How Active Intel­li­gence Took One Physi­cian from 4% to 67% Open Rates

When Dr. Susan Baumgaertel launched her talk show "Voices With Vigor" last year, she faced a problem familiar to many solopreneurs. She needed to promote events, manage multiple content streams, and build an audience. She knew she’d need support to grow these new projects while maintaining her patient load, while also being her own marketing department.

Her previous approach wasn't working. Using MailChimp primarily to announce new blog posts, Baumgaertel saw open rates hovering around 4%. "I think that's the most boring way to get an email," she admits. "People would read new posts because they would type in and go to my website and, oh, there's a blog. They wouldn't really care about the email."

Today, after implementing ActiveCampaign with strategic automation and Active Intelligence, Baumgaertel maintains a 67% average open rate across 95 campaigns. Her event promotion emails consistently hit high open rates, and one recent talk show event converted 32% of landing page visitors into registered attendees.

The transformation didn't require hiring a marketing team. It required rethinking how a solo operator could leverage AI, automation, and first-party data to compete at scale.

Baumgaertel has been practicing medicine for over 30 years, but five years ago she made what she calls "that big P word," a pivot into entrepreneurship. She now runs two distinct but complementary businesses: myMDadvocate, which provides medical consultation and helps physicians transition their careers, and MenopauseMenu, a free educational platform covering perimenopause, menopause, and aging.

The portfolio expanded in 2025 when she launched her talk show, featuring guests ranging from local advocates to nationally acclaimed healthcare experts. Recent topics have included weight management, men who matter, and trauma redefined. Her aim, she says, is to "weave this tapestry of my career in ways that support others, that promote health, that strengthen human connections."

But managing multiple websites, a book, a course, and monthly live events as a one-person operation created a visibility problem. She needed infrastructure that could scale without hiring a team.

Baumgaertel realized early that her different offerings (advocacy services, educational content, book sales, and event promotion) were hard for people to track. "I guess I realized that people didn't really know about my offerings and it was kind of hard to marry the two together," she says.

She knew that "website ownership is gold" compared to renting attention on social media platforms, where algorithms constantly shift. But her email strategy was essentially non-existent beyond those blog post announcements. With a 4% open rate, she wasn't building the owned audience she needed.

The talk show made the problem urgent. Live events have multiple moving parts, from registration to reminders, attendance, and post-event follow-up. Without a system to automate these touchpoints, she'd either spend hours on manual outreach or risk poor turnout from people who forgot about events they'd registered for weeks earlier.

She also lacked any understanding of her audience. "When you have an email list and you send stuff out... we're all busy. I mean, we all have stressful lives. Do we care about what is being sent to us? We're overwhelmed. There's only so much time." Understanding who actually engaged with her content, and what resonated, required analytics she didn't have access to in MailChimp.

Baumgaertel's consultant, Miriam at Wordshift in Australia, introduced her to ActiveCampaign and guided the initial setup. What made ActiveCampaign work for her use case was the combination of robust automation to support her live event strategy, landing page creation, and built-in analytics that could help a non-marketer understand audience behavior without having to export mountains of data to Google Sheets or hiring an analyst.

Baumgaertel describes herself as "the accidental adopter of AI," carrying what she calls "healthy skepticism" about artificial intelligence, particularly in medicine. But she realized she was already using AI pragmatically across her business, including Zoom transcription for guest prep, Opus Clip for pulling social media clips from long-form videos, and automatic closed captioning.

That validation process helped her trust AI recommendations. When Opus Clip selected the exact same video clip she'd manually identified after watching a 55-minute talk three times, she had her "eye-opening moment." The AI wasn't replacing her judgment. It was accelerating decisions she'd eventually make herself through manual analysis.

ActiveCampaign's Active Intelligence fits that pattern. Active intelligence works as an advisor or an extension of her team, not a replacement for human judgment.

Every "Voices With Vigor" episode follows the same promotional workflow, which Baumgaertel can now execute independently after learning from her consultant.

The funnel starts with social media posts and website announcements driving traffic to an ActiveCampaign landing page. When someone fills out the registration form, they're automatically enrolled in an event-specific automation sequence.

Here's the customer journey:

Trigger: Form submission on the event-specific landing page
 Action 1: Send confirmation email immediately with event details and Zoom link
 Wait condition: Until 7 days before the event date
 Action 2: Send first reminder email
 Wait condition: Until 1 day before the event date
 Action 3: Send final reminder email
 Wait condition: Until 1 day after the event date
 Action 4: Send feedback request email asking for testimonials and quotes

This structure solves the "out of sight, out of mind" problem that kills live event attendance. As Baumgaertel notes, "If you get invited to an event and it's three weeks from now, like, are you going to remember it? No."

The results justify the setup work. Event email open rates skyrocketed as a result of highly targeted audiences (people who just registered for an event) combined with timely, relevant content (details about something they explicitly signed up for) within a short sending window. This demonstrates perfect product-market fit for transactional event communications. One featured event even saw 215 landing page views convert to 68 registrations, a 32% conversion rate.

The post-event feedback automation has become particularly valuable. Early on, Baumgaertel wasn't collecting testimonials systematically. "I've since realized I do need to circle back to some people. For instance, my guests are like, 'Hey, how was it being your guest?' But I'm getting much more of that and really lovely, lovely tidbits."

Those testimonials now feed into future landing pages and social media promotion. She's currently testing whether adding social proof increases conversion rates.

Baumgaertel maintains a twice-weekly email cadence, historically sending on Mondays and Thursdays. But rather than sticking to habit, she's now using ActiveCampaign's calendar view and Active Intelligence recommendations to optimize timing.

The calendar feature, which she calls her favorite, lets her and her consultant plan two months of campaigns in advance. She can visualize the content mix (videos, recipes, medical content, event promotions) and ensure variety. "It keeps me organized. It helps me structure my day," she explains. "On that day, I might want to be available because if people email me back, I just want to be able to connect with them that way."

For solopreneurs and small teams, this calendar-driven approach solves the problem of reactive, last-minute email marketing. By batching campaign planning into monthly or bi-monthly sessions, Baumgaertel avoids the "what should I send today?" scramble. The calendar view also prevents content fatigue. She can see at a glance if she's sent too many event promotions or neglected educational content. "I have so many different themes, like, oh, I've had a couple videos, or maybe I want a recipe or oh, I have a call to action, or maybe I want a gift because I do gifts," she says.

She now queries Active Intelligence to surface specific performance insights. She can ask Active Intelligence to surface best send times, which vary by month based on historical performance and industry benchmarks. The system shows her three data points: industry best practices for healthcare, her personal historical performance, and optimal dates for the current month. "That was interesting because then if you look at the month of March or the month of April, those days change based on historical data and perhaps on industry data. So it's like this moving target, but that's fascinating to me."

Acting on this insight, Baumgaertel recently tested a Sunday send instead of her usual Monday schedule. Within just 16 hours, the email hit a 55% open rate, outpacing her typical Monday performance. "I never would have done that before," she says of the Sunday send time. "It's already blown out of the water."

This kind of optimization used to require either gut instinct or a data analyst. Now Active Intelligence surfaces it for her, and she can act on it without manual spreadsheet work.

With multiple business lines (patient advocacy, physician career transition support, menopause education), Baumgaertel needs to understand which audiences care about what content. ActiveCampaign's segmentation tools help her identify patterns without manual work.

She's asking Active Intelligence specific questions to slice her performance data. Recently, she wanted to isolate event campaign performance from regular content emails. "I started to think, OK, well, how if I take away just my regular emails, how are my event campaigns going?" The AI pulled that analysis automatically, revealing the 100% open rate on event emails versus the 67% average across all campaigns.

She's working to understand which groups respond to different content types. "Maybe they're groups that really are going to respond to medical stuff. And maybe they're groups that don't care about that, but they're different, maybe it's generational, who knows." This lets her avoid sending menopause content to her physician career transition audience, or patient advocacy materials to general health education subscribers.

Active Intelligence provides benchmarking she couldn't access as a solopreneur. When she pulled her overall campaign performance recently, the AI analysis told her she was outperforming healthcare industry means by 27 percentage points on opens and by 10 percentage points on clicks. "Oh my gosh," she says. "That was a warm, fuzzy feeling."

More importantly, that data helps her make strategic decisions about content mix and frequency. With 95 campaigns now in her history, she has enough baseline to identify what works. "Now is actually the perfect time to sit back and start to sift through and see, okay, what's resonated, what has fallen flat, what can I do better, what can I do more of or less of?"

Before vs After ActiveCampaign:

• Email open rate: 4% → 67% (16x improvement)
• Click rate: Minimal → 12%
• Unsubscribe rate: Unknown → Near-zero
• Campaign planning: Week-to-week → 2 months ahead
• Performance analysis: None → Real-time benchmarking with Active Intelligence
• Total campaigns sent: Sporadic blog announcements → 95 strategic campaigns
• Event automations: Manual reminders → 24 automated sequences

Her numbers tell a clear story. Baumgaertel went from a 4% open rate with MailChimp to 67% with ActiveCampaign, a 16x improvement. These impressive stats indicate she's reaching the right people with relevant content.

But the qualitative shift matters just as much for a solo operator. She's gained the organizational capacity to run a multi-channel content business without burning out on administrative tasks. Event promotion no longer requires manual reminder emails. Campaign planning happens two months out instead of week-to-week scrambling. Performance analysis takes minutes instead of hours in spreadsheets.

She's collecting testimonials and social proof systematically through the post-event automation, feedback she's now embedding in landing pages to improve future conversion rates.

"In the old-fashioned sense, you delegate these tasks to someone else, another human, to crunch the numbers, follow up with attendees, send reminders to registrants," she says. "But Active Intelligence is doing it for you."

With her foundation in place, Baumgaertel is exploring more advanced features like predictive sending and adaptive automation. The bigger strategic shift is preparing for monetization. Right now, her focus is on visibility and engagement, building the audience and trust that will eventually support paid offerings. "People who know me know I do things a lot out of the goodness of my heart," she says. "And down the road, there could easily be ways to optimize things for monetization."

The difference is, when she's ready to flip that switch, she'll have substantial audience behavior data to inform the strategy.

For physicians and other professionals making the leap from practice to entrepreneurship, she shared, "Be curious. Be open-minded." Don't prejudge tools before understanding what they can do. Learn the "nuts and bolts" of how systems work, then let automation and AI optimize the details.

Her philosophy on AI and automation strikes a balance that other solopreneurs might recognize. "I personally value human relationships, but it's not either or. It's yes and." She sees autonomous marketing as freeing her to focus on the human elements (the talk show conversations, the patient consultations, the physician mentorship) while letting AI handle optimization and data analysis.

When you're the CEO, CMO, and the entire marketing department rolled into one, that wisdom becomes essential. Baumgaertel has found a way to delegate the data analysis and workflow optimization to AI while maintaining what she calls "the integrity of my own work as a physician, as a writer, a creator, as a host."

After five years of building her entrepreneurial portfolio, she's found the infrastructure that lets her focus on supporting others, promoting health, and strengthening human connections. The email campaigns, event reminders, and performance analytics now run in the background, freeing her to do the work that drew her to entrepreneurship in the first place.

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