Connecting With Readers on an Ever-Deepening Level
by Joe Dysart * June 20, 2022
Copywriters and editors looking to auto-generate marketing newsletters with a more personal feel for readers and customers are reaching out to artificial intelligence for help.
Turns out, AI is great at continuously analyzing what readers are clicking on in the newsletters they receive — and then customizing future newsletter content based on those behaviors.
Moreover, AI also excels at analyzing other data an organization has on readers — including what readers say in chats, on social media and in-person — to get an even deeper insight into what makes each subscriber tick.
Over time, that ongoing analysis and continuous readjustment of text and other content results in an ever-more personalized marketing newsletter for each customer — and ideally, more sales.
In fact, 61% of customers who are treated to personalized marketing content from businesses say they are likely to buy from that business as a result of that personalization, according to a study by Movable Ink .
And 80% of Generation Z and Millenials say they are happy to allow publishers to track their digital behavior if they promise to offer a more personalized marketing experience in exchange, according to a study from Jeeng, an auto-personalized newsletter and digital marketing service.
Currently, personalized newsletters are used primarily by marketing copywriters, whose AI systems continually auto-adjust the content of their communications based on those systems’ ever-deepening perceptions on each customer’s likes and dislikes.
But personalized newsletters are also gaining in popularity among news editors. They often use these AI-powered newsletter systems to take note of articles that are of most interest to each reader — and then send that reader at least some new articles that specifically appeal to those interests.
In fact, AI-powered personalization can be a boon to virtually any organization that sends out a newsletter.
And it’s currently being embraced by writers and editors across the newsletter spectrum.
These are early adopters who realize that the more they know about each reader, the more likely that reader will connect with their newsletter on an ever-more intimate level.
In a phrase, the AI personalized newsletter “uniquely provides a powerful way for publishers to build that coveted one-to-one relationship” with customers — especially with young subscribers — according to Jeff Kupietzky, CEO, Jeeng , an auto-personalized newsletter and digital marketing service.
Maximizing Data
Generally, writers and editors using AI personalization start by building — or using already existing — databases that have information on each subscriber they can use to personalize each newsletter they send to that subscriber.
These databases often feature common data points that organizations typically track about people who visit their Web site and interact with their newsletter.
With marketing editors and writers, for example, data points commonly tracked include:
*Basic demographics like age, sex, home location, work location, political party and similar
*The time of day a reader is most likely to interact with your AI-personalized marketing letter
*The type of device a reader is most likely to use when reading your AI-personalized marketing newsletter
*The history of the reader’s purchases with your business
*The average dollar value of the reader’s purchases with your business
*Other business marketing content the reader engages with on your business’ Web site, social media properties and other digital properties
On a basic-use level, traditional newsletter personalization software — which has been around since the early eighties — uses these basic-level data points to personalize missives in a rudimentary way.
But experts in newsletter personalization also use additional data to deepen their knowledge of each reader — such as what readers are saying in chats, on social media, in person, and more.
And other expert users are pushing enhancement of databases on readers even further, operating on the premise that if you can imagine a personal data point you want to track — and a way to track it — you should make that a part of your personalization mix.
Still other expert users are going beyond what their analytics systems can automatically glean about each reader and reaching out to subscribers the old-fashioned way.
They use surveys, online forms and the like — to delve deeply into readers’ likes, dislikes, opinions so they can send them content that is even more personalized.
The upshot: At the end of the day, the number of data points your business or organization tracks and analyzes about each customer is really only limited by what you’re willing to imagine — and what you’re willing to pay each customer or reader.
The question becomes: If my customer or reader is willing to part with a bit of data for free, can I snare a motherlode of additional data if I promise a $10, $20 or $50 gift card — or something else of value — in exchange for more extremely detailed information?
Once your database is up-to-snuff (see more ideas for enhancing your subscriber database below), you’ll find that many solutions for AI-powered personalized newsletters are designed to seamlessly integrate with commonly used software services like Salesforce, Mailchimp and Hubspot.
Moreover, many other AI personalized newsletter solutions can also be integrated with software you use by leveraging automated software integration solutions from providers like Zapier, Automate.io and Microsoft Power Automate.
Bringing an AI Personalized Newsletter Onboard
When shopping for an AI personalized newsletter tech, a good solution to use as a benchmark against others is Ras.io.
An early player in AI-personalized newsletters, Ras.io’s software tracks every item a subscriber clicks on when interacting with your newsletter — and then continually provides content that more closely matches those interests with each subsequent newsletter your send.
The solution also auto-provides content for your newsletter if you prefer, grabbing news copy, blog posts and similar copy from the Web, repackaging it — and then combining that content with any original articles, posts or other content you might also like to include.
Plus, Ras.io also enables you to design your personalized newsletter using your company or organization’s colors, fonts, layout and similar organization-specific design features.
The result? The reader of a car aficionado newsletter who clicks most often on content about muscle cars, for example, will start receiving more articles from Ras.io that targets that interest.
Moreover, if that specific reader’s tastes change — say to classic luxury cars, premium auto restoration tools and/or recommended drives along America’s scenic highways and byways — Ras.io will adjust to that new profile and start sending content that is more attuned to those new interests.
Of course, Ras.io realizes you may want to send at least some of the same content to every on your subscriber list who receives your personalized newsletter.
So it also enables you to save space in your newsletter for a specific number of articles, posts or other content that is created to appeal to all readers in a general way.
Ras.io’s Competitors
A representative sampling of competitors to Ras.io you can check-out include:
*MarketTraq Email: This newsletter personalization service offers an extremely detailed rundown on its Web site on how and why its tech will work for your newsletter.
Like other competitors, MarketTraq studies readers’ interactions with your newsletter and fine-tunes the content it sends, based on your readers’ perceived preferences.
The service is based on what it calls M-Blocks — technology that auto-selects custom images, article copy, headlines and overall formatting for your newsletter based on the perceived preferences of each subscriber.
MarketTraq also integrates with Google Analytics. So you’ll be able to rely on world-class analysis to better personalize your newsletters with each send.
The solution also serves-up an ‘Email Engagement Score’ on each of your subscribers. This score enables you to segment-out readers based on the interests they share, the amount of money they have to spend, how often they engage with your personalized newsletter and similar data-based perceptions.
*Frizbit : This service’s newsletter personalization starts by tracking products and/or services each of your subscribers has purchased.
Plus it also studies each product or service they’ve engaged with, including overall product categories they’ve shopped, all the images they’ve viewed and all the prices they’ve checked-out.
Friztbit will also analyze and auto-adjust the content each subscriber receives based on the total amount of time that customer spends with your newsletter or on your digital property, how often that customer spends money with you, the value of goods or services that customer purchases and the categories of goods and services that appeal to them.
Still other data points tracked by Fritzbit include the last time of visit each customer makes to your Web site and the computer device or devices each subscriber uses.
*Adobe Campaign Personalization: Adobe offers an incredibly detailed look under-the-hood at how its newsletter and marketing personalization works on its Web site.
Like its competitors, Adobe personalizes newsletter and other marketing content based on a subscriber’s interaction with your newsletter and other, highly personalized data points.
Emergence of the All-Seeing Subscriber Database
Given that AI newsletter personalization hinges heavily on the amount of personal data you have on each subscriber, it’s no wonder that many editors and writers who are expert in personalization are using specially designed software to maximize the number of data points they track on each reader.
Known as enhanced Customer Data Platforms (CDP), these software solutions go beyond traditional organization databases — which may steward data for only one or two company departments — and instead stream-in data from every pertinent database maintained by every pertinent department in the organization.
In the vernacular of IT pros, this process is known as freeing-up data from ‘data solos’ to create an all-encompassing ‘data lake’ for an organization.
Essentially, your organization’s combined databases become a centralized pool of information, which is instantly accessible to every company department that needs it — including marketing.
A best-of-breed, all-seeing CDP, for example, can automatically import personal details about subscribers as they interact with a business or organization by email, chat, text, phone, social media, clicks in newsletters, clicks on Web sites, in person — and virtually every other form of interaction that is either digital, or can be digitized.
The result? CDPs brimming with data and insights about each newsletter subscriber can be continually analyzed by AI to identify lucrative opportunities — and content adjustment tactics — for marketing editors and copywriters, such as:
*Which customers are responding most favorably to my hyper-personalized newsletters — and how should I auto-adjust my newsletter content accordingly?
*Which customers have made purchases after viewing videos embedded in my newsletters — and how should I auto-adjust my newsletter content accordingly?
*Which customers have made purchases after they read a detailed, long-form newsletter article on my product or service — and how should I auto-adjust my newsletter content accordingly?
And those insights are just for starters.
Essentially, once marketing directors and copywriters have amassed a hyper-detailed, continually evolving, all-seeing view of each customer, they can use AI analytics to ask as many questions about their subscribers as they prefer — and from virtually every perspective.
Take one organization’s successful use of an all-seeing database from Accenture — the Accenture Consumer 360 Platform.
Using Accenture’s CDP, a manufacturer was able to stream data from 35 different departmental databases scattered across its organization to create a single master database.
That capability enabled marketers at the manufacturer to simultaneously analyze:
*What videos a customer viewed on their products
*What that customer said about the company’s products on social media to their friends and acquaintances
*What retailers the customer visited online to learn more about the product
*How that same customer interacted with marketing for those products on the company’s Web site.
Armed with those insights, the manufacturer used the Consumer 360 Platform to predict when that specific customer would make a purchase — along with what specific product the customer would most likely buy.
That’s the kind of information that comes in extremely handy when you’re looking to hyper-personalize a newsletter to promote a service or product that you’re looking to get someone to buy.
And those same insights are also extremely handy if you’re looking to further personalize a newsletter with text, images, audio and video promoting similar services or products that subscriber may also be interested in purchasing.
The bottom line: For the manufacturer, customer engagement with company marketing materials jumped 25% after using the Consumer 360 Platform — and average revenue earned per visit shot up 10% — according to Accenture.
Yet another success story: Consider Amperity, another CDP vendor, which reports similar results with Alaska Airlines, after it worked with the business to unify data from a number of company databases that were formerly trapped in data silos.
After all that information — drawn from various departments handling customer interactions in bookings, reservations, the company’s customer loyalty program and more — was centralized, it was simply a matter of unleashing Amperity’s analytics on the master database to come up with insights on each customer.
Alaska Airline’s goal in analyzing those insights was to auto-generate personalized marketing messages designed to upsell customers on various Alaska Airlines services before the day of their flights.
Specific offers Amperity helped auto-generate included upgrade offers, invitations to join the airline’s loyalty program, seating upgrades and similar service perks.
The result: Alaska saw a 198% jump in sign-ups for its loyalty program, according to Elliot Pesut, director of marketing, Alaska Airlines.
And the airline registered a 61% jump in message-open rates.
Shopping Smart for an Enhanced CDP
Fortunately, if you’re looking to take a deep dive into how an all-seeing CDP platform can help maximize the personalization of your newsletter, you’re in luck.
Market researcher Forrester released an in-depth report earlier this year that offers a complete rundown on who’s who in CDP, entitled “Now Tech: Customer Data Platforms, Q1 2022.”
The report details Forrester’s take on 34 CDP providers — including providers that specialize in centralized databases specifically designed to use insights for newsletter personalization and similar message personalization.
Meanwhile, you can also check-out a handy checklist on what to look for when shopping for the ultimate CDP platform provided by Adobe, another provider of enhanced CDPs.
Here’s what Adobe indicates are the top features best-of-breed CDP solution:
*Real-time data streaming and data ingestion: For maximum efficacy, ensure that the database consolidation you use offers real-time updates from all the data streams you’re sourcing. That means if one of your subscribers makes a comment about your company on social media, that data should be immediately added and processed by your CDP before you send out your next newsletter.
*Purpose-built by a trusted organization: Many CDPs in the marketplace are cobbled together from disparate technologies. The best CDPs, according to Adobe, are built as a single solution from the ground-up by a company with a reputation for reliability.
*Complete, unified user profiles: Even though some CDP providers promise complete data integration from every applicable database in your organization, some fall short of this promise. Ensure that the ‘unified user profile’ that is promised is actually delivered.
*Robust, native data governance tools: Ensure that rules governing the intake, process, storage and analysis of data are easy to understand and use.
*Real-time data activation: Getting new data to your all-seeing database is only half the job. Ensure the CDP you choose is also able to make that data instantly available to the personalization process as soon as it is received.
*Easy for marketers to use: CDPs democratize data. An ideal CDP will be built for marketers that features an interface, tools, and workflows structured to work seamlessly with editors, writers and other marketing personnel.
*Scalable, flexible, and extensible: Your CDP should integrate seamlessly with other software you’re already using as an editor or writer. And the entity responsible for ensuring that seamless integration should be your CDP solution provider — not your in-house IT department.
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–Joe Dysart is editor of RobotWritersAI.com and a tech journalist with 20+ years experience. His work has appeared in 150+ publications, including The New York Times and the Financial Times of London.