This episode of The Brief originally aired on April 13, 2020. You can watch the live video recording on YouTube.
Think back to the online communication platforms you were using 10-20 years ago. AOL Instant Messenger. BBM. MySpace. One after the next, these communication platforms have peaked, only to fade away into obscurity.
However, there is one form of online communication that has managed to stand the test of time: email.
In his 2014 article, “Email is Still the Best Thing on the Internet”, columnist Alexis C. Madrigal affectionately refers to email as “the gentle, dependable workhorse that everyone relies on and nobody owns”.
In 2019, there were 3.9 billion email users globally. By 2023, this number is projected to hit 4.3 billion (approximately 50% of the world’s population).
Email has a great deal of value to personal users, but it has even more value to businesses in their quest to reach more people and engage their consumer base. Email marketing has an impressive return on investment. According to a study by Campaign Monitor, for every $1 spent on email marketing, businesses can expect an average return of $44.
Email marketing is not only an effective investment for businesses looking to engage existing customers; it is also an incredibly effective method for new customer acquisition. According to a study by McKinsey, email is 40 times more effective at acquiring customers than Facebook and Twitter combined.
However, not all email marketing is created equal.
Hypothetically speaking, a business can send any email and call it “email marketing”, but it’s all for naught if that email fails to serve its intended purpose: customer engagement.
The level of customer engagement for email marketing is frequently gauged by the email open rate. Although open rates vary by industry, a good email open rate meets the industry average. Hubspot conducted an open rate survey across 28 industries and a sampling of 25 million emails, and found an average open rate of 37%.
It’s not just the open rate that counts. Great marketing emails will have value to the consumer, and one way an email’s value is demonstrated is by average user clickthrough rate. In simple terms, you don’t just want your email recipient to open your email; you want them to click on the content and open the links in your emails. That clickthrough rate is the best indication that your marketing emails have value to the recipient.
As consumers, the content that we find to be valuable is that which personally fits our priorities and interests. This creates a challenge for email marketers, because most email lists include thousands of recipients, and each one would define “great content” in a slightly (or dramatically) different way. So, how can any company assemble a marketing email that delivers engaging content for so many different types of people?
Enter Rasa.io — the first-ever platform to create "smart newsletters" based on user behavior and artificial intelligence. On Episode 12 of The Brief, we interview Rasa.io’s Founder and Executive Chairman, Amith Nagarajan about the power of AI-fueled email marketing.
The New Orleans-based company works with businesses to customize email content to each individual user. By using AI to give businesses the ability to send marketing emails that contain content that their subscribers are actually interested in reading, Rasa.io gives businesses an unprecedented opportunity to cultivate a meaningful relationship with their email subscribers.
Perhaps counterintuitively, providing each person on your email list with engaging content frequently involves the inclusion of links and articles that do not directly link to your product or content on your website.
Why? Because marketing email engagement is about more than making a quick buck for your business. When your company’s emails are able to provide content that your customer finds personally relevant and engaging, that builds the trust your customer feels toward your brand. Sending your customer content that they find to be interesting and relevant shows the customer that you understand them, and that gives your company personal value to the consumer, ultimately building your long-term relationship.
Amith is an entrepreneur who believes in the principals of conscious capitalism -- a global community of business leaders dedicated to elevating humanity through business. He founded Rasa.io to give brands the ability to share personalized, quality content using conscious business practices and cutting-edge technology.
For a limited time, Rasa.io is offering businesses the ability to use their services for FREE to send COVID-19-related content. Find out more here.
Featuring:
- Amith Nagarajan, Executive Chairman and Founder, Rasa.io (LinkedIn)
- Hosted by: Meredith Reed
Watch the live video recording on YouTube.
