Austin Williams has been part of the BlueLena team since June 2020 and now serves as our Program Operations Manager. As the go-to person for customer support, Austin makes sure your client requests are handled quickly and smoothly. He also helps new clients get up and running by overseeing the setup of their integrations, conducting training and launching publishers on the BlueLenaCXA platform.
Every member of our BlueLena publisher community receives expert in-house support as a publisher benefit – no chatbots here! We caught up with Austin to chat about his new role leading the Essentials program and what excites him most about it.
Tell us your background. How did you find your way to BlueLena and how has your role grown since your time here?
It took some luck to end up here, as I chose to delay my official graduation for a semester because of Covid guidelines. During this period, I was done with classes and needed to start getting a headstart on looking for jobs. Given my interest in business analytics and desire to support small/local businesses, I got in contact with Daniel regarding an internship, and the rest is history.
In the beginning, I was in charge of handling everything relating to Pico and the onboarding process, along with handling partial support desk duties. Over time, as we began to branch out to other monetization platform partners, my role expanded to a broader support based approach while continuing to solely manage Pico connections. I began to leverage Zapier, setup data glossaries and assist on more ActiveCampaign-facing items.
More recently, I’ve taken over management of our Essentials-level publishers, for both the onboarding process and the general management. Over the years, my role was both narrowed on support and broadened in my flexibility to investigate and assist wherever needed.
What are tools and/or functionalities that BlueLena publishers have access to that they might not know about?
There are three that stand out to me: first, the support desk. I’ve seen a handful of messages the last few months with publishers stating that they didn’t know the support desk existed. Second, that they have access to Zapier, which is how we connect different tech platforms with the BlueLena platform. Our team has the power to connect a plethora of applications together in a quicker manner than directly coding an integration. And finally, the resource library on our website.
That leads me to our next question. What are the most common questions that the support team receives — and where can we find the answers?
Many of the most common questions can be answered in our resource library. Here are just a few of the questions we often receive:
Why isn’t a subscriber receiving emails? The most common reason that a contact is not receiving a newsletter is that they do not have it selected within their newsletter preferences. The second most common reason that a contact is not receiving your newsletter is that they’re unsubscribed from your list or on the exclusion list. Find solutions to both.
How do we use ActiveCampaign’s native preference manager? For publications that are looking to replicate a preferences manager instead of individual opt-out forms, follow these steps.
How does the unsubscribe process work? This depends on how the unsubscribe is set up. See the most common use cases.
Why isn’t my campaign sending? There could be a problem with the chosen audience segment or an issue with ActiveCampaign, which powers the BlueLena CXA. Learn more about the reasons a campaign may not send.
What’s one new strategy that you’ve seen or learned recently that publishers could replicate?
Publishers want to ensure that a welcome survey is sent to all new contacts, even if they make a contribution early on in the welcome automation (an introductory series that sends to all new email registrants) and are removed from that automation before they reach the survey email.
We ended up adding a condition to the beginning of our new paid user series (a thank you and welcome automation that sends to all new supporters) looking for anyone that wasn’t sent the survey. Then they get an additional wait step in their journey so that they won’t immediately receive the new paid user email #1 immediately after the survey.
What do you like most about your work here at BlueLena?
Helping brainstorm workarounds for situations that would otherwise not be possible or would take a lot of time to implement. Saving time for publishers or getting something done that they assumed wasn’t possible is always a great feeling. Nearly every publisher has a great attitude and seems to truly trust our processes, so everyday seeing how they keep things together makes me feel good as well.
In general, I’m happy to be able to support the journalism businesses that need it most, as the economic environment is not friendly and so knowing that they aren’t fighting the battle alone is something I feel passionate about. I’m also excited to help navigate a time where nuance and standing out is going to be key, offering viewpoints on how to bridge the differences in marketing to different generations/subsets.
For fun: Where can we find you when you’re not answering support-related questions?
- Craft breweries
- Reading macro/finance articles and calculating path dependencies
- Disc golf
- Playstation 5
- Watching basketball
Meet your “audience back bench.” From growing loyal audiences and launching email newsletters to increasing membership and major gifts, BlueLena provides the strategy, support and tools that power more than 250 local news publications. Learn more about the game-changing benefits that come along with a membership to the BlueLena community by contacting us at solutions@bluelena.io .