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COVID-19 is changing the way consumers shop and industries operate. Many companies have experienced a lull or halt to business, while others are busier than ever. One industry seeing a colossal boom to business is the grocery industry. Grocery stores are seeing demand for essential goods skyrocketing past their ability to keep items in stock; they have increased staffing industry-wide since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic; in-store experience is limited due to social distancing; and ecommerce has taken over as the primary means of customer purchase. That is a lot of change in just 8 weeks and a lot of COVID-19 pandemic emails deploying to customers. Communicating clearly, consistently and quickly are the keys to being successful as a business and retaining customer loyalty during a crisis.
Staying Organized For Successful Grocery COVID-19 Emails
As the SalesForce Marketing Cloud agency partner for Peapod Digital Labs (focused on email, sms and push communications), we needed to pivot as quickly as the Clients we serve and jump on a streamlined process that accommodated an entirely unprecedented shift in email strategy and communication. Our team knew we needed a way to flag any emails related to COVID-19, but without introducing an entirely different project management system or process. Therefore, we established an “all hands on deck” deployment process that differed only slightly from our standard project flow. We reduced redundant steps, utilized methods of communication that guaranteed faster response times, and created new development flags for COVID-19 emails in order to stand-out. Staying organized allowed us to shift processes quickly so as new requests came in our team was able to act quickly to deploy the communications.
Clear Communication Was Key to Handling Urgent Requests
As organized as we were, keeping everyone informed of what was coming down the pipeline became more difficult with the team working from home. We solved this problem by creating a new hierarchy of communication urgency within Response Labs and now follow this structure when urgent requests came in:
| When Do You Need a Response? | Channel |
|---|---|
| > 8 hours | |
| Within 8 hours | |
| Within 4 hours | Slack |
| Within 1 hour | Text |
| ASAP | Call |
With this in place we streamlined external and internal communications for urgent email requests and sped up our reviews with the Client.
Preparing For The Next Wave of COVID-19 Emails
Clear communication, consistent workflow, and message clarity enabled our ability to support Peapod Digital Labs with their COVID-19 emails during the pandemic. Even with senior executives involved in the content creation and approval process, our existing project management infrastructure allowed us to pivot and adapt. That flexibility was crucial to delivering the most important store information for customers without issue – even when running into unexpected hurdles. These experiences have prepared our team, and our Client, should a new wave of the pandemic rise in the coming months. If it does, we’ll be ready.
