Media & Marketing : the 5 key people of a newsletter

Needless to say, the newsletter is now at the core of media marketing strategies. The main goal of a newsletter : attract visitors to your site, trigger online subscriptions, work on your brand image and improve customer experience with original and attractive ways to present content. In “Media marketing : The 1001 ways of cooking up your ideal newsletter“, we discussed the type of content that you might want to include in your newsletter. However, beyond the choice of the article, any new newsletter involves potentially many people in your company. Today we are going to discuss who they are and what their main role is in the process. Maybe even more importantly, we will provide some hints on how to make their lives easier !

So, what exactly is going on backstage the day that your head of marketing wakes up with this idea of creating a SEA & GASTRONOMY newsletter ?

1) Emma, Head of the project

Once the idea is out there, Emma is in charge of the whole project. She will be responsible for bringing the idea to life, study the relevance of the newsletter’s theme, think the project through, figure out which content should be in there, who the main targets are, what the ideal frequency could be, etc. She will have to get help from many others in the company: James, the designer, Liam and his fellow journalists, and, Polly and Pablo on the technical development side. Beyond orchestrating their interactions, she will also have to take care of many things, including:
– News subscriber acquisition: she needs to figure out a way to recognize which of the website visitors will be interested in this new newsletter.
– The A/B tests that are necessary to measure the relevance of the newsletter
– Backup content for the newsletter, in case the journalists do not want to take care of all the content.

2) James, designer

Second step, second key person: James, designer, is in charge of designing the mockup based on Emma’s suggestions and requirements. He will be in charge of the design, the zoning, the wireframe and so on. Once everybody is happy with the look of the new newsletter, Emma jumps back in, gets the template and goes straight to the technical department to implement the newsletter.

3) Polly, developer

Poly is a technical developer and will be in charge of integrating the newsletter in the editing platform and creating an interface for the administrative part so that the email campaigns could be launched and monitored. In the process, she will also get the help of Pablo in order to communicate with the mailer API and execute the initial tests.

4) Liam, journalist

Liam is the one who eventually decides which content to put in the headlines, and he may decide this only 5 minutes before initiating the sending process. Clearly, Liam (and Emma, actually) would love to get access to a simple and easy-to-use platform that would enable them to easily change the title, picture, summary or URL of any article, reorganize the blocks and so on!

5) Nestor, the algorithm

The last key “person” in this process is nothing less than your favorite algorithm that will help you automate the process of filling up the blocks of your newsletter. As we already mentioned in”Media marketing : The 1001 ways of cooking up your ideal newsletter“, you can include various sorts of articles that can be easily provided by an algorithm but would be very difficult to manually extract by Emma or the journalists.

• For instance, you might want to include some personalized recommendations. Out of the numerous articles that Liam and his colleagues wrote on sea and gastronomy, maybe John would be interested in knowing the best spot for a picnic on the beach while Alice wants to know everything about growing organic seaweeds for her salad. Who would be better to figure out the best article that matches the current interests of each of us than a collaborative filtering algorithm implemented by Nestor?
• Since you have a brand new and successful Facebook page where users comment a lot, and since your readers retweeted like crazy last week, Emma would love to see the most retweeted and commented articles in a newsletter. No worries, Nestor will take care of this.
• In addition, Emma would like to avoid including more than 3 articles on restaurants in the newsletter. Nestor can do it.

We can go on and on. Everything that comes to Emma’s mind (or even her boss’s) is difficult to compute manually, but can be automated, Nestor can do it.

Actually, should you wish to enjoy such a Nestor algorithm and provide your entire team with the ideal interface to easily implement and modify a modern newsletter, all the while relieving Emma, Polly, Liam and Pablo of some tedious tasks, you would definitely be interested our solution at Mediego.