Emails meant for an internal audience (people within Wexner Medical Center) should be created with a HealthBeat HUB contributor or in Outlook. For external email messages, please note the following guidelines:
We can only send email to the following (and must include an opt-out and comply with any requests to be unsubscribed):
- Individuals that have expressly provided their contact information for the purpose of receiving marketing messages (generally through website forms).
- Individuals that have provided us with their email for transactional business with us, but they have not stated that they want to receive marketing email (e.g., patients have provided their contact information as part of their health care. Emailing them a commercial message requires HIPAA release approval by the Privacy office).
- Email addresses that are first-party sourced, 100% opted-in, and privacy and regulatory compliant
We cannot send email from any of our accounts to the following:
- Lists that have been manually sourced or compiled
- Addresses that have been purchased, rented, or borrowed (e.g., industry organizations). See above for when those can be sent by the mail house/vendor on our behalf.
- Emails collected from “friends, family and alumni”
- Lists that only include email address as the subscriber key
- Emails that do not have accompanying identifiers of the actual individual (e.g., first name, last name)
- Group email addresses that are not owned by a unique individual (e.g., 245@fastsigns.com, accounting@duo.com, billing@usnews.com)
- These sources are prone to spam traps, generally have poor deliverability, do not comply with permission-based marketing rules, potentially hurt our domain reputation among email clients and violate our Salesforce Marketing Cloud user agreement.
Be sure to use the online brand guidelines and follow other best practices:
- Keep key messages between 50 and 125 words and focus on supporting the call to action (CTA).
- Multi-story emails should also be kept brief, at 200-300 words.
- Let links to external pages and call to action buttons do the elaborating. Text is used to provide highlights, not in-depth information.
- Do not clutter with images, keep the design focused on the main objective of the email.
- Middle of the week sends are best for engagement (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday)
- Best time to send is 8am-9am, 11am-12pm, and 4pm-5pm
- The distribution limit through Outlook is 500. Break into multiple emails if exceeding this limit.
- Track links to understand whether anyone clicked on your URLs; these can be requested through a web request.
- Sender must bcc recipients.
Need help with formatting? Using any of these three templates can help: