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 Enbrel patient onboarding program was a fully built CRM cadence — eight emails deployed over 45 days from the moment a patient enrolled, covering welcome, financial support, specialty pharmacy, the EMBARK® app, injection training, monitoring and tracking, what to expect, and travel with Enbrel. By open rate standards, it was performing well: 36% unique open rate against a 21% industry benchmark.
The problem was at the next step. Unique CTR sat at 4% against a 5.5% industry benchmark — patients were opening and stopping. Something in the experience between subject line and click was failing, and it was failing consistently across multiple emails, which ruled out single-email creative problems. The brief was to audit the full cadence, identify the UX failure patterns, and deliver optimization recommendations across every touchpoint.
My role: I led the UX audit across all seven emails — analyzing click data by email type, applying a structured UX framework to each, and producing annotated before/after redesign wireframes with specific optimization rationale for each touchpoint. Delivered in coordination with Amgen’s Customer 360 analytics team and presented to the client as actionable 2022 recommendations.
Led agency-side within Arnold NYC — framing UX findings as strategic recommendations internally before they reached Amgen, not as options requiring client arbitration. Every recommendation was grounded in Amgen's own Customer 360 click data. The Scan/Comprehend/Engage framework gave both teams a shared vocabulary, compressing review cycles on both sides.
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.
I structured the audit around a three-stage UX model applied consistently across every email: Scan (can the patient orient to what this email is about before the fold?), Comprehend (is the key information findable without hunting?), and Engage (is the action point obvious and accessible?). This gave the audit a repeatable, defensible framework rather than a collection of ad hoc creative notes — and gave the client a vocabulary for evaluating the recommendations.
For each of the seven emails I documented: what the 2021 click data showed about where patients were engaging and dropping off, what the UX failure pattern was at each fold, and what structural changes would address it. Recommendations were tied to specific UX rationale rather than aesthetic preference — reducing header depth to move CTA above fold, single-topic focus to reduce comprehension load, segmentation to serve incompatible user intents separately.
The audit was also informed by click data from Customer 360 showing that singular-focused emails (Injection Training, EMBARK) were outperforming multi-topic emails on CTR — which validated the core optimization direction before the redesigns were presented.
Unique open rates, unique CTR, and click source data segmented by email type across the full cadence. Actionable emails: 4.9% CTR. Informational emails: 3% CTR. Top click sources: CTA Onboarding Video (Welcome), financial enrollment CTA (Financial), app download (EMBARK), injection demo video (Injection Training).
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.
Reduce header depth to surface the primary CTA above the fold on mobile. Lead each email with a single content focus. Move secondary resources and engagement opportunities below the fold as supporting content rather than competing priorities. For informational emails, replace primary CTA with multiple lightweight engagement points distributed throughout.
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.
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.
The Scan/Comprehend/Engage framework gave the audit a defensible structure and made the recommendations feel like UX strategy rather than creative opinion — that was the right call. Two things I’d push for: a post-implementation measurement plan agreed before the recommendations went to MLR, so the 2022 optimizations could be evaluated against the same Customer 360 metrics that identified the problem. And I’d 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.