5 Healthcare Emails We Love Receiving
Not only are our favorite healthcare newsletters delightful reads, they’re also brimming with best practices.
By Erica Harmon
What makes a newsletter from a healthcare organization compelling? Is it a sleek design, easy-to-understand articles or information pertinent to everyday life?
Of course, the answer largely depends on your target audience. But whether you’re trying to inform a general audience about new initiatives or breakthroughs or keep physicians up to date on the latest research, the right email marketing strategy can help you create newsletters that people are excited to see pop up in their inboxes. Here are a few of our favorites and why we find them so compelling.
1. Ochsner Health
This regional healthcare provider offers seven different weekly newsletters for readers to opt into: Must Reads, Food & Fitness, Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Parenting, Mental Health and Skin Deep. Each newsletter provides healthy living tips, video clips and even podcast episodes, all curated around the focus of that particular newsletter. This guarantees that readers receive information that’s relevant to their interests in every email.
Takeaway: Segment your email marketing by audience or topic, and let your audience choose the topics that matter most to them. Segmenting can lead to less email fatigue and higher engagement.
2. My Vanderbilt Health
The monthly newsletters from Vanderbilt University Medical Center are packaged around timely themes or seasonal topics, such as women’s heart health for February and allergies in springtime. The emails are packed with relevant content from My Vanderbilt Health, including articles, guides and expert interviews.
Takeaway: To encourage readers to not just open your email but also click, provide seasonally relevant content they might already be searching for and offer them answers to concerns that are top of mind.
3. NYU Langone Health
NYU Langone Health’s Physician Focus content hub and newsletters share medical insights and innovations with physicians and healthcare professionals. But just because this target audience holds advanced degrees does not mean the content is difficult to digest. Newsletters typically focus on one main story with a two-sentence takeaway and “at-a-glance” highlights.
Takeaway: Medical professionals are busy, and they need information fast. Help your readers get straight to the point and format your content in easy-to-digest morsels.
4. NewYork-Presbyterian
This prestigious hospital shares newsletters under the same name as its content hub: Health Matters. Emails typically consist of a round-up of recent articles, linking readers to owned content, podcasts and social media channels, as well as to earned media and news articles. Newsletters lead with compelling subject lines like “How Much Salt is Too Much?” and “How to Avoid Sunday Scaries.”
Takeaway: Don’t sleep on your subject line. Put forth the most compelling topic, without wandering into clickbait territory. Not sure which subject line is best? Do A/B testing to see what kinds of subject lines catch your readers’ attention.
5. Mayo Clinic
The Mayo Clinic offers newsletters centered on specialized healthcare topics and service lines (from arthritis to LGBTQ+ health), in addition to one for a general interest audience. In particular, the General Health and Wellness newsletter provides a mix of universally appealing content (“Boost Your Health: The Benefits of Having a Pet”) and clinical information (“2,800+ clinical trials are underway at Mayo Clinic”) that appeals to a wide-ranging audience looking for news and information from this venerable healthcare institution.
Takeaway: You can balance general healthcare content with more clinical information. Lead with the more universal topics and then weave in clinical angles in a way that serves the reader (i.e., what’s in it for them?).
Erica has more than a decade of experience leading messaging development, content strategy and magazine projects for clients in the higher education, hospitality, book publishing and museum industries. At C/A, she helps clients such as Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Niagara Falls USA and Northern Arizona University bring their unique stories to life.
Erica enjoys traveling to places that have pop culture connections: She’s seen all the Goonies sites in Astoria, Oregon, flown through time and space with Doctor Who in Cardiff, Wales, and sang on the Sound of Music hills in Salzburg, Austria. She loves books, magazines, road trips, Broadway musicals and cottagecore activities such as gardening and sewing, but her favorite thing to do is spend time with her fiancé and stepcat.