Leading Healthcare Outsourcing Group
Email Marketing Template Initiative

Business Challenge

This leading healthcare outsourcing firm uses their email marketing campaign to attract prospective applicants for their traveling nurse placement program. By sending out professionally looking emails, they can attract more nurses to apply with their firm. With an aging population, the need for nurses has been growing at exponential rates and the supply of qualified nurses is declining. The email marketing campaign is vital to attract more applicants and convince them to apply as a traveling nurse with our client. A must-have for this client was ease of use, allowing a sales representative to quickly and easily send out professional graphic emails with the click of a mouse, right from their desks. Furthermore, in order to maximize ROI, the templates needed to be reusable and generic enough to be used for multiple campaigns, as well as support eight separate brands. Lastly, the templates needed to work inside of the ExactTarget system so that they could work in conjunction with SalesForce.com, where the distribution list of the potential traveling nurses was located.

The Solution

Acumen’s User Experience team designed 3 separate email templates for each of the 8 brands, creating a total of 24 available templates. The client relied heavily on the marketing and visual design skills of the team to create email templates that would attract the attention of the traveling nurses. The email templates left areas for customizable images, as well as multiple customizable copy areas. Acumen’s consultants worked very closely with the client’s marketing team to create emails that had the correct color schemes, layout, and text space that would best represent their brand and company.

In this solution, the client would sketch out how they would like the email to look on paper, and then Acumen would turn it into an electronic, HTML version. This HTML template would then be loaded into the ExactTarget application, where sales representatives could access the template, inserting their personal information, including their picture and signature block. The text was automatically inserted, and the recipient list was a group of prospective leads from Salesforce.com. A sales rep can now send an email that includes their personal information in a professional graphic design layout to hundreds of thousands of recipients within minutes.

Technical/Business Expertise

The greatest value to the client came from using our technical skills combined with our marketing best practices and visual layout expertise. We had a clear understanding of how people view emails and how best to ensure they get the attention of the reader. Besides using marketing and visual design skills, Acumen used the following tools to deliver the email templates: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe ImageReady, Conceptual Designs, and XHTML.

Return on Investment

By integrating the email functionality within Salesforce and ExactTarget, it was no longer necessary for the sales team to use Outlook for email campaigns. This reduced time and effort by using fewer applications, as well as keeping the email campaigns in one organized place. Furthermore, the client could better track when email campaigns were sent out on a management level, as well as the potential to apply web analytics within the email to better understand the response rates of their leads. By using an email marketing tool, it also increased the professional look and feel of the brand. The client plans to implement templates for email campaigns more extensively throughout their organization.

Leading Healthcare Outsourcing Group: Email Marketing Template Initiative (PDF)