Health Newsletters Direct, which for 15 years has provided print newsletters to hospitals and health organizations for marketing to consumers, next month will start an e-mail newsletter program.
The program, called “Regarding Health Outbound,” will be HND's first attempt at e-mail marketing. The company has been working with three of its print newsletter clients to help them develop e-mail lists of their own and expects to begin with initial drops of 500 to 1,000 e-mails in April.
The clients, all healthcare providers, have generated leads through offline marketing efforts to their existing clientele with the assistance of HND. The consumers agreed to receive e-mail information from the healthcare providers.
HND, Evanston, IL, provides basic content for four newsletters, each aimed at a different audience. The newsletters cover women's health, cardiac care, cancer prevention and overall wellness. Healthcare organizations can adjust the newsletters to fit their own needs, for instance by adding banners and buttons providing links to their owns Web sites, or by inserting links into the copy itself.
Each article in the newsletter includes a link to the full bibliography of sources that were used in the story. Termed a “CredibilityClick” by HND, the link will serve to build consumer trust, said Sally Rynne, CEO and founder of HND.
While the newsletters have been tested only in focus groups so far, HND is expecting click-through rates to average between 5 percent and 10 percent, Rynne said. The e-mail newsletters should be better suited for small, tightly focused mail drops than print newsletters, which are only cost-effective for larger drops. HND's clients on average drop 50,000 print newsletters per quarter.
