Patient Engagement Emails - 10 Effective Design Considerations to Engage Patients

 

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Email

I can see your eyes glaze over.  Done correctly, the hospital has an underutilized, efficient, and effective tool at its disposal to engage and manage patient expectations. Email also offers a cost-effective way to implement an ongoing engagement strategy when combined with social media. Email can provide relevant medical information, health and wellness tips, and practices to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic to maintain continuous engagement. Email is one of the few mechanisms that hospitals can control. It's a marketing tool to build brand loyalty, enhance the experience, and engage.

Better than outbound interruptive marketing, where your general messaging reaches the broadest possible audience hoping that someone will respond, email is direct messaging to the patient, and should be a part of your inbound marketing program.

But it just not a mail merge program to put a name at the top.

And it's not buying an email list.  

A word of caution is in order. Never buy an email list.  These people have not consented to receive an email from the vendor.  Purchased lists damage the hospital brand, risks labeling for the hospitals as a spammer, ending up in the junk folder or blocked. Given enough undeliverable emails, others marked as spam and blocked, at some point, your Internet Service Providers will flag your emails as spam, impacting your ability to send emails.

And emails marked as spam and unopened will eventually affect the deliverability of the email. Then comes the contacting of patients requesting the whitelisting of the email address. A temporary fix at best, they need to repair the content, design, and CTAs to make them more responsive to the receiver.

In the interest of blog readability, I won't go into all the detail of how to create a successful hospital email program.  But what I will do is provide some tips for creating effective, and engaging patient emails.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

10 Steps to start the journey to an engaging email 

1.       Start with a primary goal. Deliveries, clicks, and open are metrics, not goals. What do you want the email to accomplish? Send someone to the patient portal? Attend a webinar?  Download some helpful information? Make the goal measurable. 

2.       Write the copy. One of the few controllable factors in an email by the marketer is the copy. But structure and design are crucial, and it doesn't matter how excellent the copy is if the design is all wrong. Every point of text should support the goal. 

3.       Write for scan-ability. Use the right tone. Personalize when appropriate. Proofread, proofread and then proofread some more. 

4.       Use the inverted pyramid structure to - grab attention, build anticipation, call-to-action. 

5.       Have only one call-to-action.  You may have several links in an email, but each link must lead to where you want the reader to go.  Multiple CTAs confuse the reader and result in inaction.  But in case you can't help yourself with numerous CTAs, stack your content.  In the eventof emails, the choice is not okay. The only difference is a newsletter, but that is a subject for another time. 

6.       The design creates a consistent user experience for everyone who receives your email. The email design also helps to remove the friction in delivering your email. You can leverage branding and recognition to capture the reader's attention. Use headers and sub-headers, font style, italics, numbers, or colored text, but do not underline or bold. Underlining and bolding is the equivalent of shouting at people in an email.  Be deliberate about the top 25 percent of your content. 

7.       Reduce information density and add white space.  White space is good. Use a single-column layout. 

8.       Email design and web design are different. While there are only a few common web browsers, there are thousands of email clients. Each email client will render your email differently. Make sure you provide a link to an online version.  Six hundred pixels is the ideal width. Stay away from HTML/CSS-based positioning and stick to table-structured positioning.  Add alt text to your images. Avoid creating emails as a single image and don't use background images. Remember to define the width and height of your images. 

9.       Design the email for mobile. Here's why: 54 percent of emails opened occur on a mobile device; 81 percent of smartphone users say reading email is an activity that they use mobile for the most, and 41 percent say they want emails readable on mobile. Think about how you use your smartphone- looking at emails between meetings or a restaurant. People may not always be at home be sitting behind tablets, laptops, or desktops.  Less is more. Besides, designing your email for mobile makes you write content with greater clarity and gets you to the point faster. 

10.   Use mobile-friendly templates.  The call-to-action should be above the fold; Navigation goes in the footer—user 14-point type. The call-to-action should be 44 by 44 pixels.

There is a lot here in creating a successful email.  If anything, it may give you pause to reconsider how you can use email in a continuous patient engagement and experience management strategy effectively.

Michael is a healthcare business, marketing, communications strategist, and thought leader. As an internationally followed healthcare strategy blogger, his blog, Healthcare Marketing Matters, is read in 52 countries and is listed on the 100 Top Healthcare Marketing Blogs & Websites ranked at No. 3 on the list by Feedspot.com. Michael is a Life Fellow American College of Healthcare Executives. An influencer in healthcare marketing strategy, communications, digital marketing, and social media, Michael is in the top 10 percent of social media experts nationwide. For inquiries regarding strategic consulting engagements, you can email me at michael@themichaeljgroup.com. 

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The opinions expressed are my own.