Go Mobile

CDI, an elite data center integrator and services company based in Teterboro, N.J., doesn't send out newsletters to its customers, but the marketing team recently overhauled the way it handles monthly communications to employees.

The biggest change is that it has gone mobile with its templates: moving away from text-heavy content in favor of links to videos collected during seminars or content being promoted by its socially active marketing staff.

The idea is to provide sales people and solution architects – who are usually in the field anyway  – with information that they can use as talking points in client discussions, said Jeannine Perri, director of marketing for CDI, a perennial company on the annual CRN Solution Provider 500 ranking.

"Most people are on the road, not in the office. The first time we did this, we had a big jump in the open rates," she said.

CDI builds the content for its newsletters by thinking about how to reuse collateral created for events and investing in professional video recordings for certain seminars, so that the content can be repackaged and reused by its sales team. "I'm trying to take things full circle," Perri said.