Category: newsletter marketing

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How Do I Create a Healthcare Newsletter?

by

Michelle Troutman

An engaging healthcare newsletter not only informs, it also attracts patients.

It balances well-researched, HIPAA-compliant content with a clear format. In my healthcare writing, I use credible research to turn complex terms into plain English.

Crafting a healthcare newsletter requires attention to detail. Simplify the process with free healthcare newsletter templates like this one.

What Are Some of the Best Healthcare Newsletters?

Though there’s no “best” healthcare newsletter, some follow best practices like a clear layout, writing, and design.

Healthcare Newsletter Examples

The healthcare newsletter created by Loma Linda University Health featuring the theme "Go Red for Heart Month."

Loma Linda University Health: A Healthy Tomorrow

  • Target audience: Loma Linda University Health patients
  • Content focus: Health maintenance and illness prevention
  • Expertise: Medical providers’ advice

This e-newsletter features a good example of a themed format; it promotes Heart Month with suitable shades of red throughout.

Its title, “A Healthy Tomorrow,” is one of the more inspiring healthcare newsletter names.

The first article, “Do You Know Your 5 Heart Numbers?,” includes advice from one of their cardiologists, adding credibility. Research suggests odd numbers in article titles gain more attention than those with even numbers.

Below the article, links to a quiz and a related piece inspire responses.

The alternating background colors in the featured items help them “pop” while they stay on theme. The concise email subject line, “Go Red for Heart Health,” stokes curiosity.

Parts that could be improved to enhance appeal:

  • Placing social media icons at the top to boost clicks.
  • The section below the third article features two calls to action (CTAs), side-by-side, which can confuse readers. One could be removed or moved to the top.
  • Reducing the image sizes, especially the top half of the header.
  • Removing the unnecessary table of contents.

Parsley Health

The Parsley Health e-newsletter on gut health, one of the best healthcare newsletters.
  • Target audience: Parsley Health patients
  • Content focus: health gut issues
  • Expertise: “Top doctors trained in root-cause resolution medicine.”

Like the prior e-newsletter, with its focus on better gut health, Parsley Health follows a consistent theme.

From the clear email subject line repeated in the headline (“3 tips for gut health”) to the final CTA, the content stays pithy. Together with carefully placed images, it draws readers in.

They gently persuade through statements like “Parsley Health is here to help you understand and heal chronic digestive symptoms.” The tips, video, and copy below expand on the meaning, effectively addressing the buyer’s journey phases.

The two-column format in the middle reduces scrolling. The concise footer text meets anti-spam-compliance guidelines. The Instagram icon could appear at the top to boost clicks. Fewer calls to action could improve focus.

Both newsletters subtly show expertise in ways that boost trust and credibility; they come across as reputable health organizations. The messages hold interest, though they could be shorter to keep readers engaged.

These healthcare email marketing examples highlight targeting content to a certain audience. They’re aimed at patients, especially those with chronic conditions. E-newsletters geared to caregivers or health professionals would advise on patient care.

The healthcare newsletter examples emphasize trust-building — the quality of care affects people’s lives. Healthcare providers of any specialty can foster accuracy and credibility in their e-newsletters through:

  • Featuring advice from experienced staff
  • Showing awards won
  • HIPAA compliance
  • Reliable data sources

Maintaining trust in healthcare email marketing is hard because you must share helpful health details while properly advertising without sharing private patient information.

Resources:

Knowing how to write a newsletter article can prepare you for writing a business newsletter or how to create a professional email newsletter.

“In the healthcare industry, e-newsletters serve as both promotional material and a means of direct communication that delivers health updates, news, and educational content directly to patient’s mailboxes. This is a direct means of communication which develops trust and loyalty that are critical in providing health care.”

Keran Smith, co-founder and cMo, lyfe marketing

Healthcare newsletters are your lifeline to patients, helping you deliver important information to them, like policy changes and appointment reminders.

Healthcare Email Marketing Compliance and Regulations

Healthcare email marketing must follow data privacy rules like HIPAA, GDPR, CASL, and CAN-SPAM. Legal considerations beyond HIPAA compliance include getting proper consent and offering email opt-in procedures.

Regulations

HIPAA requirements for marketing emails with protected health information (PHI):

  • Patient authorization
  • Encryption
  • Business associate agreements
  • Easy unsubscribe instructions

GDPR mandates:

  • Processing personal data for marketing
  • Data protection principles
  • Letting patients exercise their data rights

CAN-SPAM: commercial emails must include unsubscribe options, accurate headers, ad identification, and a physical address.

Best Practices:

  • Get clear consent before sending commercial emails.
  • Segment communications to send commercial content only to opted-in recipients.
  • Use encryption and secure processes to protect data privacy and integrity.
  • Provide clear privacy notices, preference management, and easy opt-out options.
  • Maintain detailed documentation of data processing activities for compliance.
  • Ensure marketing emails have accurate headers, subject lines, ad labels, and a physical mailing address.
  • Honor opt-out requests in ten business days.

Crafting an Interesting Healthcare Newsletter

An attractive design and informative, trustworthy content make a healthcare newsletter readers won’t want to miss. Use these tips to create a newsletter patients can’t wait to read.

Stop stressing over your emails — start enjoying creating them easily — and gain more leads. Get the Easy 5-Step Business E-Newsletter Template.

email marketing, newsletter marketing, newsletters, writing advice

5 Email Marketing Trends to Automate Your Business Email Creation

Do you know how email marketing trends like user-generated content and personalization can enhance your messages and engagement? 🤓

You might be familiar with some of the latest advances, but others might be new to you because they’re not standard practice yet. These are among the trends that can reshape your email content landscape and conversion rates.

For an in-depth look into all five email marketing trends and how they can refine your content creation, see the videos in this playlist.
An example of an AMP-enabled email from email marketing platform AWeber.
An example of an AMP-enabled email from email marketing platform AWeber.

1. Interactivity: AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), a Google framework, brings activities like completing forms and game playing to emails. E-commerce and subscription sites like Finish Line and Booking.com have used it, but any business can leverage it for engagement. Another, lower-tech option (with or without AMP) is user-generated content (UGC).

AMP: With features like AMP List, you may automatically update product listings and remove old offers. AMP Accordion hides or expands content like FAQs and product information. AMP also animates “call-to-action” buttons.

Google offers AMP to software developers, but many email service providers/platforms (ESPs) don’t currently support it. (AWeber, MailChimp, and MailModo are among the AMP-enabled platforms.) AMP-capable ESPs often feature limited versions like design features in their template builders. Also, it’s incompatible with some non-Gmail clients.

UGC: With this and other creative email marketing trends, you may spur readers to act through methods like:

  • Requesting a review after a purchase
  • Asking readers to complete a survey

2. Personalization: Go beyond adding subscribers’ names to emails or segmenting your list by audience with custom customer-focused content. Amazon, Starbucks, and other vendors have used predictive personalization based on customers’ locations and other data to forecast content or products that appeal to them. 

Example: A sporting goods store emails a discount on a parka to a buyer who lives nearby and recently bought thermal insulated gloves.

AMP also enables personalization through collecting data directly from surveys, forms, and other content in emails. 

3. Accessibility: Emails continue to become more text than image-based. Easy-to-read fonts and complementary colors are among the elements that make them accessible, especially for readers with visual and cognitive conditions. 

Litmus reports that in 2022, an average of 35 percent of people read emails in “dark mode,” with dark backgrounds against lighter-colored text. 

To ensure everyone can read your messages, check if the text is clear. Browser add-ons such as WebAIM’s WAVE and tools like EXPERTE.com’s Accessibility Check test if the elements of emails meet accessibility standards. The EXPERTE.com tool works like the accessibility checker in Google’s PageSpeed Insights except it scores and assesses every major page at a website.

4. Automated content: Artificial intelligence (AI) tools in ESPs let people create images and email copy. Leading providers Constant Contact and MailChimp are among those that now offer AI assistants. (MailChimp’s Email Content Generator is available only to their standard and premium plan users.) Creators who cull content from other sources can use apps like: 

  • Wordtune: Summarize content from a website address. 
  • Claude: Cut and paste content into the platform and prompt it for a summary. 
  • Feedly: Through its Leo tool, this RSS reader lets you pull online content based on your reading history and keyword alerts. 
  • Google Alerts: Save keyword searches for relevant news articles
  • Web browser extensions that aid content curation

5. Automated content curation: For a fee, ESPs like rasa.io and Futurescope offer in-platform content curation. 

Rasa.io pulls content from various sources like blogs and social media accounts. Its AI automation tool will then sift through the content, and based on users’ clicks, customize a message for them. Futurescope lets you choose a topic or industry to create brand-specific content.

See where to put your e-newsletter content–save time and gain results

get your easy 5-STEP business e-newsletter template

What’s your favorite email marketing trend? Feel free to comment below.

QUOTES

“I see interactive as a huge shift in email development. Early analytics have shown far greater engagement from users who receive interactive messages.”

~ Mark Robbins, Email Developer, Rebelmail

“Content curation involves finding other people’s good stuff, summarizing it, and sharing it. Curation is a win-win-win: you need content to share; blogs and websites need more traffic, and people need filters to reduce the flow of information.”

~ Guy Kawasaki, The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users

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5 Elements of an Effective Newsletter for Business

1. A descriptive headline – Among the most crucial elements of an effective newsletter for business, the subject line should refer clearly to the content while it entices people to open.

Example: Is your Rx running low? (DFD Russell Medical Centers)

It should also provoke curiosity. Use power words, numbers, news, or scarcity (“This Friday Only”) to grab attention. Subject Line, Sharethrough, Advanced Marketing Institute’s Headline Analyzer, and other analyzers can help you choose click-worthy headlines.

2. A simple structure and design – Follow AIDA, which stands for attention, interest, desire, and action. Generally speaking, put the most important information at or near the top, where people tend to look first.

Research and marketing firm Fenwick studied several B2B newsletters. Those they ranked the highest contained an average of 241 words, used few images, had one column, and featured the same colors and branding as the companies’ websites.

3. Interesting content – Ask yourself why you’re sending your newsletter to determine what to include. Do you want to get more leads?

After you’ve started, the challenge is to keep people reading. HubSpot suggests you do that through “building relevance.” If you know why you’re sending people your newsletter, ask yourself, “What value are they going to get from it?”

4. Personalized copy – Michael Katz, an expert on professional services and solopreneur newsletters, recommends you blend stories about your life experiences with your business knowledge to connect with readers and build trust.

A more personal touch may make you stand out as someone people can relate to rather than a faceless brand name. It can also keep your content interesting.

5. Ease of reading – Check the readability level. Some grammar experts advise that your content read at an eighth or ninth-grade level or below. To check the level, use The Hemingway App.

An overlooked part of newsletter design is compliance with accessibility standards such as the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) and the European Union Accessibility Directive. The ADA requires certain businesses to accommodate people with disabilities. Web content for them should be accessible for navigation by voice, screen readers, or other assistive devices.

The ADA guidelines apply to businesses that run 20 or more weeks yearly with at least 15 full-time employees or those that provide public accommodation, such as inns and restaurants. These are the ADA legal requirements for an email.

Learn more about crafting engaging and effective business e-newsletters.

What do you think are the most effective elements of a newsletter? Feel free to comment below.

Need help with your e-newsletter? Check out The Ultimate Guide to Writing a Newsletter, my business newsletter writing packages, or request a free e-news audit.

Quotes

“When setting the goal for your email, you want to consider how to send the right email to the right person at the right time.” ~ HubSpot

“Regardless of which type of email you are sending, your reader needs to know what you’re trying to convey. Aim for a clean, straightforward design to display the value you are sending.” ~ HubSpot

business communication, business writing, newsletter advice, newsletter marketing, newsletter tips, newsletter writing, newsletters, writing a newsletter

5 Mistakes to Avoid in Your Newsletters for Business

1. Long subject lines –  Among the mistakes to avoid in your newsletters for business, keep your headlines short. Long headlines may get cut off in some email readers, especially in preview. Also, a pithier title is more likely to catch people’s eyes. Some experts, such as HubSpot, suggest you keep the headline under 45 characters — keystrokes, not words. 🙂

2. Long newsletters – You’ve heard it all before — people are busy and have short attention spans. They won’t always read content they have to keep scrolling through, especially on a mobile device. As an alternative, you can link back to a PDF or a web page, which is more appropriate for scrolling.

3. Bad links – Links are easy to overlook in the editing process. You can use a link checker or test them one by one to make sure they lead where you want them to go.

4. No links – Links help make text more visually appealing. And, if you’re promoting something, it makes sense to link back to a landing page for it, so this is your chance.

5. Not editing thoroughly – This is one of the most common mistakes to avoid in newsletters — don’t let it happen to you! Maybe you just need to send your e-newsletter ASAP because of breaking news. Perhaps you’re getting pressure to send it on short notice. If possible, take time to pore over every detail, from the wording to the paragraph length to the links and the contact information.

Need help with your newsletter? Contact me.

Quotes

“Don’t send out a newsletter just to send out a newsletter. One newsletter a year that is really interesting is more beneficial than 12 that are boring. If you write two or three boring newsletters in a row, your readers will start to think you write boring books.” ~ M.J. Rose

“Don’t tell users how to interact with your email. If it’s not intuitive enough, go back to the drawing board.” ~ Eric Lepetit, NEST

Comments? Suggestions? Need help? Feel free to contact me.

Michelle Troutman
classywriting.com