A reoccurring theme in any business is the marketing and ‘systematic’ communication that needs to take place between a company and a customer. I have been working on something like this during the past sprint. Except that even with a complex system it is still manual to update the content, ie the message. Further complicating this is that as undesirable (IMO) as email is, it is still a requirement for customer outreach. What to do, the thoughts that danced around my dreams and woke me this morning were fuzzy but they generally followed this pattern:
- Start with two rock solid templates, one for email and one for web
- Separate container templates gives you cross platform consistency when it is email delivery and latest greatest flat responsive design capability for web delivery
- Seperate content from the container (also called presentation to web geeks)
- Use automation (programming) to generate the message on demand; this can be stand alone tool or integrated into the system itself
What this allows is the separation of management into two layers. The web person only needs to worry about how the container will render in each medium. The marketing person only needs to worry about what the message says. Together they can maintain and build a robust channel that reaches customers at desired points in time. Here is my brain dump, graphically:
