The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Rasa.io: Personalized AI-powered Newsletters for Better Audience Engagement

Episode Date: March 11, 2024

Rasa.io: Personalized AI-powered Newsletters for Better Audience Engagement Rasa.io Show Notes About the Guest(s): Erica Salm Rench is the Chief Operating Officer at rasa.io. With a background in enrollment management and digital marketing, Erica brings a wealth of experience to her role. She has managed online marketing teams and executed strategies to help organizations stand out in the online market. Erica's love for digital marketing, technology, and email has led her to support the incredible community of rasa.io customers. Episode Summary: Welcome to The Chris Voss Show, where Chris Vos interviews CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. In this episode, Chris speaks with Erica Salm Rench, the COO of rasa.io. rasa.io leverages AI to personalize the newsletter experience for each subscriber. By sending personalized content based on reading preferences and behaviors, rasa.io helps organizations increase engagement and optimize their email marketing. Erica discusses how rasa.io works alongside popular email platforms like MailChimp and Salesforce, and shares the benefits of using AI in email marketing. She also highlights the time-saving aspect of rasa.io and the insights it provides to improve audience engagement. Key Takeaways: rasa.io leverages AI to personalize the newsletter experience for each subscriber, sending different versions of emails based on reading preferences and behaviors. The platform works alongside popular email providers like MailChimp and Salesforce, making it easy to integrate with existing systems. By personalizing content, rasa.io helps increase click rates, open rates, and overall audience engagement. Publishers using rasa.io can see increased returns from partner advertising revenue, as the personalized newsletters attract more engagement. The platform offers time-saving features, automating the newsletter production process and allowing users to set it and forget it. Notable Quotes: "Instead of sending one version of an email to 10,000 people, we're sending 10,000 different versions personalized by people's reading preferences and behaviors." - Erica Salm Rench "If you're someone who knows that staying in touch with your audience is important, but you put off the newsletter because you don't see the immediate value, I'd say get started soon because you need to maintain your relevant presence in your subscribers' inboxes." - Erica Salm Rench

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the big show. We certainly appreciate you guys coming by. As always, we have the smartest and most brightest Welcome to the big show. We certainly appreciate you guys coming by.

As always, we have the smartest and most brightest minds on the show. And they share with you their knowledge to help improve the quality of your life and your experience and all that good stuff. Refer to the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Go to Goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfast, LinkedIn.com, 4chesschrisfast, ChrisFast1 on the TikTokity, and ChrisFastFacebook.com to see all the places we are on the interwebs. Today, we have an amazing young lady on the show. She's going to be talking to us about her company, Raza.io. Erica Sombrench joins us on the show. She's the Chief Operating Officer over there.

After working in enrollment management, where she focused on recruitment, strategy, and marketing, she managed a team of online marketers at the largest digital marketing company of the Gulf South. There, she supported the web development, SEO, online advertising, and content marketing teams in executing strategies which elevated organizations to stand out and be seen amongst the chaos of the online market. Now a CEO, she gets to blend her love of digital marketing technology and email in order to support the incredible community of Raza.io customers. Welcome to the show, Erica. How are you? I'm doing great, Chris. Thanks so much for having me.

And thanks for coming. We certainly appreciate it. Give us a 30,000 overview of the company Raza.io and what you guys do. I sure will. So at Raza, we leverage AI in order to personalize the newsletter experience for each and every subscriber. So you can imagine instead of sending one version of an email to 10,000 people, we're sending 10,000 different versions personalized by people's reading preferences and behaviors. So in the same way that your Netflix portal serves you content based on your prior watching behavior, we're doing something similar in an email. There you go. AI is personalizing everything, I guess, between everything else. Now, do you guys replace the big providers like MailChimp and all the different list mailers,

or do you guys work with them? That's a great question. We work alongside a lot of those platforms. So we have built-in integrations with MailChimp, Salesforce, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, and a lot of the big players out there so that if you want to get a newsletter started with very little time, very little energy, if you don't have a ton of content of your own and you want to increase engagement, optimize engagement through the personalized content on the Rasa side, and then have it talk to your other platform, that's what a lot of our customers do. There you go.

Now, do you stand alone as a list server provider or does it need to work through one of these other vendors? You do not have to. We are the ESP. So we are actually vendors as well. All right. There you go. So if you've got Zapier, MailChimp, Shopify, HubSpot, Salesforce, Infusionsoft, or some of the other providers that might work with you guys, they can do it.

Now, what is the benefit? Go ahead. Oh, I was just saying you got it. Those are the integrations. We have a few more, but you can find those all on our website. I cheat reading off the website. Don't tell anyone. So what is the benefit of using this AI in percentages and returns and et cetera, et cetera?

All that great stuff. Yeah. So in addition to seeing increases in click rates and open rates and just overall various audience engagement metrics, we actually work with a lot of publishers as well who see increases on returns from their partner advertising revenue. So a lot of our clients have audiences that a lot of folks want to reach. So they'll pay for spots in their newsletters, in some cases, the publishers and a lot of our professional and trade association clients. And in those cases, they see quite a bit of return in terms of how much more people will pay for spots in those newsletters that get such great engagement. There you go.

And that gives you better returns and more personalized emails that are going out to people that they might identify with more because it's gauged towards them. How does the AI, I mean, we don't need to know what your secret sauce is, but how does the AI work to try and target that and figure all of that stuff out? Yeah, no, I'm happy to give an overview. So when you start using Rasa, you're going to identify relevant content, whether that be just your own content. If you produce a ton of blogs and podcasts and things of that nature, if you're putting a lot out there, we can just personalize within your own ecosystem. But a lot of our clients, to some extent, will leverage some external publishers as well.

So they'll plug in those sources. And then as that content comes into Rasa, we will use AI to figure out what are the most relevant pieces in general. And then we read those pieces using natural language processing, just conceptualizing it, understanding it. And then we can match the best pieces with the people based on what we know about what their reading behaviors are. So what did they open in the past? What did they click on?

What do we already know about them in order to match them with the best content? And it's a recommendation algorithm in that way. There you go. And so it takes and targets them to where they need to be and everything else. match them with the best content and it's a it's a recommendation algorithm in that way there you go and so it takes and targets them to where they need to be and everything else what what was how long you guys been doing this seven years seven eight years oh wow in the market yep so we always say we were doing ai before it was cool there you go yeah everyone's in the ai space my dog's got an ai website at this point pretty much yeah yeah we much. We have over 500 folks using the platform at this point. So we've had the fortune of once people come on, they don't leave.

So not the flash in the pan AI company. There you go. So we'll aggregate content from your website and other external sources, including facebook twitter rs feeds so it'll bring in my say maybe my podcast or maybe it will take in pull in stuff from youtube maybe videos i posted you got it so you could plug in your youtube channel your podcast we know you have a ton of awesome podcast content and then as you publish more it will bring it in automatically and then we'll seek to match the right people with the right podcast content or whatever else you plug in.

There you go. That would be ideal. That would be ideal. So it's not giving a standardized sort of flat one email for everybody. It gives you something that's – and it's all animated, so you just set it and forget it. That's good to have. Yeah.

So especially if you're looking to source from just your own internal sources, there's not a lot of review that goes into it, right? But we do have clients that they'll plug in some external sources, and they want to see what those sources have produced because they want to make sure it's 100% on brand. But if you didn't like something and you didn't want it to qualify, just toggle it off and it would not be served up to anyone. Now it looks like what you guys deploy is what you call a smart newsletter. How does that work? That is essentially what we've been talking about. That's the product,

the smart newsletter. Yeah. Now does it look, does it probably look different than when it's delivered than maybe with a standard one that I'm using on MailChimp, for instance? Yeah, so you still have the ability to kind of make tweaks and modifications in the system so that the layout of the template is the shell for the content that we serve up that is on brand for you. But each and every newsletter is going to be different. If you have an audience of 20,000 folks, it's going to be 20,000 different versions, different subject lines, different subject lines, different order of the content, different articles or podcasts served up. Now, of course, you do have manual control. So you could say, everyone needs to get this latest podcast,

this one that Erica just did, everyone should get that podcast, but the rest of it could be variable, for example. There you go. Now, I notice you get insights as well. So you're going to get a back end with reporting, different information on the articles and how much insights it got on it. Is that correct? You got it. So you'll get all of the reporting that you'd expect to be standard in an email provider, like opens and clicks, top articles, top sources, but then you'll also get concept reports so you'll see people are most interested in by topic and then you'll be able to see who those people are that are interested in various topics and furthermore that Salesforce and HubSpot integrations and

we also have an open API so you could customize any integration you want but we can send that topical data automatically back into HubSpot in Salesforce for you to take further action off of those insights. There you go. Now I notice it has some integrations with LinkedIn. How does that work? Yeah, the LinkedIn integration is a source integration. So because of LinkedIn's API, they require you to authenticate for us to grab content off of your company page. So that one is a content integration, whereas a lot of the other ones are contact integrations. So it pulls from my company page and can use that to integrate it into the sources.

It'd be really cool if you could use it on LinkedIn's messaging where you can make custom AI messages, but they're probably not going to do that because they have some power control issues. They do have a more restrictive API than some of the other social media platforms we source from. Definitely. I've seen some of that go on. What have we talked about that you guys offer in your services that we should definitely tease out to people?

So I don't think we've quite touched on the time savings. Oftentimes the newsletter production process can be sort of tedious and kind of a slog. And at the same time though, it's so very valuable, right? You need to stay in front of your audience on a regular basis in between their purchase periods or just keeping your voice and keeping front and center in their inbox. So what we do is not only do we provide a hyper-personalized and engaging newsletter experience, but we also help the newsletter producer save a ton of time on a task that tends to be kind of like tedious and unfun.

Yeah, the tedium is what gets you. I mean, that's the beautiful part about automation and everything that goes into it is making it quick, easy, fast, and efficient because without it, you're just, it's not efficient, basically, folks. Right, right, right. There you go. So there's a lot that's gone into it. You guys have been building it for seven years.

What do you guys think is the most significant challenge that you guys had in growing your startup? Oh, by far, getting people on board with leveraging AI. It really is a different way to send email. It looks and feels a lot different than a lot of the typical email centers that people might be familiar with. And so just embracing kind of a different process and the fact that it won't be one size fits all and that's okay. And that's actually better.

And getting people to relinquish even just a touch of control was very challenging. Now in the past, you know, year and four or five months since chat GPT came on the scene, it's been a slightly more easy concept or easier concept for people to grasp. But it was a little tricky in those early days leading with where the AI email platform. Definitely. Definitely. And AI is just getting crazier. Can you teach us

any features that are coming up? Yeah. So we not too long ago put out our chat GPT integration so that in addition to taking in the content from the various publishers that you would plug in in your own content feeds, we also allow

you to rewrite article descriptions or write newsletter introductions or conclusions or what have you, leveraging iChat, GPT. There you go. There you go. And it looks like you have some solutions that are built for some different markets like associations, marketing, medium publishing, real estate, and small to medium-sized businesses. So how do those work? Yeah, I'd say that those are our primary markets, but everyone needs a newsletter. So we have folks in all different verticals, but yes, we work with a lot of publishers and trade associations. In the association space, it's very much a goal of our clients to kind of be at the forefront of the content space that they're in. So making sure

that they are like the leading voice of important information and delivering that information to their members' inboxes. So that was very much a natural fit for us. And then a lot of the associations that we work with are very large and they have almost like publishing arms within the association. So working with publishers was a natural progression for

us and a lot of publishers these days you know want a way to personalize their trove of content because they put out so very much so it's a great way it's a great way to do that for them and then a lot of marketing agencies will use us to manage newsletters for multiple different clients so they'll have like their one big Rasa account and then they'll have a bunch of Rasa newsletters for multiple different clients. So they'll have like their one big Rasa account, and then they'll have a bunch of Rasa newsletters under that account. Each of those newsletters can have their own subscriber integration. So one could be integrated to MailChimp. One could be integrated to HubSpot.

They'll have their own content pools, templates, et cetera. And then, you know, we've seen, but we've seen adoption across lots and lots of different verticals. There you go. Sounds like there's a lot of different ways to do it. It's going to be a really interesting world with AI and customization and all the different things you can do with it.

Anything we haven't missed and talked about that we should tell people about your guys' service? I would say that if you're someone who, you know that staying in touch with your audience in a frequent way is so very important, which is most people, but you put off the newsletter because you don't see the immediate value in it. I'd say get started soon because you're going to need to maintain your relevant presence in your subscribers' inboxes

because if you're not doing that, it's going to be easy to fade away, especially in this fast-changing world that we're all a part of. Yeah, if you're not up on AI, your competitors probably are. Right. So they're going to beat you to the punch and develop better systems. But I can see how a personalized email works good because I may send out like a – we have a variety of people on the show from novelists to billionaires to to people write books on politics and things so we have a whole plethora of stuff and of course people have plenty to binge on the Chris Vaughn show and but you know something someone

might get a you know an email of like Chris interviewed a novelist yesterday they're like I'm not in novels man I'm my way subscribing to Chris's list anyway I'm not in novels but there's so much stuff where we have you know three to four shows a day on a weekday we have so much stuff that you can choose from and binge from i mean we have we have such a bingeable library we're like the netflix of podcasting right and we could take in your whole library we could ingest it and kind of look at it as new every time and try to match people with the content based on what we know about them. And we have so much content. It's just so insane that we can't recycle it as much as we'd like to.

And we're working on that. But, yeah, there's plenty of stuff that people probably maybe didn't see or they're new to the list and they haven't seen other stuff. But, yeah, having that personality for our personal delivery service. So give people the final pitch out. Tell people how they can onboard with you guys, reach out to you, find out more about the service, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, absolutely. So we have two kind of ways that you can get started with us.

We have more of like a self-service DIY path, and you could go onto our website, get started today, create your Rasa account, and just go for it. And then if it's more of like an enterprise play, if you're a larger organization and you want to kind of understand the deeper nuts and bolts and functionality, then book a demo with us and we'll get you started on that sales process. We do have on the pricing page on the website, we have the breakdown of features and functionality. It's also the number of contacts you have in your database is strongly going to influence your price,

in addition to the number of newsletter campaigns that you want to put out. So two paths you can go down. Get started at Rasa.io today. Feel free to also connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm Erica Salmrench, and we'd love to talk more. There you go. Thank you very much, Erica, for coming on the show'd love to talk more. There you go. Thank you very much, Erica, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me.

Thank you. And thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschristmas, linkedin.com, 4chesschristmas, chrisfast1 on the TikTok, and all those crazy places. We're on the Internet. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.