The First Marketing Newsletter Readership Study is designed to evaluate recall, readership, reader behavior, topic preferences, attribute ratings and demographics for our clients. Perhaps most importantly, our managed care clients also seek to measure the effectiveness of their newsletters in �

• Motivating members to make healthy lifestyle choices and encouraging preventive care.
• Informing members about their health benefits and their plans' policies and procedures.

The results included in this market report clearly demonstrate the power of professionally produced, custom newsletters to achieve the specific objectives of managed care companies. Highlights include:

• 72% of members surveyed recall seeing the newsletter, and among those respondents, 73% report reading every or almost every issue.
• 48% of members who read the newsletter report that they took action regarding their health as a result of something they read.
• 72% of members who recall the newsletter indicate that reading it helped them better understand their health plan benefits.

These highlights reflect just a few of the ways a First Marketing newsletter can support your goals, as part of an integrated communications program. For a full report, including topic preferences, attribute ratings and demographics, please contact us and mention the market you are interested in.

Yes 72%	No 27%
	No Answer 1%
Health plan members show a high degree of interest in newsletters sent to them by their plans. 72% of members who responded recall seeing an issue of the newsletter. This compares to a 68% recall rate for all First Marketing newsletters surveyed.

Every or Almost Every Issue 73%	1 in 3 or 4 16%	Very Few 8%
	No Answer 2%	None 1%
Among members who recall seeing a newsletter, 73% report that they read every or almost every issue they receive from their health plans. Only 9% report that they read very few or none of the issues.

All or Some Articles 87%	Part 12%
	No Answer 1%
The range of topics and editorial approach featured in managed care newsletters produced by First Marketing also deliver a high level of readership. 87% of members who recall the newsletter say they read all or some of the articles in each issue.

	37% Kept an Article	40% Saved for Another	31% Passed Along an Issue
Health plan members are very likely to retain or pass along the newsletter to a friend, family member or coworker. More than one in three readers report that they kept an article for future reference or saved an article for someone else. And slightly fewer, 31%, report that they passed along an entire issue to someone else.

Yes 48%	No 30%
No Answer 2%	Not Sure 20%
The most significant question regarding the effectiveness of a managed care newsletter is whether it motivates members to make healthy lifestyle choices. Nearly half of the readers indicate that something in the newsletter prompted them to take action regarding their health. Another 20% are unsure about the newsletter's effect, but did not answer "no."

		Survey Instrument The survey instrument is self-administered and consists of standard and custom questions and scales. Responses are tabulated along two axes: marginal counts and cross-tabulations. All closed-ended questions are analyzed by number of responses and percent of responses. The statistics on these pages represent a sample of 699 respondents from the managed care industry. A sample of this size carries with it a confidence interval between 2.2% and 3.7% (see chart below). Margin of Error Standard error is a statistical term that describes the likelihood of achieving the same result in a similar study. At the 95% confidence level, we are assured that if we were to do this test n times, the same result + or - the appropriate confidence interval would occur 95 out of 100 times.

		Data Split Cell Size 500 600 700 800 900 10%-90% 20%-80% 30%-70% 40%-60% 50%-50% 2.6 3.5 4.0 4.3 4.4 2.4 3.2 3.7 3.9 4.0 2.2 3.0 3.4 3.6 3.7 2.1 2.8 3.2 3.4 3.5 2.0 2.6 3.0 3.2 3.3