This February, our Cerkl personalized employee newsletter released after undergoing a big transformation.
We want to give communicators like you new tools to tell your organization’s story, so we went back to the drawing board to re-imagine the form and function of our newsletters. The pressure is on to provide your audience value, so the new newsletter highlights what’s most important.
Priority Content
With this release, we are introducing a new look and language for priority content. Don’t worry – you don’t need to change the way you work. This is just a new way of using the things you are already telling Cerkl to get your message across.
You may have already been using these priorities to ensure certain content is placed in your automated newsletters. For example, you might set something as a Top Story to make sure an important piece of content appears at the top of your newsletter. Or you might decide that certain content was restricted for one of your segments.
Before now, nothing really visually distinguished these essential content pieces from the others in your employee newsletter. These stories were always placed at the top of your newsletters but the ‘why’ behind the placement was unknown to your audience.
Priority Chips
That changes with this release – I’d like to introduce you to chips. These little visual storytellers show up to let your audience know how important a post is.
Depending on the priority you place on a content piece in Cerkl, a chip will accompany your content in your personalized employee newsletters.
Top Story
Top Story is the highest priority chip. When you choose to put a content piece to ’Everyone as the First Story, Once or Multiple Times,’ you are buying this piece a first-class ticket straight to the top of your newsletter.
If you have many top stories, we’ll choose the three that will be the most relevant to each audience member and continue to serve the others in the rest of the newsletter until that content is consumed or expires.
Big News
The second most powerful chip is Big News, triggered when you prioritize a content piece to go ‘To Everyone, Just Once or Multiple Times.’ This is still a very valuable tool, but if it’s competing with a Top Story chip, it will be in second place.
Just for You or Event for You
Did you know that using your audience member’s name has been shown over and over to increase click thru rate? That’s the reason for our next chip – Just for You. When you send your content to a segment, it will be given the Just for You chip, meant to entice your audience members into clicking.
That same idea applies to your events with the Event for You chip. This chip will be applied to any events sent to a segment.
Match & Trending
If you have Display Percent Match & Trending turned on in your newsletter settings, your newly redesigned Cerkl automated emails includes a new look for these two elements.
These helper chips aim to entice a click from your audience by adding another layer of temptation to your content. When applicable, Trending and Percent Match chips will show up as partners to your Priority chips. If the content isn’t part of your priority content, then a text version of this chip will show as a header in the ‘Recommended for You’ section.
Every employee newsletter, no matter which layout your organization or user choose, is equipped to handle three chipped, full-width stories with that special ‘Continue Reading’ call to action.
Recommended for You
After your three top priority content pieces are shown, the ‘Recommended for You’ section kicks in. This section will show the other priority pieces, accompanied by a text chip and that then picks up the stories that our artificial intelligence thinks your audience wants to read most.
The layout of this section picks up the layout you or your audience choose, be it Traditional, Headlines Plus, or Headlines, still giving you that distinct, hand-created look our communicators love.
Upcoming Events
Upcoming events got a massive facelift. Using popular ticketing sites as our inspiration, we brought the most important information to the forefront and made your calls to action more clear.
We are giving you a new presentation for those multi-day events, like open enrollment or conferences, to keep your audience in the know.
New Subject Lines
As part of our push to give you more tools for priority content, we have reworked our subject lines to focus on alerting the audience that the information contained inside your messages is valuable and relevant to them.
We know there’s a ton of information here. If you want a more detailed look at the change, grab a cup of coffee, and enjoy our latest Cerkl U Webinar, “New Year, New Look for Email Newsletter.”
What’s Next?
If you have any questions or feedback about this change, be sure to reach out to our Success team via our chatbot.
Want to see what else Cerkl Broadcast has to offer? Book a Demo today.
