“Great stuff in this month’s newsletter,” the VP of Marketing calls out to you as he turns the corner, only to add, “Next time, just try and get it sent out on time…” before disappearing into his office.
He’s right and you know it. You publish a ton of interesting and useful information that is just right for your newsletter audience and you get a lot of great engagement. You double-check hyperlinks and pick out the perfect images. You get the content ready, but then someone wants the layout changed. You grab an article from the blog, but the marketing director wants to add in a different call-to-action. There’s a special deal you are promoting this week, but it’s only good for 48 hours and the product team is debating with the copy team about the messaging of the ad. Or you have that newsletter that’s been ready for days except for one small graphic change that never seems to happen unless you light your hair on fire.
No matter how early you start, the newsletter creation process always seems to creep beyond the due date. Why is it so hard to manage?
One of the most challenging parts of the newsletter creation process is the coordination. A lot of different people want to have a say in the look and feel and it is hard to manage so many different expectations. The creative aspects are often the easiest parts; it’s the collaboration that often knocks things off schedule. And when you are using email to manage your workflows, you’re just asking for trouble.
Using an automated workflow application isn’t the cure to all of your struggles, but it will tackle the biggest one. When you create an automated workflow for the newsletter creation process, you break down the task of finishing the newsletter into small tasks for individuals. Each task gets assigned to a single person. When you assign tasks to individuals, they can focus on the most important and urgent contribution to the newsletter and not worry about the rest of it.
Some tasks might be dependent on each other (we need the copy before we can design the ad). Other tasks can be done at the same time (we need the CEO’s intro paragraph and the promoted blog article). Using Kissflow, you can create a workflow that allows for both types of tasks and makes everything run smoother.
An automated workflow also allows you to build in approvals where they are needed. Rather than sending a test copy to all the VPs and trying to follow up with each of them by email, you can create approval steps for them to handle quickly.
With the Kissflow pre-built Newsletter creation automated process, you can customize the different fields to get approvals for the subject line, content, design, and anything else you want.
Automating the newsletter creation process with Kissflow liberates you and your team to focus on more important tasks at hand. Get started with Kissflow Workflow, start your free trial here.