Newsletter Automation, CMS Integration, and You

5 minute read

Upland Admin

Recently, a Danish media company ran an experiment where they stopped posting to Facebook for two weeks. TV Midtvest gets 40% of their traffic from Facebook, so it was a risky move, to say the least.

The Danish broadcaster’s results seem pretty plain on the outside: they saw 27% fewer site visitors. But bite into the data, and you get to the sweet, gooey goodness in the middle. In this case, that filling in the center was a more engaged audience. Users read 12% more pages per session and spent 42% more time with each article.

As publishers prioritize deeper audience engagement, more time spent is a good sign. But spending more time on stuff isn’t always a good thing for publishers, especially when you’re spending more time on busy work like assembling email newsletters.

Many publishers deploy an email newsletter (or more) daily. That’s a lot of manual labor to keep your program running. If your newsletter creation process is spiraling out of control and devouring your entire life in its path, consider dumping it for a newsletter automation process.

Automating your email newsletter creation allows you to speed up the process, target your audience with more relevant content, and even scale your email newsletter program with minimal effort. When email newsletters engage audiences more than just about any other communication channel (especially Facebook), you can’t afford not to automate.

Save time by populating your newsletters with content from your website.

97% of publishers send an email newsletter. Most of these newsletters curate site content in email form…so why put together that content twice? Publishers can automate the newsletter process by setting up their newsletters to auto-populate with content directly from their website. Then, the newsletter deploys automatically based on your designated cadence and send times.

Sound complicated? Well, if your ESP integrates with your CMS, it’s simple. Really simple. The PostUp platform can pull website content through RSS feeds. For publishers who use WordPress or Drupal, you can take advantage of PostUp’s tight integrations with those platforms.

Integrations like that can be a lifesaver for people who deploy dozens of newsletters, like publishers. That makes it an important factor for publishers to consider when selecting an ESP.

So what kind of newsletters can you automate?

Many publishers send digests of the content they produced in a particular day, week, or month. With email automation, your ESP can fill in the blanks for you and send when you specify. It doesn’t send unless you have new content. If you’ve got news that can’t wait for the next send, PostUp’s breaking news alerts can help you reach your audience in seconds.

Newsletter automation allows publishers to send more relevant content.

Once you’ve got email automation, CMS integration, and human levitation (okay, that one’s optional) in place, work on getting the formula for your automated newsletters just right.

PostUp pulls in automated newsletter content based on tags you specify within your CMS. Tagging gives you greater control over the automation process with just a few keystrokes. Use tags to give important posts priority ranking, or even tell the platform which articles should be skipped entirely.  You can access your CMS content from within PostUp when building emails. Alternately, your editorial team can curate email content entirely within WordPress.

Most importantly, you can use tagging to sort content by category. Designate sections in your newsletter to display content from certain verticals, or even devote entire newsletters to a specific topic. This allows publishers to target site visitors with more relevant content, increasing the chances of email signup and therefore future engagement

With PostUp’s Parse.ly integration, you can go one step further and personalize email content at the individual level. Include content that fits the user’s interest while excluding articles they’ve already read. You can’t get much more relevant than that!

Use all that extra time to scale your newsletter program and generate more revenue.

You’ve automated your current newsletters, you’ve got the perfect content, now you can kick back and use the time you’ve freed up to catch up on those new Masterchef episodes. Or you can use that time to your advantage and scale your email program.

Fortunately, with newsletter automation, you don’t have to choose if you don’t want to. Automation gives you the tools to scale your email program and offer new email products with minimal effort. If too much automation gives you pause, PostUp’s newsletter process allows to to implement as much or as little manual oversight as your team desires.

Offer a newsletter for every vertical on your site, increasing the likelihood that passing visitors will click with your content and find something they wouldn’t mind having in their inbox. 52% of Rare’s email audience subscribes to multiple newsletters, which gives Rare multiple chances to connect with their audience where it counts, in the inbox.

Apartment Therapy Media took their newsletter creation time from a hour down to 5 minutes with PostUp’s newsletter automation tools. Learn how you can do the same by taking a look at our Automation Solution Guide. It’ll save you time and money, plus it’ll leave your hands free to eat that cheese danish without getting crumbs in your keyboard.

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