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Background:
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (ODPHP) leads a number of key federal disease prevention initiatives, including the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans. Their website, health.gov, houses information and resources related to these initiatives — including a blog that provides news, updates, and guest posts about how these initiatives are being implemented across the U.S.Program background:
Due to the breadth of ODPHP’s work, users who come to health.gov have many different information needs. Some users may be looking for information on one specific topic (e.g., nutrition related to the Dietary Guidelines), while others may be looking for broader information on disease prevention (e.g., related to Healthy People 2020). Keeping your audience’s needs in mind is key to building a successful digital outreach strategy. ODPHP knows that health professionals are busy, so they wanted to create an automated outreach system where users can get updates on the information they need — and not on what they don’t. With this in mind, CommunicateHealth (CH) and ODPHP developed a new system that allows users to engage with ODPHP about key topics that correspond with ODPHP’s work. This new system allows users to:- Join a list to receive emails about the topics that matter most to them
- Receive automated alerts every time a new blog or update is posted that relates to their topics of interest
- Filter on health.gov to view blog posts, events, and announcements related to the topics they’re interested in
Evaluation Methods and Results:
To evaluate the effectiveness of the new topic-based update system, CH worked with ODPHP to analyze key metrics, including:- Total blog page views
- Site referrals by source
- Email open and click rates
Conclusions:
Leveraging digital platforms to build an outreach system that caters to your audience’s information needs has many benefits — including increased engagement and site traffic and streamlined internal processes. ODPHP’s new system resulted in 1.5 to 6 times more page views to each of ODPHP’s 4 blog pages, and an average email open rate of over 23% (in line with the government average of 24.44%1). This data reinforces that implementing an automated outreach system produces a good return on investment without placing a burden on your organization — leaving you with a sustainable and worthwhile strategy.Implications for research and/or practice:
In today’s busy digital world, it’s important to stay relevant — so keeping your audience’s needs and interests first is key to engaging them. Interest-based list segmentation is an effective practice for email marketing and digital outreach that has been proven to improve engagement (including open and click rates) — yet, not everyone does it. This presentation will provide a practical, data-backed approach for improving your digital outreach strategy. The information presented in this session can be applied to different platforms for implementation across sectors.