Best Practices for Turning Prospects Into Patients Through Email Nurturing Campaigns

Two service line-specific campaigns, launched in collaboration with True North Custom, are helping Presence Health boost patient volume and build stronger relationships by leveraging its message of compassionate care.

In one of our many case stud­ies designed to help prospects con­vert patients, we explore the back­ground of Pres­ence Health. After a rebrand­ing and a refo­cus on its core mis­sion, the team at Pres­ence Health decid­ed dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing cam­paigns (specif­i­cal­ly an email nur­tur­ing cam­paign strat­e­gy) was the best tool to quick­ly and effec­tive­ly com­mu­ni­cate their mes­sages of “health through rela­tion­ships” and “com­pas­sion­ate care.”

Best Practices for Turning Prospects into Patients

The system’s cor­po­rate lead­er­ship had tar­get­ed the ortho­pe­dics and pri­ma­ry care ser­vice lines for growth. A pri­ma­ry goal for the ortho­pe­dics cam­paign was to pro­mote 72-hour express appoint­ments as well as free 15-minute injury screen­ings, while the pri­ma­ry care cam­paign was designed to raise aware­ness of Pres­ence Health’s com­mu­ni­ty-focused care and build brand recog­ni­tion in a high­ly com­pet­i­tive market.

True North worked with Pres­ence Health’s mar­ket­ing and cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment teams to craft unique nur­tur­ing cam­paigns for each ser­vice line, using a series of emails deployed week­ly, that offered read­ers a vari­ety of con­tent and calls to action:

• Drip emails were sent once per week for a total of 11 weeks and fea­tured full-length, soft-sell arti­cles and info­graph­ics. Calls to action drove read­ers to online forms where they could request the free injury screen­ings and express appoint­ments, or to online find-a-doc­tor registries.
• Trig­ger emails were deployed at strate­gic points through­out the cam­paign cycle. The goal of these emails, which were sent to users who clicked a call to action in a pre­vi­ous email, was to keep read­ers engaged with the brand by sign­ing up for Pres­ence Health’s month­ly e‑newsletter.
• A win-back email was also deployed at a strate­gic point in the cam­paign cycle, tar­get­ing read­ers who had not yet opened any pre­vi­ous drip email, re-engag­ing them to keep them in the lead nur­tur­ing cycle.

Outcomes

Both cam­paigns revealed that, by keep­ing inter­est­ed read­ers engaged, both open and click-to-open rates con­tin­u­al­ly improved and led to greater involve­ment with the Pres­ence Health brand.

The pri­ma­ry care cam­paign deployed to email address­es col­lect­ed from online health risk assess­ments and from peo­ple who called Pres­ence Health look­ing for a physi­cian. The best per­form­ing drip email, “4 Num­bers You Need to Know,” reached an open rate of 26%. Over­all, the email nur­tur­ing cam­paign aver­aged a 20% open rate and near­ly a 15% click-to-open rate

The ortho­pe­dic cam­paign reached read­ers who com­plet­ed an online joint pain assess­ment. The best-per­form­ing email in that cam­paign, “When You Need a Doctor’s Help for Joint Pain,” reached an open rate of 42%. The campaign’s win-back email had a click-to-open rate of 13.3% — show­ing that read­ers want to con­tin­ue receiv­ing infor­ma­tion even if they aren’t inter­act­ing — and over­all, the cam­paign aver­aged a 14.2% click-to-open rate.