Podcast appearances and mentions of erica salm rench

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

With the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, artificial intelligence broke into the mainstream and became a more practical rather than theoretical topic than ever before. AI has the potential to lighten the existing load and to enable new activities for learning businesses, particularly in the realms of marketing and personalization. Erica Salm Rench is the chief operating officer at rasa.io, which uses AI to send personalized newsletters to every recipient on an e-mail list. Before joining rasa, Erica worked in digital media and advertising at an agency, leading a team of content marketers, SEO specialists, Web developers, and online advertisers. She also worked at Tulane University in undergraduate admissions. Erica is passionate about designing effective marketing strategies, and she's an avid student of AI. In episode 393 of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Celisa Steele talks with Erica about the state of artificial intelligence, what's on the horizon for AI, e-mail marketing, personalization, the importance of data, and the interaction and interplay of humans and AI to get work done well. Show notes and a downloadable transcript are available at https://www.leadinglearning.com/episode393.

About Erica Salm Rench and Rasa.io: After working in enrollment management where she focused on recruitment strategy and marketing, Erica 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 which elevated organizations to stand out and be seen amongst the chaos of the online marketplace. Now, as the COO at rasa.io, she gets to blend her love of digital marketing technology and email in order to support the incredible community of rasa.io customers. We're a results-driven, goal-oriented company comprised of a collaborative, creative, and passionate team. We value employee growth, work-life balance, and each other — we share appreciation between team members regularly and enthusiastically. The Core Purpose of an organization describes its “why” – the reason it exists. At a fundamental level, a Core Purpose must evoke a deeply and emotionally meaningful response across a broad swath of people far removed from the company. Demand diversity in thought We demand all of our team members seek out ideas beyond their own. Diverse ideas often come from diverse people and sources. We are creative and seek to turn over stones and solicit ideas from people who may not always be first to share them. Simpler is better Find the simplest possible way to solve each problem. Unnecessary steps, features, or processes must be cut with extreme discipline. Tell it like it is No matter what, say what you mean and mean what you say. Do this while practicing empathetic listening. Learn by doing We are not afraid to start things with little information or insight, experiment, fail, iterate and try again. We strive to find the best way to solve hard problems with a bias towards action. We work hard to share our learning along the way so that we can get better as individuals and as a team. Measure it If you can't measure it, you can't improve it. Measure everything that you are shooting for and tell it like it is along the way. Own it As a team and as individuals, we own our individual outcomes end to end. When we sign up for something, we get it done. As a team, there is no “they,” there is only “us” and “we,” and we all own our success together. We vigorously debate our goals once we set them; even if we don't all agree, we all own them together. Celebrate success Celebrating success means celebrating success and the steps that lead to the success. We embrace failures along the way and the need to start from a position of inexperience.

Erica Salm Rench is our guest on the 359th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. Erica is the COO of Rasa.io, an AI tool used to personalize and streamline email newsletters. She shares insights about the world of AI and how although there's no slowing it down, how copywriters can use AI to optimize their systems and processes in their own businesses and use it as a competitive edge in a crowded marketplace. Here's what you'll find: What exactly is Rasa.io, and how does it work? Why email is still powerful and why you need an email newsletter.  The importance of client feedback and how AI can streamline your process. How to incorporate the use of AI in your business model and packages.  The similarities between a sales conversation and offering value.  Do your discovery questions need a facelift? How to intertwine human relationships with the use of AI.  Need a reason to create a bank of content? Here's why.  How to repurpose your content and save yourself time and energy.  How to dig beneath the surface and get customer feedback that matters. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: The Accelerator waitlist The Copywriter Think Tank Kira's website Rob's website Rasa.io The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Free month of Brain.FM AI for Creative Entrepreneurs Podcast Full Transcript:    

We admit it! We're intimidated by all the digital possibilities presented by AI and automation, especially when it comes to composing the perfect newsletter. So Elisa and Andrew called in an expert for Episode 80 of Association Transformation. Erica Salm Rench, COO of rasa.io helps us navigate content curation best practices, personalization strategies, and ensuring reliable sources. This episode will bring you up to speed on the new normal for open rates, ways to save time building newsletters, and the realities of data decay. Now we get it!  Support the show

Erica Salm Rench, COO at rasa.io, discusses the benefits of artificial intelligence in marketing tools and technology. When integrating AI into your marketing efforts, it's about finding the balance between human input, marketing automation, and AI. While there's no substitute for well-written human content, it makes sense to automate away the tasks we can afford to. Today, Erica talks about how to blend humans, artificial intelligence, and marketing automation together. Show NotesConnect With: Erica Salm Rench: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Erica Salm Rench, COO at rasa.io, discusses the benefits of artificial intelligence in marketing tools and technology. When integrating AI into your marketing efforts, it's about finding the balance between human input, marketing automation, and AI. While there's no substitute for well-written human content, it makes sense to automate away the tasks we can afford to. Today, Erica talks about how to blend humans, artificial intelligence, and marketing automation together. Show NotesConnect With: Erica Salm Rench: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Erica Salm Rench, COO at rasa.io, discusses the benefits of artificial intelligence in marketing tools and technology. Grammarly is just one of the many everyday tools helping writers produce better content. While we've gotten to the point where we trust machines for short form content, the future could see machines producing long form content as well. Today, Erica talks about AI-led content creation. Show NotesConnect With: Erica Salm Rench: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Erica Salm Rench, COO at rasa.io, discusses the benefits of artificial intelligence in marketing tools and technology. Grammarly is just one of the many everyday tools helping writers produce better content. While we've gotten to the point where we trust machines for short form content, the future could see machines producing long form content as well. Today, Erica talks about AI-led content creation. Show NotesConnect With: Erica Salm Rench: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Erica Salm Rench, COO at rasa.io, discusses the benefits of artificial intelligence in marketing tools and technology. The automation tools available to marketers now far outnumber the ones that were available just five years ago. In fact, marketers have come to depend on AI to make the marketing process more efficient, using tools for content generation, meeting scheduling, etc. Today, Erica talks about artificial intelligence tool accessibility for marketers. Show NotesConnect With: Erica Salm Rench: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Erica Salm Rench, COO at rasa.io, discusses the benefits of artificial intelligence in marketing tools and technology. The automation tools available to marketers now far outnumber the ones that were available just five years ago. In fact, marketers have come to depend on AI to make the marketing process more efficient, using tools for content generation, meeting scheduling, etc. Today, Erica talks about artificial intelligence tool accessibility for marketers. Show NotesConnect With: Erica Salm Rench: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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, as the COO of rasa.io, she gets to blend her love of digital marketing technology, partnership development, and customer support in order to support the incredible community of clients. 00:00 - 00:14 “If you look at how you spend your time over the course of a week, there are probably hours and hours of time spent where you could either automate away or use a smart AI technology…” 00:15 - 00:33 Welcome to Peppershock Media's Marketing Expedition Podcast 00:34 – 01:26 Erica's Bio 01:27 - 06:24 Marketing Essentials Moment: Accelerating W-O-M Advertising 06:25 - 09:23 Welcome to the show, Erica! 09:24 - 12:26 A tool to create an engaging email experience 12:27 - 14:42 How rasa.io marketing tools started 14:43 - 17:18 AI technologies in our everyday living 17:19 - 20:41 Work-Life integration 20:42 - 21:26 Onboard more social media clients and charge a higher retainer with a Cloud Campaign 21:27 - 26:48 Keeping the company culture alive 26:49 - 28:23 Resources on staying on top of the latest marketing and technology trends 28:24 - 33:08 AI Marketing Tools forecast 33:09 - 34:33 Erica drops some words of advice 34:34 - 37:32 Visit https://rasa.io/rasa.io 37:33 - 38:12 Thank you so much, Erica! Enjoy your Marketing journey! 38:13 – 38:59 Join The Marketing Expedition Community today! #emailmarketing #digitalmarketing #marketing #socialmediamarketing #seo #onlinemarketing #socialmedia #contentmarketing #business #email #marketingdigital #emailmarketingtips #marketingstrategy #marketingtips #branding #ecommerce #smallbusiness

In this episode, we talk with Erica Salm Rench, who is the Chief Operating Officer of RASA.IO. RASA.IO is a platform that uses AI to customize and personalize emails for clients to use in their email list. Erica also 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 which elevated organizations to stand out and be seen amongst the chaos of the online marketplace.       [00:01 - 06:19] Opening Segment Erica shares how she started her career in email marketing Working with clients to create a customizable email that tailors to their specific needs   [06:20 - 12:17] Utilizing AI to Enhance Customer Experience Personalized emails let firms engage more personally with consumers Using personalized emails to build relationships with customers can help a business succeed Email is still an effective way to reach out to customers Maintain consistency on social media platforms    [12:18 - 18:07] Dominating the Tech Market Erica share how her industry peers inspired her to thrive Inspiring a shift in market towards acceptance of women Start coding when you are young to get a jump on the market.   [18:08 - 33:06] Raising Kids and Leading a Company Developing a network of support with working mothers Finding the right flow by planning out the things you need to do Learning from the failures and achieving success   [33:07 - 40:05] Closing Segment Using SEO to optimize keywords to help improve communication Repurposing contents to reach more consumers Using AI to create personalized newsletters and emails to promote contents Special Offers for Listeners!  14 day free trial to use RASA.IO     Reach Erica through LinkedIn, and tap into your limitless social media potential!         If you liked my show, please LEAVE A 5-STAR REVIEW, like, share, and subscribe!     WANT TO LEARN MORE?   Connect with me through Emi Kirschner Business Coach, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn   Check us out on Apple Podcasts.   Thanks for tuning in!       Tweetable Quote   “I think we all get to the end of the day as working moms and think, Oh, there's this. I could have done better and this, I could have done better. And we beat ourselves up. And that's so hard. We beat ourselves up and we shouldn't beat each other up. We should support each other.” -  Erica Salm Rench      

Creating good content takes time, effort, and investment. But targeting the right content for the right target buyer and prospect is even harder. Because how do you know which prospect might care for which piece of content? Also, even if they might care about a specific topic today, they might move on from that topic in the future. And this makes engagement marketing super hard. But artificial intelligence is changing that in helping curate content and distributing to the appropriate channels as per the preferences of your readers.In today's episode, our guest, Erica Salm Rench, shares her insights on how AI can be used to improve customer engagement. She also discusses the challenges around email marketing and how AI can reduce the time in compiling the newsletters in an automated fashion to reduce the costs of marketing. She also shares her insights into the technical underpinnings of the AI technology of her platform and the emerging AI trends and technologies that will change how we interact with our customers.For more information on growth strategies for SMBs using ERP and digital transformation, visit our community at wbs.rocks or elevatiq.com. To ensure that you never miss an episode of the WBS podcast, subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform.

After working in enrollment management where she focused on strategic recruitment and marketing, Erica 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 which elevated organizations to stand out and be seen amongst the chaos of the online marketplace. Now, as the COO of rasa.io, she gets to blend her love of digital marketing technology, partnership development, and customer support in order to support the incredible community of rasa.io clients.

Email marketing is a powerful tool for eCommerce, but are all your newsletter blasts effective if they're the same for each person? Erica Salm Rench discusses the power of customizing emails, SEO tactics, and organic growth strategies.Erica Salm Rench, 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.The highlights from this episode include:Tools and tactics to stand out in the competitive world of SEOAI and automation for content creationCustomized email marketing with a variety of contentResources:SemrushMarketMuseMarketing AI Institute

** Are you a Martech Enthusiast? Subscribe to our 2-weekly newsletter at clubmartech.com ** When Artificial Intelligence (AI) comes up, a lot of marketers raise their eyebrows and tend to think that's a pretty intangible technology and, probably not something for their daily practice. But in fact, AI can be used daily and very easily. How? Listen to this episode! In this episode, Elias has a chat with Erica Salm Rench, the COO of Rasa.io. Rasa is a very sophisticated email marketing tool. Topics we discuss: SEO and AI How to use AI to personalize email marketing AI, done in an approachable way LinkedIn Erica Salm Rench: https://www.linkedin.com/in/esalm/  Website Rasa: https://rasa.io/  The Marketing Technology Podcast is brought to you by Marketing Guys, the #1 Martech agency in Europe. If you want to be on this podcast or would like to know more about Marketing Technology, visit our website at marketingguys.com or contact Elias Crum at e.crum@marketingguys.nl

Emails aren't DEAD!! I know email marketing is the most resistant thing ever in the business world, but do not fear!! Rasa.io is here to save the day (well time and stress of the day-to-day tasks with newsletters and email marketing).Erica Salm Rench is the COO (Chief Operating Officer) of Rasa.io and shares the importance of curating personalized emails, increasing donor retention, and giving- all through the use of AI Technology (artificial intelligence).Learn More and Sign Up for Rasa HereFollow Erica Salm Rench and follow Rasa.io on all social media platforms

As fundraisers, one of the best tools is the email and the e-newsletter. But why all the bounces? What should you definitely have in your e-newsletter? What is the fine line between “I'm sending the right amount of emails” and “they can't wait to unsubscribe?” Email marketing expert, Erica Salm Rench, will answer these questions to help you skyrocket your open rates.  This episode's Coaches Corner answers the listener's question: "What is the value of working with a consultant rather than having my own employee?" with https://impactability.net/debra-haley/ (Debra Haley) https://impactability.net/nonprofit-coaching/ (Impact Coach )and Nonprofit Consultant at https://soukupstrategicsolutions.com/ (Soukup Strategic Solutions). Have a question about nonprofits? Email your Coaches Corner question to IMPACTcoaches@IMPACTability.net  Want articles and valuable tip sheets delivered right to your inbox? Sign up for the free IMPACTability® Newsletter!! Sign up https://soukupstrategicsolutions86919.activehosted.com/f/37 (here) to receive the monthly IMPACTability™ newsletter for articles and useful downloads on fundraising and nonprofit management from top experts in the field. This podcast comes to you from IMPACTability™ powered by Soukup Strategic Solutions. IMPACTabilit® is an online coaching program that helps nonprofit leaders maximize their impact. With Impact Coaches, nonprofit leaders can achieve career goals and have a greater impact on the world around them. Impact Coaches will help you address real-world challenges that you experience in your own nonprofit. By focusing on your strengths as a leader, Impact Coaches can help you apply your knowledge and skills to have a greater impact. Nonprofit Coaching: https://impactability.net/ (https://impactability.net) (Learn more about IMPACTability® and how to work with a nonprofit coach). Soukup Strategic Solutions, Inc. was founded in 2012 by the company's president, Sheryl Soukup, to provide nonprofit organizations with expertise in fundraising and nonprofit management. The company offers consulting, coaching, and full-service grant writing, marketing, donor database management, strategic planning, and much more. Nonprofit consulting and outsourcing solutions: https://soukupstrategicsolutions.com/services (https://soukupstrategicsolutions.com/services )(Learn more about the services offered by Soukup Strategic Solutions to nonprofit organizations.) Visit our websites at: https://soukupstrategicsolutions.com/ (https://soukupstrategicsolutions.com) https://impactability.net/ (https://impactability.net) Follow us on Social Media: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/impactabilitypodcast (https://www.facebook.com/impactabilitypodcast) @impactabilitypodcast   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/impactability/ (https://www.linkedin.com/company/impactability) Page name: IMPACTabilit® Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/impactability_/ (https://www.instagram.com/impactability) @impactability_ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Impactability_ (https://twitter.com/Impactability) @Impactability_ https://impactability.captivate.fm/episodes (All Episodes) https://impactability.captivate.fm/episode/-distinction-between-nonprofit-and-for-profit (Previous Episode)

In this episode of AI For Business Growth, Dr. Andree Bates is joined by Erica Salm Rench. Erica is an experienced Director of Customer Success, Sales, and Operations with a demonstrated history of working in the digital marketing and recruitment spaces. She is skilled in Management and Leadership, Software as a Service (SaaS), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Business Development, and Social Media. Erica graduated with an MBA from Tulane University's A.B. Freeman School of Business, with a focus on Management and Entrepreneurship.  Today's show is about how to automate and personalise your email newsletters with artificial intelligence. As any content creator knows, creating content for email newsletters can be a very time-consuming process. Many newsletters are one size fits all, or segmented into just a few demographics. However, in the age of artificial intelligence, we now have the technology to personalise each actual newsletter to each individual subscriber. Erica's AI service - Rasa - is the software platform that allows you to do this easily. In this episode you will learn:  Erica talks about her AI service, Rasa, what it was made to do and how different people and businesses use it. How to automate and personalise your email newsletters using Rasa. Rasa uses resources and information from clients to provide them with accurate and relevant newsletters, personalised to each client. How to use Rasa for automating your businesses emails and newsletter. They cover how Rasa makes this task easier and more efficient, as well as some types of businesses it's not recommended for. How AI can help you in automating your emails, increasing the quality while simultaneously decreasing the amount of time spent on each task. Click for more information and for resources mentioned in this episode:  Rasa.io  AI For Business Growth is the podcast from pioneering Artificial Intelligence entrepreneur Dr. Andree Bates created to help organisations understand how the use of AI based technologies can easily save them time and grow their brands and business.  This show blends deep experience in the sector with demystifying AI for all business people from start up entrepreneurs right through to Fortune 500 companies. In this podcast Dr Andree will teach you the tried and true secrets to building a company using AI that anyone can use, at any budget. As the author of many peer-reviewed journals and having addressed over 500 industry conferences across the globe, Dr Andree Bates uses  her obsession with all things AI, futuretech and business to help you to navigate through the, sometimes confusing, but magical world of AI powered tools to grow businesses.  This podcast features many experts who have developed powerful AI powered tools that are the secret behind some time saving and supercharged revenue generating business results. Those who share their stories and expertise show how AI can be applied to sales, marketing, social media, psychology, customer insights and so much more. Key Takeaways: Rasa makes emails and newsletter proceedings much easier by automating the whole process. Resources Erica Salm Rench LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter   Andree Bates LinkedIn | Twitter 

Erica Salm Rench, COO at rasa.io, discusses the benefits of artificial intelligence in marketing tools and technology. When integrating AI into your marketing efforts, it's about finding the balance between human input, marketing automation, and AI. While there's no substitute for well-written human content, it makes sense to automate away the tasks we can afford to. Today, Erica talks about how to blend humans, artificial intelligence, and marketing automation together. Show NotesConnect With: Erica Salm Rench: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // Newsletter // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Erica Salm Rench, COO at rasa.io, discusses the benefits of artificial intelligence in marketing tools and technology. When integrating AI into your marketing efforts, it's about finding the balance between human input, marketing automation, and AI. While there's no substitute for well-written human content, it makes sense to automate away the tasks we can afford to. Today, Erica talks about how to blend humans, artificial intelligence, and marketing automation together. Show NotesConnect With: Erica Salm Rench: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // Newsletter // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Erica Salm Rench, COO at rasa.io, discusses the benefits of artificial intelligence in marketing tools and technology. Grammarly is just one of the many everyday tools helping writers produce better content. While we've gotten to the point where we trust machines for short form content, the future could see machines producing long form content as well. Today, Erica talks about AI-led content creation. Show NotesConnect With: Erica Salm Rench: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // Newsletter // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Erica Salm Rench, COO at rasa.io, discusses the benefits of artificial intelligence in marketing tools and technology. Grammarly is just one of the many everyday tools helping writers produce better content. While we've gotten to the point where we trust machines for short form content, the future could see machines producing long form content as well. Today, Erica talks about AI-led content creation. Show NotesConnect With: Erica Salm Rench: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // Newsletter // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Erica Salm Rench, COO at rasa.io, discusses the benefits of artificial intelligence in marketing tools and technology. The automation tools available to marketers now far outnumber the ones that were available just five years ago. In fact, marketers have come to depend on AI to make the marketing process more efficient, using tools for content generation, meeting scheduling, etc. Today, Erica talks about artificial intelligence tool accessibility for marketers. Show NotesConnect With: Erica Salm Rench: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // Newsletter // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Erica Salm Rench, COO at rasa.io, discusses the benefits of artificial intelligence in marketing tools and technology. The automation tools available to marketers now far outnumber the ones that were available just five years ago. In fact, marketers have come to depend on AI to make the marketing process more efficient, using tools for content generation, meeting scheduling, etc. Today, Erica talks about artificial intelligence tool accessibility for marketers. Show NotesConnect With: Erica Salm Rench: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // Newsletter // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode of Startup Hustle, Matt DeCoursey and Erica Salm Rench, Chief Operating Officer of Rasa.io talk about company newsletters and the importance of personalization.   Find Startup Hustle Everywhere: https://linktr.ee/startuphustle   This episode is sponsored by Gusto: https://gusto.com/startuphustle Get three months free when you run your first payroll.   Learn more about Rasa.io: https://rasa.io   Learn more about Full Scale: https://fullscale.io/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 work, to the point where people don't want to do it. You might not walk somewhere that you drive, but you might not trust the self-driving car to get you all the way there. What is this on-ramp for a marketer or maybe a business owner to grow with trust in this system that's going to send I-don't-know-what to my customers? What's it going to say to them? How do you build trust, and what's that ramp look like? ERICA: That is such a great question, and we get it a lot. AI is one of those things that you get out of it what you put into it. It's the same with newsletters. It's the same with a chatbot. The chatbot is only going to be as good as the training that's put into it, and it's the same with newsletters. Essentially, the first level of trusting that the newsletter is going to be great is the fact that you get to put in your own sources. The AI is not going to go out and do a Google search query to find articles. It's going to first draw from sources that you've said, “These sources produce content trusted to this space.” So that's one thing. Furthermore, you can take each of those sources and filter them down by trusted keyword and topic. To use the HBR example again, you might say, “I really like Harvard Business Review as a source, but only if HBR hits on the topic of marketing,” for example. From there, we're pulling in the most relevant articles from your relevant sources. After that point, you also can include an editorial review window where you can just scan the articles that have come in from the engine and deselect anything that you don't want the AI to potentially select for one of your subscribers. So, there are lots of levels of control. The AI is selecting stories, but only from the list of stories that you've said, “These are okay for my subscribers.” ROB: I see. At times am I picking the articles? Or have I done that just by picking the keywords and everything else? Can I mess with the newsletter before I send it just to make sure I like the articles that are in there? ERICA: Absolutely, and most people do. Maybe you have 50 articles coming in from your preapproved sources; you might deselect a few of those that aren't perfectly on brand. Or some people do reverse-engineer it and say, “These are 50 great articles, but I'm going to choose the 5 that I want everyone to get.” So, you can override the AI in that way. We don't recommend it, but you certainly can use the system to your benefit because the curation aspect of our system is also really powerful. ROB: Got it. Talk to me about the copy a little bit. What goes into the newsletter to describe the articles? If I'm fearing the Terminator and the machines taking over the world –  ERICA: [laughs] Killer robots, right? ROB: Yeah, I'm afraid of the article summaries too, and the headlines. How does that part get decided? What's going to show up in the newsletter, what's going to get clipped, what's going to be linked out afterwards, that sort of thing? ERICA: That's another great question. We look to the publisher. We're going to take in the publisher's metadata or their published description of the article. In a lot of cases, that is a rich description that the blog publisher writes themselves, or sometimes by default it might be the first couple sentences of that blog. It's going to be the publisher's title that they assign, and it's going to be the publisher's primary image that comes along with that blog. We're going to pull in all of that great data, and, obviously, the publisher is going to want their article to look great, so we're pulling from data that is really carefully thought of. And you can make tweaks to that if you want. You can impact the description of the article and have it be your own commentary on the article if you want, but you certainly don't have to. So, it eliminates a lot of the newsletter production time that goes into rewriting article descriptions and resizing images and redoing a lot of the data that already can be done for you. ROB: Not that we want to play around with the product all day, but I kind of do – when we get into the user, the recipient, clicking on the article, do we know what they clicked on? Do we even get a sense of how much they read it? Are we launching the article in a way where we can track what they do with it? ERICA: To a certain extent you can do that within the dashboard, and then we also have an open API and several integrations that allow you to draw those insights into your own systems. What we're doing with each article when it comes into the system is using natural language processing to “read” it and conceptualize it and say, “Okay, this Harvard Business Review article is about marketing and SEO and brand management.” So then when Erica or Rob engages with that article, we know that Erica and Rob are interested in those topics. From there, in the Rasa dashboard, you can see on the aggregate what your audience is interested in across many, many, many different articles, across whatever time period you want. Then if you want those insights on the individuals, you can look up the individual and see what they're clicking on. But if you want to say bring those insights into your own CRM, you could fire off a campaign based on everyone who's interested in marketing. ROB: Got it. Let's get into the origin story a little bit. How did you come to be involved in Rasa, and where did the platform come from? ERICA: There's definitely a story around that. When I was in business school about 10 years ago – I can't believe it's been that long – Amith Nagarajan, who is the Chairman of Rasa, came to speak to one of my business school classes, but about his former company. So, I actually had engaged with him and talked to him about working for his former company called Aptify, a really popular association management system among many, many huge, largescale associations out there. I still had school to do; I had another job that I had to finish out. So that opportunity didn't quite work out and the timing wasn't great, but then about four or five years later, he was spinning up this exciting Rasa opportunity, and he engaged me and talked to me about the potential of getting involved in email. For me, I was actually working at a digital agency at the time. I worked in a kind of agency that probably a lot of your listeners are working at, where we did everything online – SEO, front- and backend web dev, paid online ads. We did everything online. But the one thing that we didn't touch was email because email is so hard to do in a quality way and at scale. That's why I thought to myself, “Oh, this Rasa.io thing, there's some meat to this, because if you can do email at scale and personalize it without a ton of effort, there aren't many people doing that.” ROB: What role did you come into the business in, and what does the journey up to COO look like? ERICA: I came in in more of a customer success and marketing capacity, and then as we grew, I really focused in on that customer success and helping our enterprise-scale customers succeed. We put in a lot of time in those campaigns. Something that's interesting about AI tools is that, like you mentioned earlier, you really get out of them what you put in. We wanted our early customers to do exceptionally well, and I worked with my team on that. As we grew the business, I evolved eventually into more of a business development role, and then more recently even more of a leadership role, and that's what brought me to COO. ROB: As you're unlocking the COO role, what are you learning about the business and how to make it function well that might've been harder to see from elsewhere in the organization? ERICA: Oh gosh, that's such a great question. In my prior marketing agency role, I worked much closer with the developers. When I first started at Rasa, I didn't work as closely with the developers and the engineers, and now, in this evolution to COO, I'm working again closely with developers and engineers, which has been really great. It's allowed me to connect the dots – when I'm talking to a prospect or when I'm supporting one of my team members talking to a prospect who's interested in the tool, there's more of now, in my head, a direct connection with “Oh, let's go talk to these folks who can directly impact the development of the product.” Being able to more easily connect those dots for me has been great. And then of course all the financial stuff. It's what I went to school for, so now I'm doing the nitty-gritty of the numbers. [laughs] ROB: Sure. To pull on a little bit of a thread, since you are a product company, a lot of our guests are certainly on the services side; they talk about the pride of bootstrapping. That's mostly the option you have as a services company. It's not like a lot of agencies are – there's some interesting stuff going on in funding and acquisitions, but mostly not the case. How are you and Rasa.io thinking about funding growth in the business? Do you have investors? Will you have more investors? How does that look? ERICA: We are privately funded. We had the resources we needed to get off the ground, and now an exciting engine for growth is a self-service model that we launched a couple of years back which allows folks to come in, try the platform, DIY the newsletter themselves. So that's another revenue stream for us, and then we also have the largescale association organizations that we work. The revenue from those has really fueled our growth as well. ROB: That's such an interesting market, those associations. I'm sure they've all needed email; now they just might not have as many events to talk about as they used to. ERICA: Yeah. If you're familiar at all with the space, you know that the events for associations are really important revenue streams, so they've had to look to outside tools, to digital tools like email, like personalized Rasa.io emails, to make sure that member engagement is still optimized. ROB: What are you seeing from that vantage point? I know I certainly greatly valued our local marketing association, some of those meetings, some of those speakers, some of those conferences. They seem to be coming back slower than almost anything else out there. What are you seeing from your vantage point in when these associations are firing up? How many of them are doing events, how many of them are not doing events? What's the trendline looking like? ERICA: That's a great question. The majority of the organizations that we work with who did virtual events in 2020 are now either doing hybrid or entirely in-person events for late 2021 and now 2022. Obviously, with the ascent of first Delta, then Omicron, there was a lot of uncertainty, so I think that's why people still hung on to the dual virtual and in-person. We did also see that doing both is really hard. It's like running two entirely separate conferences at the same time. I think the evolution is slowly but surely back to in-person events for folks that those were important revenue streams and tools for member engagement. ROB: It's been interesting. I'm in a dues-based membership organization where I think they feel the pressure to keep some sort of event going to drive value for members. They were doing hybrid for a while, and then they stopped. We have a distributed team, so some of my distributed team wasn't getting their content anymore. I asked them why they killed the virtual option and they said that people were not showing up in person at all, and they were just coming in – if it was a two-hour event, they'd pop in for 30 minutes and disappear. So, it's interesting seeing some of the hybrid stuff go further back than I ever thought it would, and go away in some cases where I thought we would continue to have an online option. ERICA: Right. Yeah, they're not just making their revenue from people paying fees to come join a conference, but they're also making a lot of money from people like myself and other vendors who are interested in working with their members. Doing that virtually is much harder than having vendors come in person and share their services and have a booth. So yeah, I think there's a lot of reason to eventually migrate back to in-person for the big associations. ROB: Erica, with some time on the product side, with some time on the agency side, now with an ever-rising level of responsibility, if you were to go back into the agency world, what are some tools and some lessons that you would bring to bear in running a services organization, knowing what you know now? ERICA: Oh gosh, that is such a good question. This is going to sound – this is very biased, but I would include something like a Rasa newsletter in all of our online packages because there just wasn't a tool to do email well back in the day when we were developing our packages for clients. I would also have wanted to be one of the earlier adopters of lots of those integration connectors. We use Zapier at Rasa. There was just a lot we did – we processized things really well at my agency, but I think that if we knew more about Zapier earlier on, or an Integrate leader or all those awesome connecting tools, our processes would have been so much tighter than they even were. So yeah, I think that would've been a major game-changer for us too. ROB: Do you think that's been more a matter of timing, or was some of that also being in more of a product mindset and maybe more of the team is more technical in a software company versus an agency? ERICA: That's a good question. I think it was both. I think it was a matter of timing because we developed a lot of our processes before tools like that were more mainstream. And I think you make a good point; even though we did have a bunch of developers on the team and we did have a bunch of technical analysts and technical SEO folks, we did still have a lot of content and graphic design and creatives who might not have been as comfortable with the integrator tools. But I think once those integrations are set up, then it becomes looped. Then anyone can use them. ROB: Talent is always hard – you've mentioned working with developers in both roles. Competition for developer talent may be among the hardest of jobs to find people for, to keep people for. How do you think about creating an environment and a pattern of success for talent in general and software developers specifically? Because I have been one, and we're a bit of a different breed. ERICA: It's so hard. We try to be really purpose-focused at Rasa. We try to really focus on our greater mission of better informing the world through relevant content. When people are rallied around that, it becomes much more exciting than getting emails out the door. So, we try to align our values to that greater purpose. We try to align a lot of the decisions we make to that greater purpose. It allows everyone a really good framework with which to make big decisions. I think that's definitely helped at Rasa. We have a really good average employee tenure. ROB: Very interesting. Email has been such an interesting channel over time. I think it falls in and out of fashion almost seasonally like the color white. It's really something. Where do you think we are in the ebb and flow of email? What do you think it is that keeps us coming back to email? ERICA: Oh, that's such a good question. Email is not the fancy new car. It is not the Tesla of the digital marketing world by any means. But time and time again, it shows up as one of the top channels for encouraging transactions, for driving people to a website. Landing in people's inboxes is a completely separate conversation, but your chances of landing in someone's primary inbox as an email versus catching a glimpse of their eyes on a social media channel when you're not doing paid is still much greater. For better or worse, people are glued to their inboxes. They wake up with their email, they go to bed with their email. We know that from the data. So even though it's a dinosaur, it still is effective. [laughs] ROB: It's a really helpful dinosaur. ERICA: It's a helpful dinosaur, yes. ROB: You probably think almost equal parts about artificial intelligence and email. Those are two very interesting things to pair together. Where do you see this kind of technology expanding? You've got this Rasa core of applying AI content to email, but where does it start to go next? What's coming up? ERICA: I don't know so much if it's next or just the way I've seen AI influence marketers' lives. Even if it's not the predictive piece of it – that's not as tangible in terms of making people's lives better – the automation that's inherent in AI has made so many marketers' lives better. Of course, there's the Rasa tool, but then in terms of social media tools, back in the day we used Hootsuite to schedule our posts, but now there are so many intelligent social tools out there that recycle posts and also generate the snippet to social media. That's just a little bit smarter than what I was doing five years ago. And then there are tools like MarketMuse that do really great semantic optimization. Back in the day, SEO was a lot of keyword stuffing, and now there are tools out there that help you intelligently write content so that the search engines will identify it as authoritative, trustworthy, you look like the expert. It's making things a little bit smarter. Nothing I've noticed has blown away the marketing world yet, but it's these incremental adjustments that AI has helped with that have made things faster and smarter. ROB: I'm so glad you mentioned MarketMuse. It was on the tip of my brain, and Aki from MarketMuse is a previous guest on the podcast. He came in to talk about it. ERICA: Cool. I just did a webinar with Jeff Coyle over there. ROB: I met Jeff first, actually. Jeff was the person people pointed me to, and then that led us to also having Aki on the podcast. ERICA: Awesome. ROB: I'm glad we closed the loop on that. Number one, I couldn't remember it; number two, if they were your mortal enemy, I didn't want to bring it up, perhaps. [laughs] ERICA: Oh, no, not at all. We have an awesome tech exchange with them. We use their tool for our content and they use our tool for their newsletter. ROB: Definitely have used their tool as well. You mentioned some tools to bubble up and bounce social content. Is there anything that's most effective for you in that mindset? Any tools you'd recommend? ERICA: Yeah. We use MeetEdgar, we use MarketMuse. Oh, I don't know how much AI they're using, but we use SEMrush too, for just looking at general search volume, keyword ranking. For anyone who hasn't really done a lot of SEO or diving into the SEO world, I love SEMrush. It's a great place to start with your keyword strategy. Other tools – oh, for you, I'm actually curious if you've heard of – there's an AI tool that's on the tip of my tongue, but it's for audio. They ingest your audio, they read the file, and then you can type edits. What is it called? It's totally escaping me right now. ROB: I do think I have seen that. I do not recall off the top of my head. We keep an eye on it. We put transcripts of every episode on the page with our episodes, but we actually looked at a bunch of AI tools for it, and when we first started, the quality just wasn't there. ERICA: It wasn't there yet. Got it. ROB: I haven't reevaluated that recently; we have a phenomenal transcriber who hopefully will hear this. I don't talk to her enough, but I hope she'll be encouraged, because she's just remarkable. Hopefully, she'll be encouraged here, but we have a great human who transcribes. ERICA: A great human. That's so good. ROB: And some things are really, really hard for AI – something like Rasa.io, the computer might not transcribe correctly, or something like MarketMuse. And then you get into SEMrush and you just totally blow their minds. They just don't know what to do. But it's all getting better. It's going to get there. ERICA: It's getting better, right. It's nothing like blowing people out of the water yet. I thought of the name of it. It's called Descript. Have you heard of it? ROB: Yeah, that's right. The letter “D,” is that right? ERICA: Yep. So, you have the same experience; there are a lot of tools out there that might not be complete game-changers yet, but just making people's lives a little bit easier right now. And soon I'm sure there will be game-changers. ROB: Absolutely. Erica, when people want to get in touch with you and with Rasa.io, where should they go? Although I think I tipped your hand on the second part. ERICA: You can feel free to reach out to hello@rasa.io. You're welcome to email me directly; I'm just erica@rasa.io. I'm always happy to answer people's questions or direct them to folks that can do a better job than I can. [laughs] ROB: This is great, Erica. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for helping us understand this topic. ERICA: Sure thing. ROB: We've got to keep on figuring it out, and you're helping us. Congratulations on all that you all are doing at Rasa. I wish you the best. ERICA: Thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate the time. ROB: All right, be well. Thank you. Bye. ERICA: Thank you. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.