CRM Email Audit & UX Optimization
An eight-email patient onboarding cadence with open rates above benchmark but CTR below. A full UX audit across every touchpoint, diagnosing why patients opened and didn’t click, and redesigning each email to close the gap.
The brief described a CTR problem. The UX audit revealed it was a content density and fold architecture problem operating at different levels across different email types.
“Audit the CRM email touchpoints and provide optimization recommendations that will help drive higher engagement and click-through to Enbrel.com. Unique open rate is strong — we need to improve CTR.”
This isn’t a single CTR problem — it’s two structurally different problems by email type. Actionable emails (Welcome, Financial, Injection Training, EMBARK, Monitoring, Travel) failed at scan and engage: content density above the fold buried the CTA, and users couldn’t orient to what action was being asked before losing interest. Informational emails (Specialty Pharmacy, What to Expect) had no primary CTA by design — their 3% CTR was an architecture problem, not a creative one. The optimization framework had to treat them differently, not uniformly.
This reframe drove the two-track optimization strategy: CTA-above-fold restructuring for actionable emails, and multiple secondary engagement points for informational emails where no primary CTA was appropriate.
Any regulated patient support CRM program. The Scan/Comprehend/Engage framework and the two-track actionable/informational email distinction apply directly to any pharma onboarding cadence. The pattern of strong open rates masking below-benchmark CTR is common in regulated CRM — subject line optimization gets the open, but fold architecture and content density determine the click.
Singular focused emails outperformed multi-topic emails consistently. Injection Training and EMBARK — both single-topic emails — drove the highest CTRs in the actionable segment. Welcome and Financial — multi-topic emails with competing content blocks — underperformed. The data validated the hypothesis that content density above the fold was suppressing engagement, not creative quality.
I audited all seven emails against one repeatable model: Scan (can patients orient before the fold?), Comprehend (is key information findable?), Engage (is the action obvious?). Each recommendation was tied to specific click-data evidence rather than aesthetic preference — reducing header depth to move CTAs above the fold, single-topic focus to cut comprehension load, and segmentation to serve incompatible intents separately.
Current Enbrel CRM patient onboarding cadence at the time of the audit — eight emails deployed over 45 days from enrollment. Welcome (Day 0) and Financial (Day 1) delivered via CAPS to all patients. Specialty Pharmacy (Day 5), EMBARK (Day 6), Injection Training (Day 9), Monitoring & Tracking (Day 20), and Travel with Enbrel (Day 45) delivered via CAPS. What to Expect (Day 31) delivered via Pulse Engage — designated informational, no primary CTA. The audit covered all seven non-system emails; recommendations were sequenced by impact potential based on click data.
The cadence map gave the audit a shared reference frame — client and agency could see the full 45-day arc before evaluating individual email performance.
Welcome (Onboarding) email — 2021 original (left) vs. 2022 proposed optimization (right). Original: full header block, salutation, and brand intro paragraph above fold; primary onboarding video CTA buried below. Optimization: reduce header depth, move video block above fold, reinforce CTA at end of video, add multiple secondary engagement points below fold (injection demo video, My Enbrel Guide download, Statwise video). Primary optimization driver: 2021 click data showed majority of Welcome email clicks originating from the Onboarding video CTA — bringing it above the fold was the single highest-impact structural change available.
Moving the onboarding video above the fold was the single highest-impact structural change: click data showed it was already the primary engagement driver — the fix was surfacing it, not creating something new.
Financial email — 2021 original (left) vs. 2022 proposed optimization (right). Original: three-column layout presenting Co-Pay Card, Commercially Insured, and Government Insured scenarios simultaneously, requiring patients to self-identify their insurance type before engaging. Optimization: single above-fold focus on the Co-Pay Card benefit and enrollment CTA; segment the email into two streams (commercial insurance subscribers, government program subscribers) so each patient receives a version relevant to their actual situation. Comprehension burden removed; enrollment CTA made the unambiguous primary action.
Removing the self-identification burden from the financial email resolved the primary comprehension failure — patients who couldn't quickly determine which option applied to them were abandoning before the CTA.
EMBARK® App email — 2021 original (left) vs. 2022 proposed optimization (right). Original: multi-feature layout leading with a list of four app capabilities (financial support, medication reminders, injection tracking, EMBARK Nurse Partner) with parallel copy blocks competing for attention. Optimization: single focus on the EMBARK app as the primary entity, with feature callouts as a supporting hierarchy; QR code and app store links consolidated below the feature section; optimize copy to serve both new and current EMBARK users from one email rather than treating them as the same audience. Customer 360 data showed singular-focused emails consistently outperforming multi-topic emails on CTR — this email had the widest gap to close.
Consolidating from multi-feature list to single-focus reduced the attention split that Customer 360 data showed was suppressing EMBARK app downloads — the highest-priority CTR gap in the cadence.
What’s missing from this audit is a measurement plan agreed before the recommendations went to MLR — so the 2022 optimizations could have been evaluated against the same Customer 360 metrics that flagged the problem in the first place. I’d also have pushed harder on audience segmentation as a systemic recommendation rather than just a Financial email fix. The click data suggested several emails were serving incompatible user states simultaneously — a patient at Day 6 who already downloaded EMBARK and a patient who hadn’t were receiving the same EMBARK email. Segmentation at the cadence level, not just within individual emails, would have been the more structural solution. The Scan/Comprehend/Engage framework did its job as a strategy structure; the follow-through is what I’d build in next time.