At some point, every company feels obliged to focus even more on the needs of its customers. Whereas it used to be possible to simply sell "a good product", customers can now demand more. The customer is increasingly becoming the focus for individual companies. "Customer centricity" and "customer journey" are the new German terms here. I would say: you have to put the customer at the center and take care of their needs.
The website is one way to get in touch with the customer; Facebook, Twitter and other media are other possibilities, but how did the whole Internet start in Germany at the University of Karlsruhe about 35 years ago? That's right! An e-mail was sent from the USA to Germany. Just like text messaging, e-mail has been buried for around 20 years, but it has persisted because it offers a number of advantages over other media: Contact can be asynchronous, you can reach many people at the same time and you can make offers tailored to them personally. Last but not least, the potential customer could also get in touch with the company if the bad habit of "no-reply" addresses did not become more and more widespread. Imagine this: You get a call and the first thing you hear on the other end is: "I'm going to tell you something important and please shut up for now and say nothing at all."
So what could be more obvious than making your customers an offer on your website on the one hand and contacting them by email on the other? Nothing really - if it weren't for a few technical hurdles and the GDPR that everyone loves.
Of course, it would be much nicer if you could maintain the content of the website and email in one place and only have to give the customer the most important information in the email and the customer then picks up everything else on the website itself. There are already many facets of this. What Neos lacked so far was the connection of Neos to Episerver.
punkt.de episerver has already connected several similar interfaces to NEOS in the past, so it was clear for us to create a solution here too.
Successful technical implementation
Episerver's Rest API is documented in a reasonably comprehensible way via Swagger(http://swagger.io), so we set to work reverse-engineering the interface. Since Neos is already the central system that provides the content in most projects anyway, we decided to establish Neos as the leading system here too. The content and users that Episerver(https://www.episerver.de) needs to send emails are available in Neos. Editors can then enter their content for the web and the newsletter in Neos and transfer the corresponding data to Episerver. This is time-controlled and fully automatic. This makes it possible, for example, to enter the content well in advance and then have it sent fully automatically at a specific time.
Our connection also takes care of removing users who no longer wish to receive the newsletter. The newsletter is then sent out by Episerver.
When creating an email newsletter, it is important to ensure that the newsletter can be displayed correctly by all email programs. This is technically as complex as displaying a website, which should also be usable on all browsers and end devices. With the help of "mjml"(https://mjml.io/), all common mail programs can be supplied with the corresponding data, and NEOS provides the data fully automatically for mail dispatch.
Half the effort with twice the success
The advantage for the user of the system is that he can now maintain all content in one central location, and the layout of the mails is also stored in Neos. As a result, the mail and the website appear as if they have been created from a single source and there is no need to maintain the layout twice.
