: click tracking, conversion rate, data driven email marketing, email analytics, email deliverability, email engagement, email list clean up, email list hygiene, email marketing, email marketing metrics, metrics, patient engagement, precision nudging
Posted in Email Marketing
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How Online Tracking Technologies Threaten Patient Privacy

Wednesday, May 3rd, 2023

Many healthcare marketers use online tracking technologies to gather information from users as they interact with a website or mobile application. After several breaches tied to improper uses of third-party tracking pixels, the Department of Health and Human Services has clarified that data collected via online tracking technologies are often PHI and must be secured according to the Privacy Rule.

What are Online Tracking Technologies?

Tracking technologies collect information about website visitors in various ways, many of which are invisible to the user. Some of the most common types of tracking technologies include cookies, web beacons or tracking pixels, session replay scripts, and fingerprinting scripts. Mobile apps also include tracking codes within the application to enable the collection of user information.

After collecting the information, it is analyzed to create insights about users’ online activities. Marketers often use the data to create advertising campaigns. In the case of third-party tracking technologies, they may continue to track users and gather information about them even after they leave and visit other websites. As you can imagine, this raises serious patient privacy concerns.

How is this Data Protected Health Information?

It may not be obvious to users, but tracking technology vendors can access a lot of personal data through tracking technologies placed on a healthcare provider’s website. Some of the information that can be captured by tracking technology could include:

medical record numbers
email addresses
appointment dates or requests
IP addresses
medical device IDs
geographic locations

Marketers may not realize that individually identifiable information collected on a covered entity’s website or mobile app is often protected health information (PHI). Even if the individual has no pre-existing relationship with the healthcare provider, DHHS’s recent update is clear that this information is protected. Collecting this information establishes a relationship between a covered entity and an individual relating to their past, present, or future provisioning of health care.

There is always some gray area when it comes to defining PHI, but in this case, it’s better to be safe than sorry. If you are using any online tracking technology, you must confirm that it is processing and transmitting data in a way that aligns with HIPAA regulations.

How Healthcare Marketers Can Protect Patient Privacy

First of all, if you plan to use tracking technology on your website, the vendor needs to be a business associate of your organization. In these circumstances, covered entities must ensure that the disclosures made to such vendors are permitted by the Privacy Rule and enter into a business associate agreement (BAA) that outlines how PHI will be protected.

Think carefully about what data needs to be collected and why. In other industries, collecting user data and selling it to third parties or using it in advertising efforts is very common. Healthcare marketers must be more intentional in using online tracking technologies and take additional steps to ensure the data is processed and transmitted securely. Do not install tracking pixels without careful consideration. As many hospital systems learned last winter, failing to do so can have profound privacy and compliance implications.

If you want to follow up with patients who browsed your website for available appointments, you must ensure their data is secure from when it is collected through transmission to other systems. For example, a patient may enter their name, email address, phone number, and desired appointment time into an online form. When they click “Submit,” where and how is this data transmitted and stored? As they browse the available appointments and doctors, your system may log which web pages they visit and store them in a CRM, CDP, or another platform. If they leave without making an appointment, what do you do with the data you collect? If you transmit this data to other advertising or marketing platforms, you will also need business associate agreements with those vendors. As you can see, it can get complicated very quickly.

HIPAA-Compliant Marketing Technology

LuxSci’s Secure Form and Secure Marketing technologies offer a few ways to address the patient privacy issues associated with online data collection and transmission. Our fully HIPAA-compliant solutions enable you to securely collect data on your website and use email to engage prospects. Contact our sales team to learn more today.

Tags: email marketing, ePHI, hipaa compliance, online tracking, online tracking technology, patient privacy, phi, pixel tracking, tracking pixel
Posted in Email Marketing, LuxSci Library: HIPAA
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Identity-Driven Engagement: The Next Generation of Patient Engagement

Wednesday, April 26th, 2023

A new tech buzzword has come to the healthcare industry: identity-driven engagement. This article explains what precisely identity-driven engagement is and how it applies to the healthcare industry’s patient engagement goals.

What is Identity-Driven Engagement?

Identity-driven engagement is not a new concept. It has been used outside the healthcare industry for many years to describe how marketers personalize consumer experiences to build community and achieve better results. It relies on using customer or patient data to create relevant communications that speak to individuals where they are in their journeys.

Successful identity-driven marketing efforts require accurate and up-to-date data sources, as consumer needs and preferences can rapidly change. In some ways, the healthcare industry is at an advantage compared to retail and other B2C companies because of the data they have about their patients. However, electronic health records only tell part of the story. In order to execute patient engagement efforts, a customer data platform (CDP) or customer relationship management (CRM) system is often required to capture behavior occurring outside of the medical practice. Signals from other digital channels like social media activity, your website, and digital advertising can provide helpful information about what any patient wants at any particular moment.

Using identity-driven engagement techniques allows marketers to incorporate this data to create highly relevant messaging. You can expect better ROI from your marketing efforts by demonstrating that you know your users and their communities.

How to Incorporate Identity Into Your Patient Engagement Strategy

It can take time to set up the right systems to collect data before rolling out identity-driven engagement on a large scale. It’s best to start small by identifying one community in your patient population that isn’t engaging with your health system as expected.

For example, let’s say that in your community, 15% of people speak Spanish as their primary language. Yet, your patient population only contains 2% of this audience. How can you reach more of these people and educate them about your services? By adopting tenets of identity-driven engagement, you can create better messaging and content that speaks to their unique needs. Of course, using Spanish in these messages is vital. But the content should be more than just translations of the other messages you use for your English-speaking patients. This audience has unique needs regarding health concerns, insurance providers, and technology preferences. It’s up to you to learn about these needs and address them with unique messaging that is consistent across all platforms and locations.

Email and Identity-Driven Engagement

Email can be an excellent way to execute identity-driven engagement because it allows for trigger-based activity, audience segmentation, and personalization at scale.

First, emails can be triggered based on new patient activity to provide relevant and timely information. For example, when a patient visits the scheduling page on the website but exits without making an appointment, you can send them a follow-up email with links to complete the process. Suppose you know that the patient was viewing pages on dermatology. In that case, you can include helpful links to dermatologist profiles, related reviews, and other information that may be relevant as they decide where and when they want to visit.

Another core aspect of identity-driven engagement is audience segmentation. Every patient is unique, and it’s important to group patients with similar characteristics to deliver the most relevant messages. Including male patients in an email regarding breast cancer awareness month and the importance of receiving annual screenings doesn’t make sense. By sending the message only to relevant patients, it improves engagement and builds brand trust.

Furthermore, it’s possible to personalize the messages to improve their relevance without adding additional work. The same appointment scheduling reminder can be customized according to what you know about the patient. Do they prefer to talk to someone? Include the phone number prominently. Have they historically preferred morning time slots? Include a few available dates and times that are similar to their previous appointments. Making minor tweaks to the message contents can improve response rates and help your organization meet its goals.

Tags: audience segmentation, cdp, crm, customization, email marketing, email personalization, identity driven engagement, patient engagement, personalization, sdoh, segmentation, triggers
Posted in Email Marketing
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Patient Portals and Patient Engagement

Wednesday, March 8th, 2023

Patient portals are powerful tools that allow patients to access their health records and even enable appointment scheduling and communication with healthcare providers. Despite their growing importance and popularity, patient portals alone aren’t a solution for patient engagement.

What is a Patient Portal?

A patient portal is a secure online website that gives patients 24-hour access to personal health information from anywhere with an internet connection. By logging in to an account with a unique username and password, patients can view health information like medical records and lab results and communicate securely with their healthcare provider.

In May 2020, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) finalized federal rulemaking to increase patients’ and caregivers’ access, exchange, and use of electronic health information. This rule implements key provisions of the 21st Century Cures Act. The legislation requires certified health IT developers to adopt secure, standards-based application programming interfaces that enable individuals to access and manage their health records using a health application.

The top ways patient portals are used include:

The Problems with Patient Portals and Patient Engagement

Despite their growing popularity, not all patients want to use online portals. Below, view some of the top reasons patients do not want to use a portal.

The most common reasons included just simple patient preferences. Survey respondents preferred to use another channel to communicate with their healthcare providers. This survey data was collected before the Covid-19 pandemic began. Over the past two years, other surveys have identified a growing acceptance of digital health tools. Nevertheless, it’s important to remember that not everyone prefers to use internet-based technology and provide alternate methods for engagement.

Another primary concern is technology access. Three factors accounted for over 50% of responses, including:

Difficult to login (24%)
Uncomfortable with computers (20%)
Do not have a way to access the website (13%)

Not all patients can access a reliable internet connection or confidently use a computer. These barriers can prevent patients from accessing their medical information and highlight why providing multiple channels for patients to interact with their providers is essential.

Security concerns are not irrelevant either. With increasing threats to the healthcare industry, it’s understandable that some patients are hesitant to have their health information shared online. Providers must do more to secure their digital environment and earn patients’ trust.

Patient Engagement Challenges

Sending timely, personalized messages is critical to the success of patient engagement efforts. However, patient portals can also be a barrier to engagement if they are the sole vector for patient communication. Nearly 40% of patients never login into the portal, while only 18% log in more than six times a year.

If you attempt to send engagement messages via the patient portal, they will go unread by most of your audience. A simple forgotten password could prevent patients from accessing the portal for months, meaning they could miss out on timely messages about their healthcare.

In addition, patient portals do not support the creation of personalized messages at scale. These platforms were designed to send one-to-one messages about a patient’s upcoming appointment, lab results, and medical records and do not possess the same customization features as email marketing platforms.

Finally, most patient portals were designed to be data repositories and were not built to enable patient communication. Most send a vague notification email to the patient, letting them know a message is waiting. However, the burden is on the patient to log in and read the message. Most EHRs cannot even track who is opening and reading the messages! For healthcare marketers trying to identify the best patient engagement strategies, patient portals lack the analytics and data needed to define, track, and boost engagement.

Patient Engagement with No Portals: Secure Email Solutions

Patients expect a healthcare experience that is more like that of e-commerce. 90% of patients want to receive emails from their providers that apply to their health journey. By moving patient engagement activities out of the portal as much as possible, it opens up new possibilities for marketers. TLS-encrypted emails do not require passwords to read, and securely deliver information directly to inboxes.

Not all messages are appropriate to send via TLS-encrypted emails. Sometimes the security of the patient portal is preferred. Patient portals are an excellent place to store sensitive data and must be a part of the patient’s healthcare experience. It’s always a good idea to post highly sensitive data like test results and medical records in an encrypted portal and not send them via email because of possible interception and eavesdropping issues. However, by using secure email to send less-sensitive patient engagement messages, marketers can reduce barriers and promote precision nudging in a way that does not compromise data security.

Marketers will see better open and engagement rates by delivering the message directly to patients’ inboxes. Using a HIPAA-compliant email marketing solution enables the use of PHI to customize messages designed to guide patients on their healthcare journeys. Contact LuxSci today to learn about creating a flexible, data-informed patient engagement strategy.

Tags: email marketing, ePHI, medical records, patient engagement, patient portal
Posted in Email, Email Marketing
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The PHI Difference in Healthcare Marketing

Wednesday, February 22nd, 2023

Healthcare marketers are facing complex challenges with serious stakes. Unlike in other industries, healthcare marketers share messages that can impact people’s health and livelihood. Creating the most effective messaging needs to be a priority for healthcare marketing teams. Using first-party data is one way to make a major difference in your marketing efforts. Marketers can craft highly targeted campaigns using protected health information (PHI) to deliver better results for patients.

First-Party Data for Healthcare

In some ways, healthcare marketers are at an advantage because of the amount of first-party data they can access. First-party data is information a company collects directly from its customers. The company owns this data and can verify its authenticity. Marketers can use data like digital interactions, purchase history, and preferences to create experiences that cater to an individual’s interests. In the healthcare industry, first-party data goes way beyond digital interactions. Information about health statuses, diagnoses, and recent patient visits can all be incorporated into marketing campaigns to guide patients on their journey to better health.

Marketers in other industries know that first-party data achieves the highest return on investment of any data type. In 2020, Google partnered with Boston Consulting Group to study how brands succeed with first-party data strategies. The report found that businesses using first-party data for key marketing functions achieved up to a 2.9 times revenue uplift and a 1.5 times increase in cost savings. In addition, as data privacy restrictions grow and third-party cookies are phased out, marketers need more control over their data sources to ensure compliance.

Why Use PHI in Healthcare Marketing?

When healthcare organizations use PHI to segment their email lists and personalize campaign content, they experience better results. Using a HIPAA-compliant email marketing solution allows marketers to leverage the data and information they have about patients to increase engagement. When using PHI, there are so many ways to customize email content that can deliver impressive results.

It makes intuitive sense. What would you prefer- frequent emails about products and services you don’t want, or consistent emails that relate to your goals and interests? It’s an easy decision. No one likes to be annoyed by pointless emails. Using information about your patients’ health statuses and goals to craft personalized messages increases patient satisfaction and retention, while also improving engagement.

As discussed above, healthcare patient data is an excellent source of first-party data that is more comprehensive than the information gathered in other industries. However, healthcare marketers face another hurdle. In addition to getting patient consent to use this data for marketing purposes, organizations are also strictly governed by HIPAA compliance regulations that restrict the use of PHI.

The Challenge: HIPAA Compliance Requirements

So what can healthcare marketers do to surmount this obstacle? First, they must understand the regulations surrounding the transmission of protected health information (PHI). Responsible healthcare marketers must comply with HIPAA when utilizing patient data in their marketing efforts.

Most marketers rely on some sort of email marketing software, CRM, or CDP to manage their marketing campaigns. However, not all platforms are able to meet HIPAA’s stringent requirements. A simple approach to evaluating marketing software for HIPAA compliance focuses on three crucial aspects:

Sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA)
Securely Store Data
Securely Transmit Data

First, any third party with access to PHI must sign a Business Associates Agreement to govern how the information will be secured and what happens in case of a breach. If they will not sign a BAA, the software should not be used to store or process PHI.

However, signing a BAA alone is not enough. Understanding the terms of service and what the provider allows is essential. If their terms of service forbid you from sending PHI, it could put your organization at risk. It’s also important to review how the data will be secured at rest and in transit. When storing patient health data in a marketing application, consider how it will be protected. Simply put, you must ensure that all PHI is encrypted and can only be accessed by people with the appropriate keys.

If protected health information is transmitted outside of the database or application via email, encryption must also be used to protect the data in transmission. At a minimum, TLS encryption (with the appropriate ciphers) is secure enough to meet HIPAA guidelines. However, many applications do not offer transmission encryption that is secure enough to comply with HIPAA. You should only send communications containing PHI if they are encrypted.

Conclusion

Using PHI data in your marketing efforts can yield improved results. However, this approach requires careful vetting and planning by your marketing and compliance teams to ensure data is secured under HIPAA regulations. To learn more about HIPAA-compliant marketing solutions, contact LuxSci today.

Tags: email marketing, email personalization, healthcare marketing, patient engagement, patient retention, personalization, phi, segmentation
Posted in Email Marketing
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