As a Sr. Business Analyst on the Global Operations team of the Consumer Products department at Warner Bros. Discovery, I contributed to composing, designing graphics, and distributing email newsletters and updates to internal and external audiences.
Personalized Notifications w/ PDF Attachments
We reached out to multiple licensees regarding changes to their contracts with personalized emails and attachments.
To generate the personalized emails, I first switched Outlook to Work Offline mode so that the email drafts would be generated in the Outbox folder but not sent out. I mail merged the recipient’s name or company name into the salutation section of the email, then manually attached personalized documents we had previously generated out of Word using mail merge. After doing a spot check on a couple of the emails, I turned off Work Offline and made sure that the emails were sent out from the Outbox. If any emails weren’t sent out, I manually moved them to the Drafts folder, pressed Send, and Outlook moved them to the Outbox folder and sent out.
Visual Newsletters
I created and sent out newsletters with graphics. I created the graphics in Photoshop, Figma, or other graphics editing tools, inserted them into emails. Either the graphics were in the email header and footer with regular body text in the middle, or all graphics and text were in the image and that was inserted in the body of the email.
Email Distribution Platforms
We used various distribution methods when sending communications, depending on the needs of the project and the target audience.
Outlook
We started with using Outlook. It had a short learning curve, given that we already used it for normal work emails.
One of the limitations we discovered when we used it to send emails to external recipients such as licensees was that it had a limit of 500 recipients per send. Therefore, I would split the mailing lists into parts using Excel, and then copy/paste the email addresses into Outlook.
Salesforce Sales Cloud
Once we got our list of licensee companies and their various contacts (e.g. legal, marketing, sales, primary business, etc.) loaded into our Salesforce instance, we were able to start using Sales Cloud to send communications to them. I set up email templates with merge fields, so that Salesforce would insert the recipients’ names into the emails.
I created contact lists in Salesforce by filtering down our contacts and saving those as different contacts lists. When sending out an email, I selected the contact list to display, clicked the “Send List Email” button, made sure to use the review feature to check that the merge field worked to personalize the emails before sending them out.
We moved to using Salesforce Sales Cloud because not only were all of our licensee contacts loaded to a centralized system where either we or licensees could keep the records updated on an ongoing basis, but we could also send to more than 500 recipients at a time.
However, one limitation we encountered was that you couldn’t send more than 5,000 emails in a day, across all instances of Salesforce at one organization. If another team or department had already sent 2,000 emails that day, we were limited to 3,000 sends that day, and then I would wait until it passed midnight in GMT time zone before sending out the rest of the batch. We had to work with this restriction if we had more than 5,000 emails to send, such as in the case of a Creative team seasonal rollout announcement.
Another limitation was that you cannot share custom contact list views with another specific user, you have to add that user to a public group first, before sharing the custom list view with the group.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Given we encountered some limitations in Sales Cloud with recipient limits and list views among other challenges that we had to find workarounds for, we evaluated email and newsletter solutions and chose to start using Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC).
I generated mailing lists out of Sales Cloud using the Reports feature and loaded them to Marketing Cloud’s Data Extensions, which are tables containing data about contacts. I created graphics in Photoshop or Figma, depending on the complexity required, and loaded them to templates that could be reused for different communications.
For each email outreach, I created a set of folders for that communication, which included graphics and file attachments. I composed the email body text and built the email, then sent test emails to myself and others on my team. Once everyone signed off on it, I selected the Data Extension(s) to send the email to and sent it out.
Just as with the other platforms, we encountered limitations with Marketing Cloud. One was that we weren’t able to attach files the normal way. Instead, our workaround was to load the attachment files to the email folder structure and link to the file from the email. Another limitation was that we weren’t able to CC internal users as a way to notify them that the email had been sent out, because our tech team informed us each CC individual would receive a copy of each email that was sent out, meaning if we sent 1,000 emails to licensee contact recipients, then each CC individual would receive 1,000 copies of the email. Our workaround was to forward the sent email to the internal users.
One major benefit of using Marketing Cloud were the reports that Marketing Cloud provided showing which emails were delivered successfully vs. which ones bounced/undeliverable, who opened our emails, and who clicked the links in the emails. This gave us valuable data and information if we needed to prove that we had sent an email to a specific person, or figure out why a licensee wasn’t aware of upcoming news or events.
Learnings
From working on a variety of email communications, I learned a good deal of information that I didn’t previously know.
These included email sending limits or adding file attachments, which led me to design workaround solutions for each limitation.
I also learned about email sender reputation, and how it improves when recipients engage positively with your emails. Recipients opening emails tells email service providers that the sender is sending useful or valuable information, which helps with improving a sender reputation, which in turn improves email deliverability to recipients’ inboxes instead of their junk or spam folders. When we progressed to first using Marketing Cloud, we created a custom From email address to use, so we needed to work towards building up our sender reputation and email deliverability.