Brianna Patel
Brianna Patel
 

Communications Strategy & Newsletter Design

Timeline

4 weeks

goals

Improve the Meetings & Events team’s communication tactics by aligning with event planners’ needs and alleviating their pain points

Design Process

User interviews to identify user needs, pain points, and current experience

Affinity mapping to find common themes across event planners

Success Metrics

Open rate of newsletter

Feedback from event planners

*Emails mentioned in this case study were for internal distribution only and cannot be published

 

Challenge

How can we, the Meetings & Events team, change the way we communicate with event planners to get them the information they want and need in a timely manner?

The meetings and events landscape at BCG is ever-evolving with new digital tools, updated best practices, changes to policies, and more. All of these changes need to be communicated quickly and effectively to event planners across the company.

Our team found that breakdowns in communications between our team and our users, BCG event planners, were happening frequently. Planners expressed different understandings of new initiatives impacting events, which services were available to support their events, and didn’t know where to find information. We quickly realized we needed to make changes to how we communicate if we wanted to start aligning everyone across the firm.

 

Hypothesis

A change to format, structure, and content in our team’s newsletter could increase engagement and understanding.

We believed that by changing the format, structure, and content in our team’s newsletter to better match event planners’ needs, we could start to see improvements in their engagement, understanding of services available to support their events, and new initiatives.

 
 

User research

“[A] newsletter via email would be really nice for me because I’m too busy to have a session every month or quarter with tips and tricks.”

A couple of months prior to this communications project, I conducted user interviews to grasp an understanding of event planners overall experience at BCG. Using relationships I built with event planners during my time in a customer service role, I identified 15 planners from different departments to interview.

Part of these interviews included questions about their communication and marketing preferences. Due to time constraints for this project, I analyzed only the relevant data from these previous interviews. Since the data was qualitative, I decided to do an affinity map based on results from 6 participants to draw out key themes.

insights learned from user interviews

  • Planners only want to see news that’s “really news:” tell them strictly what they need to know and keep it high level

  • Strong preference to receive general updates only quarterly: if there was urgent news, such as a travel policy change that would immediately impact ongoing/upcoming events, planners preferred the news to be communicated via a phone call

  • Content focusing on fresh ideas and best practices is the most interesting: planners were most interested in learning about new ideas that worked well for other planners, quick tips and tricks, and information about memorable venues that other BCG planners used

Additional research led me to see a few gaps in our current format and ways to improve our newsletter

  • Text heavy content: I looked at previous newsletters that were sent and noticed they were dense with text. The focus and tone of our content was heavily skewed towards what our team was doing with an authoritative instead of supportive tone. Looking at the content in prior newsletters helped me better understand where we were falling short in meeting event planners’ expectations and interests

  • Gathering inspiration from other outlets: I researched news and blog platforms like Medium and CNN for inspiration on format and usability. I noticed there were more visuals, content was easily scannable, and they incorporated features that catered to the user such as a read time on Medium articles

 
 

Redesigning the newsletter

Drafting the content

Before jumping into the visual design, I drafted strictly the text for the newsletter to match the user needs discovered in research. I meshed this together with the additional content our team wanted to share in order to balance both user and business needs. Getting the content sorted out first helped me get feedback from our director and managers early on and iterate rapidly.

New layout and format

Tool used: Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Using library UI components built by our Marketing team, I designed a new layout based on each piece of content. After discovering how limited event planners’ time is in the user interviews, I made the following changes:

  • Added a read time for the newsletter (inspired by Medium)

  • Added key takeaways as the main heading to increase scannability

  • Added a pulse check survey to understand if the content was useful or not

  • Added icons and visual elements to break up content

 
 

Results and what I learned

Open rate jumped from 52% to 83%

For this newsletter, our open rate increased significantly from our prior communications. The next newsletter we sent following this new format showed this new open rate holding steady around 83% as well.

What I learned

  1. UX principles can be applied to anything and be rewarding even when you’re pressed for time

  2. It’s important to keep a pulse on your user’s needs and present them to your team/stakeholders to gain buy-in with your ideas and changes early on

  3. I learned a new tool - Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Next steps

Defining our communication strategy and revamping our website

After defining a new approach to our newsletter, I was able to build out our strategy holistically based on the knowledge we collected on event planners’ needs. My next step was to iterate on the intranet site’s design for event planners (case study here).

Between the website, a Slack channel, and our newsletter, I defined how the information would flow through the various channels we use to share information with event planners. This created an organized process internally and streamlined user experience for the company’s planners.