StoneShot Learning > Marketing Automation > Automating Insight/Blog Emails

Automating Insight/Blog Emails

Our research shows that 75% of professional investors frequently receive emails from asset managers that aren’t relevant.

We get it. Without marketing automation, it’s extremely hard to ensure your clients get content around their interests. Consider an investment firm that has Insights under these four categories.

  • Bonds
  • Equities
  • Markets
  • Sustainability

One client is interested in Bonds and Markets. Another Equities and Sustainability. Or just Sustainability. Or all four! Without automation you’re stuck making 16 emails and managing 16 lists to cover all scenarios. That with only four categories, most of our clients have many more.

Another consideration is how you add clients to an existing program. How can clients “catch up” on older content? How do you ensure they don’t get the same insight post more than once?

We address these issues with our techie-sounding Content Distribution System (CDS). CDS picks up a feed from your website and dynamically creates emails around your client’s interests. Does that make sense? Let’s walk through how it works on this very website.

How we do it

Look at the top right of this page and you’ll see a profile icon. If it’s feint, you’ve not registered before (go on, we’ll wait for you). Otherwise, it will be purple as below. These are the communication preferences we have on our own blog.

We tag all our content into one of these categories. So you’re only interested in Event Marketing, that’s all we’ll ever send you. Let’s dig deeper into how it works.

The need for feed

First we need to create a feed from your website. We use WordPress which gives you an RSS feed out of the box… if you have a WordPress site you can most likely just add “/feed” to your blog/insights URL. Here’s how our feed looks:

https://www.stoneshot.com/category/blog/feed

Ok, that’s pretty geeky… But you can see it’s nicely structured for us to ingest and distribute. So next is setting up the feed within the StoneShot Platform. That starts by setting up the tags.

Once you’ve checked out tagging strategy , it’s a simple job of making the tags. Go to Options > Tags and into the Content Tags tab. Hit New Content Tab Group and enter a group name. Let’s go with “Blog Tags”. Next, go into the Tags tab and click New Tag to create a tag for each category on your blog. Set the Content Tag Group to “Blog Tags”. Each tag should look like this.

We’ve enabled Engagement Scoring here too which we recommend doing for content tags. Also note Default Value for New Contacts is set to Unsubscribe. That means any new contacts you create won’t be opted in to get content via the feed. Best practice there is to use a preference form explicitly opt clients in.

Right now go into Content > Feeds and click New Feed. Name the feed, check Enable new articles by default and check the tag group you just created (“Blog Tags”). Finally, add the custom field as shown.

Hit Next and you’ll then go through a tag mapping page. This auto-maps the common fields we see in a feed. Note you need to check the GUID as the unique identifier.

And finally… we map the tags in the feed to the tags in StoneShot. You could enable the feed at this point too – nothing will get sent yet.

Preference form

So the feed is in and live and within 30 mins you should see content on the Content tab under Content > Feeds.

The next step is to bring these content preferences into your preference form. We could have made a stand-alone for you during your onboarding or integrated preferences into your site (as we’ve shown above). Hmm, maybe you’re a global client with 20 preference forms (yup, we do that too). Get in touch with your dedicated team and we’ll set things up for you.

Email and schedule

We’re nearly there, promise. The final piece of the puzzle is to create an email and schedule it. If you’ve not made an email before please see Creating an Email for a walk-through. You’ll need a layout with the necessary code to pick up content from your feed – there’s one in our Email Library (you’ll see an Email Library tab when making a new email) or we can make a custom one for you. If you want to make your own email, check out Blog/Insight Feeds tags.

Finally, go to Automation > Emails and click New Email Schedule. Pick an email and the scheduler will pick up the subject, sender, list, etc.

Let’s make a recurring weekly schedule.

The schedule will run every week, checking to see if any updated content has been published around the client’s interests. Clients can update their own preferences via the preference form (or website if it’s integrated like our site).

The final step is assigning clients to content preferences. You could do this via an import or by using bulk assign.

When you’re up and running you’ll start seeing metrics under Content > Feeds.

  • Content shows engagement by insight article or blog
  • Tags shows engagement by tag – mapped to the categories on your site
  • Campaigns shows engagement by each email that’s been sent
  • Contacts finally shows the most engaged individuals or organizations

As always, if you need help please get in touch.