Leading Healthcare Company Provides
Targeted Internal Communications
Using Dynamic Content

How a principal healthcare company uses Dynamic Content to
communicate effectively among thousands of employees
with different information needs.

This leading healthcare provider operates centers throughout the U.S., delivering high-quality and specialized healthcare services to patients. Centers are staffed with a wide array of healthcare employees, including care providers, technologists, administrators, and front-desk staff.

The internal communications team faced an intriguing challenge: How could they communicate effectively with thousands of employees who are spread throughout the U.S., but have different information needs?

"We were using email to reach out to healthcare staff in individual care centers, and they were hit by a ton of different emails," says the marketing communications coordinator. In addition, most of the content wasn't relevant. "Physicians have different information needs than front office staff."

The team sought to implement an employee communication tool that would reflect the company's culture. "We have a friendly, caring company, and we wanted to create an email newsletter that would embody those values while packaging important content about HR, operations, and critical process changes," says the internal communications manager.

The team is using EmailOpen to meet its internal communications needs. EmailOpen's employee communication tool provides customized newsletter templates tailored to client brands; a rich content management system; segmented lists; dynamic content; and responsive newsletter delivery, so that readers can access it on their device of choice.

"EmailOpen worked with us to create a design that met our needs and packages highly technical content," says the internal communications manager.

Targeting Articles to Employee Roles with Dynamic Content

The team uses EmailOpen to create a single weekly email newsletter, using dynamic content functionality to tag articles to relevant employee roles from seven different audience segments.

"A lot of the content is companywide, such as announcements, recognitions, and advancements," says the marketing communications coordinator. "However, some content is highly targeted. For example, if there is testing at a center, we might allow our front office staff to read a story about a new workflow with check-in, while our medical staff reads about business process changes."

"By using dynamic content, employees only get the content that is relevant to their job," says the marketing communications coordinator. Without the dynamic content, the team would be forced to produce multiple newsletters to reach different audience segments. Administrative staff see every story so that they know everything that is happening at their particular center.

The team also produces a second employee newsletter, a weekly communique for physicians, which doesn't use dynamic content.

Increasing Productivity with Defined Communications Processes

The team works with other internal organizations like HR, operations, and corporate communications to strategize and develop stories. "The amount of content has increased dramatically as our healthcare programs have grown," says the marketing communications coordinator. "We may be producing 30 different stories for each issue, with the average reader seeing 10 articles that are related to their role." She handles the technical content, while her colleague writes features and corporate content.

After writing content and gathering imagery, the team is ready to create the weekly employee newsletter. "EmailOpen is a great content management system," says the internal communications manager. "I have used many of them, and EmailOpen is quite easy to use compared to the others. It has a very intuitive system for uploading and designing content."

The marketing communications coordinator values the ability to collaborate with the internal communications manager on urgent deadlines. "We might have something come in Tuesday afternoon that needs to go out Wednesday morning. My colleague and I can both log into EmailOpen at the same time and work on different stories, without kicking each other out of the system or overwriting each other's work."

Increasing Access and Usability to Healthcare Documentation

The team also use the employee communication tool to share resources housed on the company intranet. "We have so many documents and workflows for our company," says the marketing communications coordinator. "We use the hyperlink function to connect employees with the collateral that is housed on our servers." Past newsletters are also archived on the portal so that employees can access them.

The team distributes the internal employee newsletter on Wednesday at 10 AM, which the staff have determined is the best day to drive readership. They review metrics every week, including email opens and click-throughs, individual article performance, and readership by center and role.

"The metrics are very helpful," says the internal communications manager. "We know that our front office team members may not be the most engaged readers, but it is essential to make sure our center managers are reading everything, as they implement key changes. So we monitor that metric carefully."

"If an article doesn't perform well, we'll brainstorm why," says the marketing communications coordinator. "We may need to adjust the program or move the content to a different channel."

The team is very pleased with their ongoing collaboration with EmailOpen staff, who provide design services for new newsletters, ongoing training on new features and functionality, and technical support when the team needs it. "EmailOpen has been great at supporting our company, which is in rapid growth mode," says the marketing communications coordinator.