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Where are you coming from: Our e-newsletter?

Image source: iStock

Organization: Akron Children's Hospital

What: Traffic to pediatric-focused educational articles on its blog. (see example) 

Scenario:  The marketing team at Akron Children's began to question consumers’ continued interest in its monthly educational e-newsletter, called iGrow. Parents sign up online, at special events or via a brochure/flyer. It was slightly customizable in the fact that they could choose categories of pediatric health articles based on the individual needs (asthma, diabetes, fitness, nutrition) and age groups (pregnancy/infant, toddler, school-age, adolescent, teen) of their children. If birthdates were provided, the database would revise subscriptions as the child(ren) aged to ensure the content continued to be relevant to the reader. Children were aging out. New enrollment was declining. Open rate was declining. (Smith, 2018).

Advantages: The e-newsletter’s articles allowed the hospital to highlight and market its medical experts, programs, and services. The monthly frequency provided an ongoing, personal touch point to keep the organization top of mind with this key audience.

Disadvantages: iGrow had been around for several years, so the layout was beyond its prime and looking dated. An investment was needed to keep up with competitor publications and the many other places to find reliable content online. Fifteen new articles were required each month to keep the library current and fresh; therefore, the team felt too much content was being posted on the blog. The team was struggling to meet these and other project deadlines.
Educational article on Akron Children's blog

Questions: Should the newsletter continue? Was it driving enough traffic to the blog to justify an investment in design, ongoing writers’ fees, staff time to coordinate, experts’ time for interviews, etc? Did readers value the information? Or value it in the current format? Could we achieve the same results by promoting the articles in another way?

Analysis: Typically the newsletter editor Karen Adams, who is a writer not a web analyst, would review metrics monthly, but specifically just for the newsletter (such as open rate, click through rate, most engaged subscribers) and then compare to the industry average. Results would typically be below average.  

Chosen Metric and Reasoning: Page Referrer, which describes the source of traffic to a page. The newsletter editor requested assistance of the digital manager to evaluate where traffic was coming for the educational articles that she was featuring in the newsletter. By evaluating this metric they could see if clicks from iGrow were an important part of the referrer mix. The team decided the most important question was, “Could we achieve the same results by promoting the articles in another way?”

Outcome: The report provided 12 months of data for 180 educational articles. Page referrers included, in order of significance: Direct, Search engines, Inside the Site, Email/iGrow, Social, Other websites (e.g. school district sites where with the organization’s nurses are caring for their students).
Because “Email/iGrow” was the fourth most frequent page referral during the last year, resulting in less than 15% of the articles traffic, the team decided to temporarily suspend the distribution of iGrow for 6 months then re-evaluate the effect it had on page referrers during that time. Secondly, they will monitor feedback from enrollees regarding the suspension. All will be encourage to follow on social media, subscribe to the RSS feed, or access the blog directly as they wish.  

Reference
Adams, K. (2018, October 18). Personal interview.
Smith, B. (2018, October 19). Personal interview.
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