Making Newsletters New – Strategies to Increase Email Engagement

Background:

CDC’s Office of Health Equity (OHE) serves as principal advisor to the CDC Director on all health equity matters domestic and global. OHE coordinates programs, practices, policies, and budget decisions across the agency with a health equity perspective that includes a comprehensive view of disparities (including race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, rurality, disability). Within OHE, CDC’s Office of Women’s Health (OWH) serves as a central point for women’s health and raises visibility of risk factors and other conditions that impact women’s and girls’ health.

Program background:

Health Matters for Women (HMFW) is OWH’s monthly e-newsletter, providing information on what is happening in women’s health, including research and programs, from CDC and other federal, global, and state agencies or organizations. The newsletter is distributed on the last business day of each month to over 40,000 subscribers. OHE communicators use Adobe Campaign to disseminate Health Matters for Women and monitor and evaluate email delivery and engagement.

Evaluation Methods and Results:

Starting January 2023, OHE communicators conducted a series of A/B tests to determine the impact of changing newsletter subject lines, content, content order, and imagery within the Health Matters for Women e-newsletter. E-newsletter engagement was analyzed using the open rate (the number of people that opened the email relative to those who received the email multiplied by 100) and click-through rate (number of people who clicked-through on an email relative to the number of recipients multiplied by 100). These tests are ongoing but early results show a slight increase in both the click-through rate and open rate. More testing and analyses are needed to understand the extent to which variability in e-newsletter format impacts audience engagement.

Conclusions:

Understanding how different types of content, structure, and imagery within e-newsletters may facilitate increased engagement with audiences. Routine monitoring and evaluation of e-newsletters may yield valuable information on strategies to optimize email campaigns.

Implications for research and/or practice:

For many organizations, newsletters are important route of communication and a primary way to share important information with partners. Learning strategies to increase engagement can encourage improved communication and interactivity with newsletter audiences. Lessons learned through this evaluation could have implications in newsletters both at the CDC and other agencies or organizations.