Our culture is undergoing a crisis of trust. Amid misinformation, manipulative messaging and the rise of self-proclaimed experts on social, real expertise has never been needed more, especially in health and wellness. The Well by Northwell—a brand publication that delivers trusted expertise at moments of truth in people’s lives—is our commitment to the future of healthcare.
We connect with our audience—Chief Medical Officers of the Home— to provide them with personalized content that reduces stress and makes them feel more confident on their healthcare journey. Our mission is to become a trusted partner in moments of truth. Be there for our audience during life-altering diagnoses, to correct misinformation, and to guide them through challenges and the unknown.
When we study our audience, we see that they’re frustrated with the health information they find. Publishers monetize their anxiety, and other health systems sanitize it through cold & clinical information. And in 2023, the proliferation of AI has made the health information landscape incredibly more complex. As our audience navigates these challenges, the way they’re consuming health information is evolving.
We launched The Well as a digital publication nearly seven years ago. But in early 2023, we identified a need for a more robust newsletter strategy to foster deeper connection and engagement with our audience. With this launch, we aimed to be a steady voice in a more direct and intimate way. With a direct line of communication to our audience, we knew we could be there for them in new ways.
Our audience is at the core of The Well’s entire operation. In moments of need, people need voices of trust. The Well scales our expertise to reach people in those moments and offer them a way out of their anxiety and a next step to take. We aim to close the chasm between health seekers and health experts, while improving overall health literacy. We do this by translating our clinicians' expertise into highly relevant, accessible and easy to understand content that helps solve our audiences' real concerns.
As part of our newsletter strategy, we studied engagement and content performance across owned channels to identify topics of interest among our audience. Based on this research, we built two core newsletter products to speak to these specific needs:
- Happy Head: Written by The Well’s award-winning editor-in-chief Julie Shapiro, this monthly newsletter explores the topic of emotional wellness, sharing both expert advice and personal experiences on topics such as the mental impact of aging, human connection, setting boundaries, and more.
- Well Being: This monthly newsletter shares expert advice on nutrition and fitness topics, an area that we know is swirling with misinformation. We leverage experts to mythbust trends, address the latest fad diet, and share information to empower audiences to live their healthiest lives. We also share seasonal recipes developed by registered dieticians at Northwell.
We also refined our approach to The Well’s weekly newsletter to better match subscriber needs:
- Well Weekly: After an analysis in late 2022, we saw that our engaged subscribers had begun to skew older (65+) and that they were primarily female. Not surprisingly, we saw that topics such as women’s health, chronic conditions, aging and aging outperformed. With this in mind, we better tailored our content to match this demographic.
To fuel these newsletters, we leverage a data-driven editorial planning and production process:
- We study our audience on an ongoing basis to identify specific opportunities for relevance. We triangulate inputs from third- and first-party data sources and internal intelligence to create content that is in-demand for our audience. We match these opportunities with Northwell experts who are best positioned to respond to the need.
- We create expert-driven content by engaging Northwell’s vast network of clinicians and applying signature editorial formats designed to meet a specific audience need. This ranges from first-person video walkthroughs of health procedures or new wellness trends to therapist advice columns.
- We launch content with a hyper-targeted, per-piece distribution plan, focusing on a mix of owned channels. When we see positive results, we amplify performance through paid efforts.
We monitor feedback and performance to optimize campaigns and inform future planning.
In 2023, performance highlights include:
- The Well as a channel brings people who are more likely to be active and engage with the health system over time: Users subscribing to The Well are more likely to be highly engaged with Northwell Find-A-Doctor pages, with an 86% increase in average sessions. Well subscribers have a 27% lower time to schedule a next appointment, 59% more service lines used, and 66% more locations visited within the system, as compared to patients in the general population.
- Subscribers to The Well are also more likely to then have greater engagement with other Northwell communications. The open rate for non-Well communications is 20% higher after recipients subscribe to newsletters from The Well, which includes email deployments from service providers, webinars, and the Northwell Health Foundation.
- The Well’s newsletters are growing organically with a 29% YoY increase in list size, including a more than 100% organic increase in subscribers to our new Well Being newsletter list in less than a year since its debut. These subscribers are very engaged with Well content, with a 57% open rate on Well editorial newsletters.
92% of identifiable subscribers are in Northwell's service area, creating a direct tie between Well editorial efforts and awareness (and consideration) of Northwell’s health services.
Video for The Well By Northwell Health, with Revmade
