A mobile-responsive and CRM integrated e-newsletter
Success achieved
How the Royal Pharmaceutical Society increased open rates and click throughs in their e-newsletter
- Website
- www.rpharms.com
- Project dates
- September 2015 - September 2016
Tools & Systems
- Dotmailer
- Photoshop
- Google Analytics
Introduction
The purpose of this newsletter is to update our members on news related to our work in pharmacy across the U.K.
The content covers a wide range of topics from new support resources we’ve developed to our national media coverage, lobbying government and collaboration with stakeholders across the profession.
The content is segmented across the different countries that the RPS work across, with separate newsletters going to members from England, Scotland, Wales and overseas.
When stories are relevant only to one particular sector of pharmacy we use dynamic content to target these stories to that particular sector using data fields in our CRM. Based on the heat map and previous newsletter click-throughs on stories, we can determine what will likely be the most read content to keep the e-mail more succinct and include a link to all news stories for those who want to look at everything we’ve been working on over that month.
Discovery
Our newsletter gives us the opportunity to promote our work that may have been missed through other channels. By increasing our engagement with members using our website and sharing our content, we cause a knock on effect for our members increased likeliness to renew their membership.
Objectives
- Move to a mobile responsive template
- Clean up the design of the newsletter
- Improve open rates and engagement
Activities
Based on segmenting our data held in our CRM, we send out 4 versions of the newsletter to show news relevant to members in England, Scotland, Wales and those based overseas. Once news stories are added in, we look to personalize further by using dynamic content to send sector specific stories to only those who subscribe to it.
By using send time optimization, we also schedule the e-mail to arrive in our members’ inboxes at the time that they would most likely be looking at their e-mail, based on previous open time data stored in Dotmailer.
After evaluating the design of our newsletter late last year, we redesigned the templates to have a much cleaner look and reflect the modernization of our brand.
E-news - mobile version
This new mobile responsive version gives easy navigation of stories through scrolling down a shortened version of the newsletter based on the reduction in content that may not be relevant.
We include a link at the top of the e-mail so that members may go straight to the website and view all stories if they don’t want to see this shortened version via e-mail.
When placing images in the newsletter, they are all resized and optimized to give a consistent flow of images from top to bottom. Introductory text is also rewritten to give a good short summary of each story so that recipient can get a short overview before clicking through to the main story.
Photography is used throughout for each story which are optimized in Photoshop before placing in the newsletter. The images help to engage the reader by adding a visual element to represent the story. As a lot of our images used were from photoshoots involving our members it helps them feel more engaged and involved in our work. Size of image is also factored in to ensure the e-mail is not too large a file to be received in the subscribers' inboxes.
Innovation
As the brand was going through a modernisation process, the design of the newsletter template had to reflect a fresher, cleaner image. We also wanted to make the newsletter more user friendly for our members to improve engagement. From our survey carried out it appeared that a majority of members were navigating to the stories by scrolling through the newsletter rather than using the header links at the top of the newsletter.
In hindsight, it also seemed that the categories of news headers probably meant more to us as marketers than to consumers. These categories were colour coded using the various pantones in our brand guidelines so it became clear that by reducing these categories and colours, we could give the newsletter a cleaner and more user-friendly design.
A challenge was to change processes by reviewing the content before it was put into the newsletter. Previously, the newsletter was seen as a medium to include every piece of content produced by the RPS, so the culture had to change to educate members of staff that only newsworthy content could be included as to improve performance and engagement with our most important stories. This selection process involved looking at stats from previous e-mail content and Google analytic data to decide what the most newsworthy and interesting content would be to include.
Achievements
The newsletter goes to around 28,500 members of the Society, depending on fluctuations in our membership figures. We measure the results of the newsletter through open rates and click to open rates. Through subject line split testing and use of dynamic content, we can determine what will give us better open rates and have the ability to personalize these subject lines based on data we hold for our contacts. Our average open rate is around 38% across all segments which increases when we have a large news story highlighted in the subject line.
To measure engagement with our newsletter we look to the click to open rates to determine the number of people clicking through on our stories to read more. This is felt to be the most important metric as it shows how interested members are in the content once the e-mail has been opened. This engagement rate has increased since redeveloping the newsletter to be mobile responsive towards the end of last year. We made this change based on over 50% of our members opening e-mails on a mobile device.
Subscribers of E-news do share the content from the newsletter but this is mostly done through sharing the content of a news story directly from the website
Targets & Statistics
Newsletter opens and clicks - 2016 vs 2015
What would we do differently?
For the future, we would want to add more of an automated process to this newsletter which would involve complete integration between our CRM and ESP, where feeds would automatically populate the newsletter based on xml feeds of popular content from our website. However, this all dependant on how this integration is implemented and what our capabilities would be.
Feedback & Testimonials
Overall I believe the key successes from this project are the 21% increase in opens of the newsletter and near 70% increase in clicks. By providing more newsworthy content and delivering this in a more user-friendly manner using mobile responsive content and a cleaner design we have significantly improved the member offering through our newsletter.