33% time saving in email marketing because of unique user interface
Case study
For NRC, we developed a completely new user interface for their email marketing. This was a big challenge, because not before had we conceived and developed this around an existing platform. The results and enthusiastic reactions show that it is a great success.
In this customer case you can read:
NRC’s desire
The 100procent approach and set-up
The success and the results
33% time savings on news releases
50 editors working with the user interface
200 hours less per month spent on newsletters
The wish of NRC
To create a newsletter, you had to manually input all the individual elements of a newsletter. So the image, text, intro, links and excerpt were selected separately and manually for each newsletter. NRC sends 23 different newsletters to 400,000 unique recipients. These newsletters range from daily news updates, to “catch-up” newsletters from foreign correspondents about that week’s highlights. All current, important content that needs to get to the right recipient. In short, there are many different editors composing and sending newsletters and a huge database of content to choose from. In the existing environment, it took the editors a lot of time to compose all the newsletters. It should be possible to do that more efficiently, NRC thought.
The goal
We want to make newsletter creation more efficient and more fun. Because so much time goes into it and it comes back daily or weekly, NRC wanted a sustainable solution.
The challenge
Together with a team, we came up with an interface that was developed by our Marigold Engage (formerly Selligent) expert. We placed this new interface, as it were, on top of the existing email platform, allowing you to enjoy the benefits of Marigold Engage while creating your newsletters in a customized email studio.
The process
To save time, we developed a custom user interface for NRC. This has made creating a newsletter more fun and efficient. In the new user interface, you’ll find a real-time feed on the left side, and by drag and drop, you can drag the desired elements into the newsletter builder. You immediately have the title, image, URLs and body text in the newsletter template and save a lot of time. In May, the first newsletters were created in this new email studio and now all newsletters are created here.
NRC is currently still working in the ‘old’ Marigold Engage environment, but will switch to the Marigold Engage cloud environment next year.
Marigold Engage’s flexibility allowed us to connect a custom solution to the email platform. The data and links to existing systems and the Marigold Engage platform remained unchanged, so everything remained easily measurable and insightful. We started this journey with a desire from NRC to help their editors and together we now proudly look back on a valuable collaboration and an extraordinary result. The new email studio is completely tailored to the needs of NRC and it is great to see what is possible with Marigold Engage, because this is certainly not obvious for an email marketing solution. We too did not know beforehand how this would turn out. It was a complex process of a lot of trial and error with this great user interface as a result. The newsletters are still sent from Marigold Engage and thus NRC still benefits from the high performance level of Marigold Engage.
How does the interface work?
Check out the demo here.
The results
NRC has measured the hours it takes to compose newsletters, and with the new email studio, it saves editors 30% of their time. Previously, for example, every Sunday the Editor-in-Chief would send out a summary of that week’s most important articles. Previously that took 3 hours and today only half an hour. What a time saver! Around 50 editors at NRC work with the program and an initial estimate is that this way of working saves around 200h per month.
In addition, Marigold Engage is now more accessible and available to the entire organization. Marigold Engage is now even more user-friendly and is being used more widely throughout the organization. As a result, even more relevant content goes to the right recipient.
“We are extremely happy with the new interface. Our editors can now compose their newsletters more efficiently and we see more job satisfaction. It’s great to see how happy the editors are with this. They can now also compose a newsletter from a smartphone using their own NRC login. And that’s a big plus, very user-friendly in other words!”
– Luuk Willekens, Manager Data & Innovation at Mediahuis NRC
200
hours less spent on newsletters per month
50
editors work with the program
33%
time saving due to a unique user interface