Founded in 1973, Pro Farmer — a division of Farm Journal, Inc. — is a leading news and commodity marketing and advisory organization for farmers and agribusiness leaders. Pro Farmer is subscription-based and prides itself on bringing trusted news, analysis, and marketing advice through its newsletters to farmers and agribusiness leaders across the United States and Canada.
Pro Farmer’s initial offering began as a weekly printed newsletter — which is still in circulation — and introduced an email component in the 1990s. Now in 2020, they produce over 130 email newsletters per month for their subscribers, a process they were doing manually.
Pro Farmer sought out a tool that would integrate with their Marketo email platform that they could use to automate and improve their content distribution strategy and save their editors countless hours.
One of the company’s largest pain points was the need to automate their content distribution. According to Joel Jaeger, President and General Manager of Pro Farmer, their content distribution process was to copy and paste the content into different content management systems and distribute it. It was a long, arduous process.
The Pro Farmer team had other automation systems in place, so Joel sought out a tool that could elevate their content distribution strategy to the demands of 2020. Once they researched FeedOtter and other offerings, they knew they had found the right tool with FeedOtter to achieve their goals. Pro Farmer chose FeedOtter because of the “accommodating customer service” and customizations available.
The main goal for Pro Farmer when it began its FeedOtter implementation was automating its email content distribution.
To do this, Pro Farmer worked closely with FeedOtter to build out their email newsletter templates and create RSS feeds. Then their FeedOtter account was connected to their Marketo account, which is how the emails are distributed.
Once the FeedOtter solution proved effective, they could fully automate their nine daily email newsletters and start strategizing on how they can scale and automate further.
With FeedOtter, Pro Farmer was able to automate its 130+ monthly newsletters and eliminated the manual labor that went along with newsletter creation — saving its editors countless work hours. “The time savings are significant,” says Joel, “it’s literally hours per day allowing editors to focus more on content creation and less on the process of distribution.”
FeedOtters’s excellent client service and willingness to go the extra mile, coupled with its ability to automate their content at scale, provided the Pro Farmer team with the confidence to continue to invest in the FeedOtter platform.
Looking to the future, Pro Farmer plans on integrating FeedOtter further into their marketing automation systems. They plan to scale their programs further with improved processes for email capture, allowing them to segment and distribute content to a larger, more tailored audience.
“I would absolutely recommend FeedOtter. It just works — I can’t overstate that enough. Once we got FeedOtter up and running, it’s just run like clockwork. We can set it, depend upon it, and forget it. And the customer service is exceptional. Like I said — it just works.”
— Joel Jaeger, President and General Manager, Pro Farmer
Want to learn how FeedOtter can help you save hours of email creation time and create scalable email programs? Reach out to us today!
