Brunet’s Email Marketing Communications: a Central Part of a Long-Standing Digital Collaboration

Background

Since 2013, Tink supports Brunet in the design, management and optimization of digital content for its platforms - website, personalized communications and social media. In addition to offering strategic and editorial advice, we create a wide range of content pieces and we monitor their performance on an ongoing basis.

Mandate

An important part of the digital mandate we got from Brunet is the management of its weekly newsletter and email marketing campaigns. This mandate consists of two parts:

• A strategic part. We make sure that Brunet's emails stay effective and pertinent at all times, that they comply with the brand positioning and that they reach their communication goals. We also suggest solutions to optimize their performance when necessary.
• An operational part. We coordinate the production of each email, from brief to deployment. This process includes copywriting, mockups, quality insurance (QA) and integration.

Execution - Strategic Part

Brunet's emails feature two types of content:

• The articles and informational pages from the brunet.ca website, that cover a variety of health, beauty and wellness topics;
• The retail offers: weekly flyer savings, contests, events, etc.

Newsletter subscribers can enter their content preferences in their onboarding form. They are then linked to a segment (Tips or Offers) for which our team has developed a specific newsletter template. This way, they can see the content they're most likely to engage with as soon as they open their email.

The weekly monitoring of open and click rates have allowed us to establish a profile of the newsletter's main audience. We have outlined their age group, preoccupations and areas of interest, as well as their favourite products and offers. It's a solid base to create engaging content and to develop customized communication strategies.

Thanks to our knowledge of the target audience, we can:

• Make editorial recommendations based on SEO trends: weekly topics, Web content creation or revamp, etc.;
• Choose the most efficient wording for email objects, titles and taglines;
• Pick visuals that reflect the audience's reality;
• Make tactical suggestions to boost subscription and conversion: email campaigns featuring offers or promotional events, acquisition campaigns, multiplatform initiatives, etc.;
• Survey the audience's appreciation of the newsletter and use A/B testing to make the best choices for structure, storytelling, distribution frequency and schedule.

Along with this ongoing work, we make sure to keep up with any changes in the client's branding, the market or the field of personalized communications.

In ten years, we've proceeded to four redesigns of the newsletter in partnership with the Brunet team. Every time, we've reviewed the look and feel, the structure and the content of the emails according to the evolution of design and branding, the learnings gathered from tests and data analysis and the best practices in user experience (UX).

We also keep an eye on upcoming changes. In the short term, we anticipate a more precise segmentation and an increased content personalization based on the subscribers' shopping habits.

Execution - Operational Part

Our digital operations team plays a center part in the achievement of every email-related project.

Every week, members of the team produce the newsletter and coordinate its deployment. They also manage Brunet's email campaigns. To ensure the efficiency of the process, they follow a thorough production schedule with precise steps:

1. They make sure to get the client's full brief and visual material;
2. They follow up with our content production team to write the email texts and to confirm that featured Web contents will go live or be updated on time;
3. They create mockups for every version of the newsletter (Tips and Promotions) and adjust them according to the client's feedbacks;
4. They coordinate the integration of the emails, the tests and the QA process;
5. They oversee the deployment of the newsletter in Brunet's mailing management tool (Dialog Insight).

When the newsletter is redesigned, the designer-integrators work with our digital conception team to create new email templates. They study the "behaviour" of these templates when the first emails are sent. They can then modify or add some components to optimize their structure and adaptability.

Our work on Brunet's personalized communications can be summarized in one word: synergy.

• Synergy between our internal teams who manage the emails from strategy to deployment;
• Synergy between the many digital projects we take on in Brunet's ecosystem;
• Synergy between Brunet, Tink and several agencies who work together to establish the brand's digital identity.

A rich, fruitful mandate!