Making It Click: Examining Email Metrics to Determine Successful Factors for Public Health Email Communications

Background: Public Health Ontario (PHO) is a government funded, arms-length public health agency.   We work with our partners in government, public health, health care and related sectors to prevent illness, improve health, and reduce health inequities in Ontario, Canada. In order to meet our mandate we must be able to effectively reach our stakeholders. Email is a foundational component of our communications strategy.  As Ontario is a bilingual province our communications are often in English and French.

Program background: In October 2014, PHO implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM (CRM) to manage and track contacts, mass email communications (such as newsletters and product releases) and consultation requests.  In February 2016, we undertook an evaluation of our “open rates” (opened emails) and “click rates” (clicks on links embedded within emails). We examined factors related to the subject line and to the email itself. The purpose was to examine the impact of these factors on the open and click rates.

Evaluation Methods and Results: Between October 2014 and February 2016, 196 emails were sent using CRM to a total of 226,557 recipients.  Email factors were classified as follows:

• Short titles - subject lines less than 30 characters long
• Bilingual - both English and French in the subject line
• Call to action - subject that contained a request (i.e., register now or call for members)
• Generic account - email not linked to identifiable sender (i.e., events@oahpp.ca vs jane.doe@oahpp.ca)
• Presence of an image
• Inclusion of personalized salutation

Open rates and click rates were calculated using the total number of recipients on each distribution list as the denominator. Differences in the rates within each factor are expressed as relative increases. Overall the open rates for our emails were 25% and click rates were 10%, compared with published average open and click rates of 25% and 3% for health care and 27% and 4% for government. Factors associated with a higher open rate were: short title (40% higher), bilingual title (16% higher), and identified sender (16% higher).  Having a call to action was associated with a 17% lower open rate. Having an image in the email and coming from an identified sender were both associated with higher click rates, 3% and 7%, respectively. Sending emails on 5 consecutive days resulted in a 25% drop in open rates and a 4-fold increase in unsubscribes compared to a monthly email to the same recipients.

Conclusions: Our results show that we had an open and click rate slightly higher than published averages, and that several factors impacted those rates. Current analysis is underway to determine confidence limits, correlation of results and examination of additional factors. Given the importance of email in our communication strategy, we consider these successful factors to be of significance and will use them to improve email effectiveness and reach.

Implications for research and/or practice: To our knowledge, little literature on factors influencing email uptake exists for public health. The effective factors determined by this evaluation are a valuable resource to other public health communicators looking to increase the reach of their email marketing strategies.