Employee Marketing Increases Health Center Use

Premise Health Uses Email Marketing to Save
Client $1.5M in One Year

Premise Health is a privately held, four-decade-old company with a very modern mission: helping large companies improve the quality of the healthcare they deliver to their employees. Headquartered in Brentwood, Tennessee, Premise Health takes healthcare further by bringing it closer – operating more than 500 health and wellness centers, pharmacies, and fitness centers for its 220+ clients, who are located across 45 states and two U.S. territories.

Today's companies are looking to provide access to critical health and wellness programs in a cost-conscious manner. U.S. employers project that their healthcare costs will soar past $14,000 per employee in 2018 , so ensuring that employees take full advantage of regular checkups and tests to maintain wellness is every bit as important as providing expert, targeted care to ill patients.

Increasing Employee Use of Services with Targeted Internal Newsletters

Premise Health operates six onsite health centers for one of its large corporate clients and wanted to help the company drive employee usage of its services. The client, which has 40,000 employees, was struggling to get staff to use covered services, since many employees weren't aware of the full range of services available and were being bombarded with emails and other information at their jobs.

Using EmailOpen for Email Marketing of Healthcare Services

Chastity Kessler, Director, Onsite Marketing and Engagement Strategy, knew Premise Health could help. Kessler had joined the company from a retail healthcare organization, where her team had harnessed the power of email marketing to achieve business goals. Premise Health's client agreed to serve as a beta tester for the company's new email marketing service.

Kessler needed a platform that would drive results, and she needed it quickly. Fortunately, Premise Health already had a great tool in place: EmailOpen. The company selected EmailOpen for internal communications purposes, and as a result, its email newsletter platform had already been through a strict business, legal, and security vetting process.

"We took EmailOpen and put a B2C retail healthcare marketing spin on it," says Kessler. "The platform has great functionality, but what really puts it over the top is the service."

Kessler says she worked with EmailOpen to design templates for her campaign that met her goals. Kessler shared the content that she wanted to appear above the fold, while the EmailOpen team advised her on how to create a flexible template that she could use across multiple clients and campaigns. "EmailOpen was very cognizant of the fact that I don't have deep pockets. Ultimately, everything I spend I have to get client approval on. We set a budget for coding on the front end. Now, I have the ability to change out header images with my emails without needing their design support," says Kessler.

"The platform is very intuitive and easy to use," adds Kessler. "I did a one-hour training session upfront, and that is all I have needed."

Email Marketing Provides Rapid ROI with Greater Service Usage

Kessler worked with her team to design a campaign that would accomplish the client's business objectives of increasing utilization and reducing costs. Premise Health prepared an email marketing campaign on a modest budget to generate awareness about each health center, educate employees about their opportunities for care, and increase overall foot traffic in the centers and service usage. The team worked closely with client leadership to create an email campaign that was on-brand and on-message, aligning with the company's culture, integrating with existing incentive programs, and incorporating employee feedback.

Each month featured a new topic and relevant call to action, based on the season, underutilized services, or client-promoted initiatives. Each campaign was designed to deliver timely, relevant content. Most importantly, the emails were trackable – so Premise Health's marketing team could measure how users' interactions with the emails affected utilization.

"We achieved 25% to 32% average open rates with our client, something we've continued to see across all of Premise Health's clients who use our email marketing service. We can see that we are consistently driving users to the patient portal where they can review services and book appointments," states Kessler.

By using communications best practices and aligning to customer needs, Premise Health increased overall health center utilization for the client across six sites by 11 percent in the first year, boosting new service-specific appointments and completed registrations booked through Premise Health's patient portal. Equally importantly, Premise Health's campaign contributed to nearly $1.5 million in total net savings in 2016.

"The client was very pleased with the campaign results because we dramatically increased overall service utilization and penetration into their population. As a consequence, they are reengaging with us as an email marketing client for 2017," says Kessler.

This client's success has helped Kessler make a compelling business pitch to other companies. "We shared the results from the case study at our 2016 client forum, which we hold to share new business trends and innovations. Since then we've launched the email marketing service with six more clients," she says.

Meet Chastity Kessler
Chastity Kessler is a marketing and advertising professional with experience in the healthcare, hospitality and restaurant industries with a primary focus on Business-to-Consumer (B2C) engagement. She has substantial ad agency and client-side experience, including franchised organizations. Mrs. Kessler has proven ability to strategically develop, launch, and execute marketing programs and is well-versed in effectively managing complex business relationships. At Premise Health she leads a dedicated onsite marketing and engagement team whose sole purpose is to support client marketing and communication endeavors to drive site utilization. Mrs. Kessler majored in advertising and holds a Bachelor's of Science in Communications from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.