How to brew a newsletter

After all the articles written by Xavier about advanced robotics, AR in the nuclear industry or the NDA RD&I report, we thought it would be interesting to show you how to brew a newsletter like inTechBrew.

Behind a fancy website and an active LinkedIn page, it does take a lot of work performed by yur Master Brewers !

Let’s review the different tools that we use on a daily basis to brew your digital newsletter on nuclear innovative technologies:

• WordPress + Stripe;
• Mailchimp;
• LinkedIn.

WordPress and Stripe

We could have simply done a newsletter without a website; just relying on our network from the nuclear industry. Through Xavier’s experience, we know quite a few experts in innovation such as in the decommissioning sector. However, we decided to open our work to as many people as possible, relying on a momentum that could be created. In addition, it gives us the possibility to add more content to the newsletter, with longer descriptions and media contents.

One option could have been paying a web developper. We would have saved time, but our capital expenses would have been quite high and we would not be sure to get the website we imagined from the beginning.

Another option was to internalise everything, spend time on creating the website but at least we would get exactly what we envisioned.

As you can imagine, we chose the latter option !

Nowadays, you can find Content Management Systems freely available, These systems allow you to set up your own website and customise it without the need of coding in HTML, PHP or SQL.

The one we chose is WordPress because you have access to a wide range of plugins. One of these plugins allows us to set up private sections for registered users and also manage the paid subscriptions through the Stripe platform.

Mailchimp

It’s nice, we have a website. But our value proposition is to offer a digital newsletter featuring COTS technologies demonstrated in a nuclear environment. Unfortunately, WordPress does not offer a newsletter service.

That’s why we decided to use Mailchimp, a dedicated system to publish newsletters.

Once you register on our website, WordPress sends a command to Mailchimp to subscribe you as well to our newsletter and you become part of our “audience:.

Mailchimp is a very powerful tool and it can do the following tasks (something that you cannot do in Outlook or Gmail …):

• Set up a proper template for your newsletter;
• Schedule your newsletter;
• Know who opened the newsletter (we are expecting a 100% opening rate !);
• and many other things.

All these functionalities free us time to focus on what matters: Scouting and curating your 7 monthly COTS innovative technologies proven in a nuclear environment !

LinkedIn

Offering a newsletter featuring nuclear innovative technologies is a great concept. But if no one is reading it, what’s the point?

That’s why we are using LinkedIn as our main marketing channel. If you are reading this blog post, you mostly came here through LinkedIn !

Many companies think that generating traffic on LinkedIn is only through paid ads, but they are wrong ! It all comes down to content. The more a company posts and shares relevant content on LinkedIn, the more likely it will attract people.

And that’s clearly what I am doing here by writing this blog post 😉

I hope this blog post gave you more information on how we run inTechBrew. Now that you know how we brew our newsletters, why not registering to our monthly newsletter featuring 7 COTS technologies demonstrated in a nuclear environment?