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Posts Tagged ‘health equity’

Fuel Your Cross-Channel Marketing Strategy with Email

Monday, July 24th, 2023

Moving to an omnichannel or multichannel marketing strategy requires time and investment. However, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel to drive behavior and achieve results. For reasons we will explore in this article, email is a powerful tool in patient engagement and driving a successful cross-channel marketing strategy.

Email is Everywhere

One of the main reasons email is so essential to a cross-channel marketing strategy is its high adoption rates. Compared to other channels, email has an almost universal adoption rate. 92% of Americans have email accounts, and 49% check them multiple times daily. Let’s look at some other tech adoption rates. In the United States:

  • 80% text
  • 72% are social media users
  • 85% have a smartphone

As you can see, email has one of the highest adoption rates among popular digital technologies. Even among older populations and disadvantaged communities, email is widely used, making it an essential channel to address health equity.

Email is also excellent at generating revenue and driving patient behavior. Email is one of the most effective channels, delivering an average ROI of $36 for every $1 spent. Delivering results in the email channel drives business success, even if other channels are slow to take off. Best of all, email can be secured to meet HIPAA requirements and protect patient privacy, all while providing a patient-centered experience.

Email Messaging to Drive Cross-Channel Actions

Email is essential in a cross-channel marketing strategy because you can harness an already engaged mailing list and direct them to take action in other channels.

The best way to illustrate this is with examples. Email can:

  • Encourage people to visit a website to take a specific action
  • Drive visits to patient portals for appointment scheduling or viewing medical information
  • Get users to follow accounts on social media channels
  • Solicit reviews and survey responses
  • Direct people to physical locations to address health concerns
  • Prompt patients to opt-in to SMS messaging
  • Alert people to look out for a physical piece of mail

using email messaging to drive cross-channel actions

This list is just a sampling of the types of messages that marketers can send to prompt activity in other channels. When you segment your audience and personalize your messaging for specific audiences, email can effectively drive desired behavior.

Use Email Data to Determine Next-Best Actions

The other benefit of email is the data you can acquire from the campaigns. Most people open and engage with emails within 24 hours of receipt. This data can be used to trigger activity in other channels.

Similar to how there are so many use cases for email campaigns, there are innumerable ways that you can use the data from these campaigns to drive cross-channel activity. For example, if you notice that a patient is engaging with content about scheduling an appointment but failing to complete the process, it can trigger a staff member to make a phone call to help them. It would be too time-consuming and expensive for staff members to contact everyone who has not scheduled an appointment recently. But by looking at your email data and information about the patient, you can identify people who may want to schedule appointments but are hitting roadblocks in the process.

A counter-example is that if people are not engaging with your emails, you can focus your marketing efforts on other channels like paid advertising and direct mail. These channels are often more expensive than email, so by only targeting those who are hard to reach, you see a better ROI and don’t waste valuable marketing dollars.

Conclusion

If you are struggling to drive conversions in other channels, consider focusing on email. It’s easy to get started with, and once you build a solid list, it can be used to drive cross-channel behavior. To learn more about the benefits of email marketing, contact LuxSci today.

Tags: email marketing, email reporting, email reports, health equity, marketing strategy, multi-channel marketing, omnichannel marketing, patient engagement, personalization
Posted in Email Marketing
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Digital Strategies to Address Health Equity

Wednesday, July 5th, 2023

According to a HIMSS Market Insights study, nine out of ten healthcare executives see health equity as a top business priority. Improving health equity can drive value for other business metrics, including patient satisfaction, provider retention, health outcomes, and cost reduction. Email is an excellent way to address health equity issues, thanks to its widespread adoption across different ethnic and demographic groups.

 

doctor sending an email to patient

What is Health Equity?

According to the CDC, health equity is “achieved when every person has the opportunity to attain his or her full health potential and no one is disadvantaged from achieving this potential because of social position or other socially determined circumstances.”

 

Under President Biden, the Department of Health and Human Services has prioritized health equity in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 highlighted the healthcare system’s racial, economic, and social disparities. For example, COVID-19 killed Black, Latino, and Indigenous people at double the rate of White people. Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders remain three times more likely to contract the illness than White people. Addressing the social, cultural, racial, and economic factors contributing to this disparity is essential to improving individual and population health.

Improve Health Equity with Email Communications

Email is an excellent tool for patient engagement because of its widespread adoption across different demographic groups. As you can see in the data below, email has an overall adoption rate of 92%, and across all age and ethnic groups surveyed, adoption rates are above 80%.

email usage charts by age and ethnicity

Unlike phone numbers and addresses, email addresses seldom change because of economic instability. Email addresses are free to create and are typically accessed at least once a day. Broadband access continues to expand, though it still presents a barrier to email communication. However, even when broadband is unavailable, slower connections still permit text-based emails to be sent and received. Email is reliable, easy to use, and widely accessible to most individuals, making it an excellent channel for patient engagement.

The Technical Advantages of Email

Email also offers several advantages on the technical side to address digital health equity. Email’s main benefit is its ability to be personalized at scale. When using a secure email provider like LuxSci, you can create groups or segments of patients and send them relevant information about their health conditions or risk factors. These workflows can be automatically triggered when certain criteria are met to streamline operations and improve efficiency.

Thanks to the nearly universal use of EHR systems, healthcare marketers can access a wide variety of first-party patient data. Health records not only contain information about health conditions, but also information about patient demographics and preferences.

Intelligent marketers can use this data to close care gaps and improve health equity. Let’s take a look at an example.

An Example of Personalization and Segmentation to Address Health Equity

There are so many options when it comes to segmenting your patient population. To address health equity, you can use information like the patient’s native language and communication preferences to create personalized messaging. By doing so, you can increase response rates and close care gaps.

 

For example, say you have a significant portion of your patient population that speaks Spanish, and they are more likely to miss an appointment or not schedule a follow-up. How can you drive appointment attendance and reduce churn? The first step is to create an audience segment composed of patients who speak Spanish as their first language. Next, create email messages that are designed for the audience. This means writing the subject line and email contents in Spanish and using imagery they can identify with. But you can do more than that. Point people in this audience to schedule appointments with doctors who are fluent in Spanish. If there are other reasons this audience struggles to attend appointments, extend opportunities to help them with transportation, child/elder care, or access healthcare outside of regular working hours. Once you understand the barriers to attending appointments, you can extend personalized offers that help increase attendance and improve health outcomes. 

 

Most importantly, email allows you to test messaging and see what’s working. Review your campaign statistics and adjust your messaging to reach the most people and improve health equity among your patient population.

Conclusion

As we have seen, email is a highly effective way to engage marginalized patient populations. However, don’t forget about HIPAA compliance! Communications personalized and segmented using ePHI need to be secured.

 

LuxSci offers secure email services designed to meet HIPAA requirements. If you want to learn more about addressing health equity with secure communications, please contact us today.

Tags: covid19, diversity, email engagement, email use, ePHI, health equity, inclusion, patient engagement, personalization, phi, segmentation
Posted in Email Marketing
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