A big part of marketing and sales is relationship building with your customers. Personalizing communications with your base allows you to create this connection and stand out from the competition. However, to do personalized marketing at scale, you need to rely on some tech solutions.
In last week’s episode of Optily Radio, we focused on personalization and AI in marketing as a whole. Erica Salm Rench took us through the automation solutions and tech stack that has worked for her and her teams in the past. We chatted about SEO, content marketing, and email marketing as part of an overall organic strategy.
Check out the clip below where Erica talks about how you can customize content feeds in emails. Or if you have the time, listen to the full episode. Otherwise, continue reading below where we summarize the main points from the show:
- Making SEO easier with automation tools
- AI for content creation and optimization
- Creating personalized email newsletters at scale
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Who is Erica?
After working in enrollment management where she focused on strategic recruitment and marketing, Erica Salm Rench managed a team of online marketers at the largest digital marketing company in the Gulf South. There, she supported the web development, SEO, online advertising, and content marketing teams in executing strategies that elevated organizations to stand out and be seen amongst the chaos of the online marketplace.
Now, Erica is the COO of rasa.io, the only AI-driven smart newsletter platform designed so organizations of any size can personalize content for every subscriber on their email list. She gets to blend her love of digital marketing technology, partnership development, and customer service in order to support the incredible community of rasa.io clients.
Making SEO easier with tech
It’s no secret that SEO is harder now than it was ten years ago. There are simply more sites competing for the first page of the SERPs. Since age is a factor as well, newer companies automatically start with a disadvantage.
Erica brought up some of the tools that she and her team use to make SEO much easier. Semrush is a leader in the space. It’s great for keyword research, audits, and keeping an eye on the competition. Erica is a big fan of using tech to make marketing less tedious and this one can definitely make SEO a whole lot easier to manage.
We’re big fans of Semrush here at Optily too!
Content creation with tech
Another solution for actually optimizing on-site content that Erica mentioned is MarketMuse. The way she explained it made me think of Grammarly, but for SEO. With this software, you can have it scan your blog or website copy. It then will flag places you can improve your copy to optimize it for your chosen keyword. It’s not keyword stuffing, however. It tries to suggest semantically related terms to your keyword that will tell Google that you know what you’re talking about with your article or text.
Another great resource Erica suggests using is the Marketing AI Institute. They provide overviews of all sorts of marketing automation tech and plot it on a marketer-to-machine scale. This scale lets you easily see what the level of automation is before you start using technology. While some marketers and business owners might be more than happy to hand over the keys to the robots in full to automate as much as possible, others may want to retain more manual control.
Personalized email marketing at scale
Personalization is a big topic that we’ve chatted about frequently on the show. With new marketing tools, it’s becoming much easier to automate personalization, rather than having a customer service agent manually typing out emails.
The way a technology like rasa.io does this personalization at scale is by automating the newsletter generation process. As a business you first need to invest in a solid CRM solution in order to have the cleanest data about your customers. This customer data will then feed into your email marketing solution and you’ll be able to segment audiences based on purchase history.
Next, you select the content that you want the solution to pull from. Keeping in mind that not all the content in your newsletters needs to be content you product can open up a world of possibilities. As long as you attribute the source and it’s publicly available through an RSS feed, there’s no reason you can’t use it in your newsletter.
Then rasa.io’s AI tools kick in based on the setup you’ve done in your templates. By using a content recommendation algorithm, much like Facebook or Twitter, it pulls content from across the web through natural language processing that is relevant to your selected topics. It then brings together your internal content and external content to create a unique email for each user based on their profile.
