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Patient Engagement: Why Email is an Essential Channel

Thursday, June 22nd, 2023

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, social media, 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.

Email Adoption Rates

Because of its ubiquity, email should be prioritized as part of your patient engagement efforts. 92% of Americans have email accounts, and 49% check them multiple times daily. Compared to 80% who text, 72% are social media users, and 85% have a smartphone, email has one of the highest adoption rates among digital 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 patient-centered experience.

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 society, 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 assisting patients. Trigger-based email flows can remind patients of appointments, collect insurance information, ensure proper medication adherence, and send other relevant healthcare communications. This frees up time for staff to focus on other tasks and relieves some administrative overhead.

The Results: Improved Patient Engagement

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 medical practice. It is often preferred for one-to-one communication and can also be an effective marketing channel. Learn more about how to address clinical communication challenges with secure email technology 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 Email Marketing
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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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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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How to Personalize Email Campaigns Using Custom Fields

Wednesday, March 22nd, 2023

Personalizing your email content is essential to provide an excellent patient experience. With LuxSci’s Secure Marketing platform, you can use the custom fields feature to make it easier to segment your contacts and personalize content at scale.

What Are Custom Fields?

Custom fields store additional data about your contacts. Traditional custom field data includes information like the first and last name of the email recipient, dates, and location information like city, state, or zip code.

You can use custom fields to capture and include any data you can think of, including information about health conditions, doctor names, insurance information, gender identity, and so much more.

A quick reminder on HIPAA compliance- if you use an email marketing platform to store and send patient health data, ensure it meets compliance requirements. Read more about what you need to look out for when choosing a vendor: Infographic: Most Email Software Cannot Use PHI.

Ways to Use Custom Fields to Personalize Emails

With LuxSci’s fully compliant email marketing solution, you can use custom fields to include any data you’d like, including protected health information. To personalize email content using custom fields, first, you must upload that data to the platform and link it to a specific email address. This is easy to do when uploading a contact list. First, create the custom field. Then, when uploading your list of email addresses, include a column that contains the custom field data. In the example below, both the First Name and Last Name columns represent custom fields.

Next, create your email content. You can insert additional field data by using Dynamic Fields. Dynamic fields appear as %%field_name%% in the content creator. For example, say you want to insert a patient’s name into the body of the email. First, you would have uploaded the patient’s name as a custom field when you uploaded their email address. Then when creating the email copy, you would insert the “name” additional field, which would look like “%%first_name%%.” When the email is sent to the recipient, “%%first_name%%” is replaced by the patient’s name associated with that email address. In their inbox, %%first_name%% appears as “Joanna” or whoever the recipient is. This allows you to create one base message that can be personalized and sent to thousands of recipients.

5 Ways to Use Custom Fields to Personalize Healthcare Emails

Healthcare marketers can use first-party data to create communications that cater to an individual’s interests and preferences. 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. Here are a few ideas for ways that you can use custom fields to personalize email messages.

1) Appointment Dates and Times

By associating each email contact with an upcoming appointment date and time, you can insert that data into the body of the email to send multiple reminders at once, confirm appointments, and reduce no-show rates. This is a workflow that can be automated and triggered to send one week before an upcoming appointment, with little additional work needed from the marketing team.

2) Doctor or Provider Name

You may want to include the individual’s provider name in an email message for many reasons. It can be helpful to ask for reviews and feedback, remind patients who their provider is, and build trust and connection with patients and their healthcare provider.

3) Locations

Including the address or office location can help remind patients of where their appointment will be held, especially for large hospital systems or for new patients. Making it as easy as possible to access healthcare services improves the patient experience.

4) Events and Educational Programming

One way to help patients on their healthcare journey is to provide program recommendations based on past behavior or diagnoses. For example, sending resources to diabetes patients based on recent test results can help patients take the right steps to improve their health.

5) Precision Nudging to Improve Health Outcomes

Precision nudging is a preemptive and proactive approach to patient communication that prompts action to overcome patient-specific barriers to action at the right time and place for scalable, sustained behavior change. Messages that drive behavior change include reminding patients to refill a specific prescription, reminders to schedule screenings and follow-up appointments, or pre and post-op instructions.

For some additional ideas on how to use PHI to personalize campaigns, check out some of our other blogs including: Personalize Healthcare Communications to Improve the Patient Experience.

Why Personalize Email Campaigns?

Using personalization techniques is an excellent way to improve engagement, provide a better patient experience, and receive a better ROI on email marketing. Patients expect a personalized healthcare experience, and customizing communications is one of the first steps you can take. Organizations not providing a personalized experience are at risk of declining patient satisfaction, retention, and reimbursement. A 2021 McKinsey survey of more than 3,000 US healthcare consumers found that satisfied patients are 28 percent less likely to switch providers.

To learn more about how to customize email campaigns using custom fields, schedule a demo of LuxSci’s Secure Marketing platform today.

Tags: appointment reminders, email personalization, patient engagement, patient retention, personalization
Posted in Email Marketing, LuxSci Library: HIPAA
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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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