We recently fielded a request to set-up a weekly email automated email. We wanted to build this, as much as possible, using out-of-the-box functionality. Here’s how we did it.
Use case
Association members have the option of receiving a set of workouts for the week each Monday morning. These workout summaries are delivered to the member’s inbox via an EXM automated email campaign and associated marketing automation plan.
Weekly content publishing
The workouts are authored outside of Sitecore in a separate coaching system. Completed workouts are sent to Sitecore via API. We need to publish the week’s worth of workouts on Monday right after midnight. We used the Sitecron module to set-up the specific weekly publish schedule - Thanks Akshay.
Subscribe / unsubscribe
We created a set of Sitecore forms, one for subscribing and one for unsubscribing. The form submit actions place the member in a marketing automation plan or removes them from the plan. A personalization rule determines what form is displayed - Show the unsubscribe form if the user is in the plan & show the subscribe form if not.
The weekly email
We use EXM automated emails for the Monday morning emails. The email template has a component that is designed to display a weeks worth of workouts - displayed in order, from Monday to the following Sunday. The workout details link takes the member back to the website. The member can view the workouts in email, on the website or they can have the workouts download to their mobile device.
Marketing automation
The marketing automation plan drives the timing of the emails. It’s designed to trigger the first email when the member subscribes, and then send another email each Monday. The MA has a delay built into the plan that waits until Monday morning. First thing Monday morning, a custom listener runs to confirm that the contact is still an active member. If they are, the MA restarts and sends the next week’s email out.
Summary
The goal of this work was to have a series of emails that run without a marketer having to manually set-up an email & send it out. We think this approach would work for plenty of other use cases; from weekly article summaries, to new listing reports, to active case updates. If you have any questions about how we did this, you can find me here.