A research and publishing company increasing their readership by streamlining their newsletter production process.
YouGov is an online research data and analytics technology group. Their purpose is to give their global community a voice by collecting, measuring, and analyzing their opinions and behaviors and reporting the findings accurately and free from bias.
Their stakeholders and community members expect to receive timely research results.
As the director of marketing operations at YouGov, I oversee all things marketing-related. My main job when joining the team was getting our email production volume up.
When I started with the YouGov team, we were manually building all of our daily emails. As someone with a decade of experience, I knew we had to do something different.
Unforunately, the email building tools in our ESP; Marketo were taking our team so much time that producing 2 regional daily newsletters was taking our team an enormous amount of time.
Here are a few reasons why our current process had such a negative impact on YouGov’s emailing capacity:
My goal was to get our emails sent to all 9 of our target regions and not just 2. That meant we needed to increase our email sends per month from 32 to 150. We were not able to get anywhere near this number with our current manual process.
I did not have the budget required to hire enough staff to reach our email goals. At 3 hours per email, it took us nearly 100 staff hours per month to send 33 emails. Getting to our goal of 150 emails per month by hiring additional team members would have taken, 350 more labor hours for which we did not have budget.
In addition to sending these daily email newsletters to our audiences, we also needed to be able to track the analytics data inside of our ESP. There are some email tools that all scheduled sending and could possibly pull new content from our website into newsletters but none of them worked directly with our ESP.
I advocated with our leadership team to implement a solution that would work with our ESP; Marketo out of the box and could open up our email capacity, and increase our publishing reach. We decided to go with FeedOtter and the results were apparent the first day. Our team got up to speed with the app quickly. The integration was done in minutes and the FeedOtter team was extremely helpful in helping us connect all our content and email designs.
Now that YouGov has started to use FeedOtter, we’ve seen a night and day difference in our newsletter production process and capacity. FeedOtter makes our team so efficient that we can now create 9 custom newsletters in less time than we previously could create 2.
In addition, the tool is easy-to-use and helps keep our content structure consistent.
Here are a few other benefits we've experienced since implementing FeedOtter for our newsletter process:
The support we received from FeedOtter before, during, and after our onboarding was a difference-maker. They had easy-to-follow documentation to use during our integration with our ESP. They were also easy to reach with questions when we first got started. I appreciated their proactive approach to notifying us if the changes we made caused an issue with the connection.
Before we switched, there was some initial concern from our team that it may be complicated but we quickly learned that wasn’t true. We were able to get new campaigns set up in as little as 5 minutes. It was built in a way that makes it accessible to marketers of all skill levels.
We can now add new audiences without having to worry about our ability to get all the emails set out in time. FeedOtter campaigns are quick to set up and our content pulls in easily.
FeedOtter’s automation and integration capabilities have streamlined our workflow, drastically reducing the time and effort previously spent on manual email creation. This efficiency gain not only allowed us to meet our increased volume targets but also freed our team to focus on more strategic tasks, enhancing overall productivity.
The decision to implement FeedOtter has proven to be highly cost-effective. By avoiding the need to hire additional staff, we significantly reduced our operational costs. The time saved in email production and the ability to effortlessly scale our program has contributed to a substantial return on investment, both in terms of financial savings and increased marketing reach.
YouGov's adoption of FeedOtter has been nothing short of transformative. As the Director of Marketing Operations, I've witnessed firsthand how FeedOtter revolutionized our email production process, offering a seamless, efficient, and scalable solution. By integrating FeedOtter, we achieved our ambitious goal of expanding our email outreach from 32 to 150 emails per month, catering to all nine target regions without the need for additional staffing. This was a game-changer for us, both in terms of operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
In conclusion, FeedOtter has been a pivotal tool in enhancing YouGov's email marketing capabilities. Its user-friendly interface, coupled with exceptional customer support, makes it an ideal choice for marketers looking to optimize their email production process. As we continue to grow and evolve, FeedOtter remains a vital component in our marketing strategy, helping us to efficiently reach and engage with our audience worldwide.
