How to Apply AI to Email at Scale The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast

Erica Salm Rench, Chief Operating Officer, Rasa.io (New Orleans, LA)
 
Erica Salm Rench is Chief Operating Officer at Rasa.io, a company that supports marketers, business owners, and large associations by applying AI to generate automated, smart, personalized email newsletters. Rasa’s mission? T0 better inform the world through relevant content.
Clients import their subscribers. Rasa plugs in subscribers’ super-relevant content – their own blogs, their own LinkedIn company page, their Facebook page, their Twitter profile – plus relevant external sources. From this rich pool of content, Rasa automatically selects which stories go to which subscribers . . . and refines that selection process as the system learns more about the individual subscribers.
Articles are first selected from sources a client trusts for content, then filtered by trusted keyword and topic. Through an editorial review window, the client can scan the engine-selected articles and deselect those that s/he does not want the AI to “potentially select for one of (its) subscribers.” Using much of publishers’ original metadata/article descriptions eliminates the need to rewrite introductory material or reformat content, saving time and a lot of headaches.
From the Rasa dashboard, a client can see in aggregate its audiences’ interests . . . across any period of time and range of articles and then drill down to see the click-responses of an individual. Rasa provides a way for clients to pull those insights into their own corporate systems.
A couple of years ago, Rasa launched a self-service model that allows companies to try the platform and “DIY the newsletter themselves.” In addition to large and small companies, Rasa works with largescale association organizations that often rely on events as important revenue streams. These need focused personalized email communications to optimize member engagement.
Erica can be reached on her company’s website at https://rasa.io/ or by sending an email to hello@rasa.io or erica@rasa.io
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Erica Salm Rench, Chief Operating Officer at Rasa.io based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Welcome to the podcast, Erica.
ERICA: Thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be here.
ROB: It’s excellent to have you here. Why don’t you give us a glimpse into the superpowers of Rasa.io? What do you all do? 
ERICA: Sure thing. At Rasa.io, we do AI for smart email newsletter generation. In the same way that, for better or worse, your social media feeds know what content to recommend to you based on your prior engagement, we recommend relevant stories to you in your emails.
We work with organizations large and small – anyone who needs a newsletter, which is pretty much anyone. They import their subscribers, start to plug in content sources that are super relevant to your subscribers – their own blogs, their own LinkedIn company page, their Facebook page, their Twitter profile. They plug all those things in along with some relevant external sources – maybe Harvard Business Review produces great business content that’s relevant to their space. That content starts flowing in, forms a rich content pool, and then from there we automatically choose which stories go to which subscribers and we get smarter as we learn more about those subscribers.
It's not only personalized, really engaging content, a great way to engage with the organization’s brand, but it’s also automated, so it saves people a ton of time on the newsletter process. Newsletters can be a really unsexy task, so it makes that unsexy task a lot faster. [laughs]
ROB: I’m sure this exists on an entire spectrum. A lot of AI type work reminds me of self-driving cars and that sort of thing. There’s sort of a ramp-up of trust. First of all, getting somewhere is a lot of work. Writing a newsletter is a lot of