SPRING 2022

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THE DISTRIBUTOR’S LINK
JOE DYSART AI PERSONALIZED NEWSLETTERS: HOW FASTENER DISTRIBUTORS CAN DEEPEN CUSTOMER LOYALTY from page 14
¤ Other business marketing content the reader
engages with on your business’ Web site, social media
properties and other digital properties
Ultimately, the number of personal data points a
fastener distributor can study and use as triggers to shape
content on a case-by-case basis is virtually unlimited.
Essentially: If you can imagine a personal data point
you want to track -- and a way to track it -- you can add that
tracking to your newsletter’s AI personalization mix.
Moreover, while AI’s ability to automatically track personal
data points is legendary, fastener distributors sending
personalized newsletters have
also found you can capture
even more data the oldfashioned
way -- using surveys,
online forms and/or Q&A’s
between a company chatbot
and your customer.
Jeeng, for example,
found in its study that 76% of
customers are willing to fillout
a short company survey
-- as long as they’re promised
more personalized marketing
content from the company.
The upshot: At the end of
the day, the number of data
points your business can
track and analyze is really
only limited by what you’re
willing to pay each customer
for that data. The question
becomes: If my customer will
part with a bit of data for
free, can I snare an additional
motherlode of personal data points if I promise a $10,
$20 or $50 gift card in exchange -- or some other
compensation.
Once you begin shopping for AI-powered personalized
newsletter software, fastener distributors will find that
many of the solutions are designed to integrate with
commonly used software services like Salesforce,
Mailchimp and Hubspot.
And many other solutions can be integrated with
less commonly used software packages using automated
integration solutions from providers like Zapier (www.zapier.
com), Automate.io (www.automate.io) and Microsoft Power
EACH CUSTOMER OFFERS A MOTHERLODE OF DATA YOU
CAN TRACK TO HELP PERSONALIZE YOUR FASTENER
DISTRIBUTOR NEWSLETTER
SOMETIMES OVERLOOKED, THE TRADITIONAL SURVEY --
WITH A REWARD FOR COMPLETION -- IS ONE OF THE MOST
EFFECTIVE WAYS TO BUILD AN IN-DEPTH, PERSONALIZED
DATA FILE ON EACH CUSTOMER
Automate (www.powerautomate.microsoft.com/en-us).
A good industry standard email solution to check-out
to use as a benchmark against competitors is Ras.io
(www.rasa.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 continually provides
content that more closely matches those interests with
each subsequent newsletter from you.
For content, the software grabs news and info for your
newsletter from the Web, repackages it and then combines
it with any original content you
might also like to include.
Ras.io also enables
fastener distributors to design
any newsletter it manages for
you with your company colors,
fonts, layout and similar
design features.
Of course, Ras.io also
realizes you may want to
send at least some of the
same content to every reader
you’re marketing to with your
personalized newsletter. So it
enables you to reserve space
for say three-out-of-ten articles
in your newsletter that are
applicable to every reader in a
general way.
Here’s a representative
sampling of Ras.io’s competitors
that also offer personalized
newsletter services fastener
distributors can use:
¤ MarketTraq Email (www.markettraq.com/features).
This newsletter personalization service is worth a click
simply because it offers one of the most detailed, blowby-blow
rundowns on how they’ll personalize a newsletter
for you.
Like others competitors, MarketTraq studies readers’
interaction with your newsletter content and makes
adjustments based on the content those readers most favor.
Its service is based on what it calls M-Blocks --
technology that changes any image, article copy, headline
or formatting for your newsletter on a subscriber-bysubscriber
basis.
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