Do newsletters still work?

Everyone loved email when the internet was in its infancy and first became available to the general public. We were ecstatic when we received notification of a new email because, well, it was new and exciting. Today, everyone receives dozens and dozens of emails per day, many of which go unopened; this aspect causes corporate marketing departments and content creators to wonder, "Is email marketing still an effective and appropriate tactic?" and "Is it worth distributing my content via the email channel?"

The short and simple answer is yes.

So why do so many companies continue to send dozens and dozens of emails to customers, readers, prospects?

Distribution

First of all because email is by far the most popular tool in the world, in 2018 as many as 3.8 Billion individuals worldwide were using email and the figure is continuously growing +3% CAGR (average annual rate) between 2018-23

EFFECTIVENESS

According to McKinsey, the newsletter is still a more effective means of communication for acquiring new customers than social media:

Moreover, the ROI of newsletters is definitely interesting, according to mail chimp, content distribution emails get an open-rate of 22.2% and a click rate of 4.62%.

How to stand out from the crowd: personalization

Standing out has certainly become more difficult at a time in history when the number of emails sent continues to grow at a faster rate than the number of email users. It's no wonder that content relevance to the audience should be a priority. Some companies approach the problem by segmenting the user base and creating different newsletters for different segments, while others go to the extreme concept of creating thousands of variations of a newsletter to make it as personalized as possible.

Flash sales site Gilt Groupe sends out more than 3,000 variations of its daily email, for example, each of which is customized based on its users' reactions to both the site and previous emails.

The Brescia newspaper, on the other hand, leveraging the services of Socialbeat (www.socialbeat.io) creates a series of thematic newsletters, which are generated in an automated or mixed journalist and Artificial Intelligence manner and are sent to only a portion of the customer base.

Of course, building true personalization is a transformative process that requires specific capabilities and supporting infrastructure. Often in companies, publishing and otherwise, customer information resides in different parts of the organization and must be aggregated to create a single view of the customer. While in some cases this process may seem time-consuming and laborious, the improvements in open rates and click throughs are significant, plus you can increase the amount of newsletters you create without increasing the amount of human labor.

Create company newsletters to engage internal stakeholders or B2B customers

Socialbeat allows, through the Content Monitoring platform, to intercept all the contents that talk about a specific topic, sector, geographic area or that contain a particular keyword and to detect how much these contents have been viral. Moreover, through the platform it is possible to generate, with a few clicks, newsletters (with customized email template).

Thanks to the integration with Mail Chimp, Socialbeat, powered by Roboticly AI engines, can distribute newsletters both to the company's internal stakeholders and to the database of external customers.

Moreover, always thanks to Roboticly AI engines, it is possible to ask the system to automatically select the best news to be included, build a newsletter with the correct HTML template and send it automatically in your inbox, in that of your colleagues or in that of your customers. It is thus possible to create dozens of personalized newsletters, through minimal effort.

If the company has its own content site, which is a typical case for newspapers and companies that take content marketing seriously, Roboticly can import content from the site, track behavioral data about readers, and use that data to automatically build a newsletter, with only the company's proprietary content, to send to readers of the site.

Contact Roboticly.ai to try out the automatic, personalized newsletter service