Why Every Business Needs a Great Newsletter with Amith Nagarajan: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. are brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Imperfect Action. Today, we're pulling a timeless EO Fire episode from the archives, so the giveaway may not be active, and we'll be breaking down why every business needs a great newsletter. To drop these value bombs, I have brought Amit Nagarahan and EO Fire Studios. Amit is the founder of Rasa.io, a company that makes it incredibly easy for any business to send a great newsletter. And today, Fire Nation will talk about how no matter what your brand is, people will forget you.

0:41You have to keep reminding them how curation is getting the best possible content together and that every business needs to be connected on a high frequency basis, or again, you'll be forgotten and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Amith and our sponsors. As business owners, it's part of our job to stay ahead of the curve and with AI stealing the show these days, it's time to study up. But where do you even start? Start with HubSpot. HubSpot's AI power tools, including their content assistant and ChatSpot, are changing the way you create content and communicate and serve your customers.

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1:57Amith, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something interesting about yourself that most people don't know. Hey, Fire Nation, I'm excited to be here. And one thing that most people do not know about me is that I was extremely scared of public speaking up until the point when I joined the high school debate team. That kind of threw me into the deep end really quick. And thereafter, I really found a knack for it and enjoyed public speaking. Most people don't know that. Awesome. What would you say you do public speaking wise now? Are you doing a bunch of different conferences per year or what does that look like?

2:33Yeah. A long time ago, I used to travel a fair bit and get out on stage and give a lot of talks. These days, it's mostly, well, certainly post-COVID, it's been over the wire. But But I very much enjoy getting in front of people and sharing stories about what I've been doing business-wise. And most of the time, it's over video these days. Well, Fire Nation, as I shared in the introduction, we have quite an awesome podcast episode ahead of us. We're going to be talking about why every business needs a great newsletter. And I just want to jump into it. I mean, what specifically is the business problem that you solve with Rasa.io?

3:13Well, you know, newsletters are interesting things because they've been around a long time, but we didn't start there. We started off with the fundamental issue. And the problem companies have today and really any brand, whether it's an individual solopreneur or if it's a larger company, is that people forget you. It's extremely easy in the world we live in today to be forgotten. And there's so much information coming at you from every angle, and particularly these days over different channels, through social, through email, through a variety of methods. People are overwhelmed. It's easy to get lost in that shuffle.

3:49So at the same time, it's critical that businesses do stay in touch with their prospects, with their customers, with their partners, and so forth, and do it on a frequent basis, but not in a salesy way. So fundamentally, that's the thing we're focused on is how do you keep the business top of mind without being viewed as being salesy? I got to be honest, Fire Nation, it is critical that you stay top of mind, but in an organic way, in a way you're adding value. I mean, there have definitely been times in my business where I'm like, you know what, I'm going to go like a couple of weeks, you know, maybe a month or so without really communicating with my audience, kind of going a little quote unquote hiatus.

4:27But the reality is, if you do this too long and too often, you're not staying top of mind. You're not staying present. You're not adding the kind of value you need to be adding to their world for them to be your customers, your clients, to refer you, to think about you when those different opportunities come for referral business. So why is it such an urgent problem for the organizations that are out there right now that Rasa.io comes in and fixes? It really boils down to this. the faster things change, the easier it is to be forgotten. So the world we live in has been changing rapidly. And for the last couple of decades, the acceleration has been incredible.

5:06And now in, you know, even in the last few months, what's been happening in our world in a number of levels has accelerated that change further. So the more change that's happening, then, you know, it's easier and easier for people to be forgetting those who they've been in touch with because so much new information is pouring at them. Also because they're looking for new things. When people are encountering change, some people are trying to stay away from it. But over time, people are looking for ways to either adapt to that change or in some cases, you know, look at that change as an opportunity.

5:39So it's really important to have that piece of mindshare. And, you know, we live in an extremely turbulent times right now, again, on a number of levels. And so it's critical that you keep your brand front and center at all times and to do it consistently. I think consistently, which translates to a reasonably high frequency, is the key message. So there's a lot of ways to get in front of your audience. I mean, there's social media, there's things like podcasts. I mean, there's YouTube, there's a lot of different ways that people and organizations try to stay top of mind and try to just provide value to their audience on that consistent basis.

6:14So how specifically does a newsletter help solve this problem? What additional value is this adding? There's a lot of things that newsletters do as a channel that are either hard to do or not possible to do through social media and through other channels. One of the things to understand is that a newsletter is done in a way where you're essentially establishing a one-to-one relationship over time. There's ways to create a highly personal connection with your recipients and to encourage communication in two directions. So that's one element of it that's particularly exciting. Newsletters also offer you the opportunity to own the channel, to control when and how that message gets across.

7:00In the world of social media in particular, you don't really have that control. You may have a wonderful large audience and even an audience that's extremely engaged. However, you're also in a place where you don't control when that message appears or how it appears, the optimization of those algorithms is really not about you and your audience. It's really about advertising primarily. So it's a way to create ownership of the channel, which is a powerful asset over time. But specifically with newsletters, it's an opportunity to actually inform and to educate. A newsletter that's done well, in our experience anyway, the ones that perform best over the long run, they're really about helping.

7:41They're about education. They're about informing the reader about something they may not have known. And sometimes it even is entertaining the way it's written and the voice of the brand. Ultimately, though, the real key is that over the long run, when people are opening your newsletter on a regular basis, it really changes their perception of you as a brand. And again, that is applicable to a single individual as a solopreneur all the way up to any size company because they see you as a trusted advisor. They see you as someone who's trying to help first. And certainly you're a commercial entity as well, but they see you as a helpful advisor as opposed to a pitch person.

8:22So I love how Amit shared the phrase, own the channel and control the how and when. And Fire Nation, that's the power of newsletters. You can own that channel. You can control the how and when. And Amit, you've talked a few times about consistency, the power of consistency. But I know a big problem a lot of businesses have is themselves just saying, where the heck do I actually get the content to provide this value on a regular basis? I mean, help me out here. What would you say to them? That's tough. You know, having good content and doing it on a regular basis is really the key topic, the key challenge.

8:59People don't, when we speak about newsletters, it's not as though the people we're speaking to say, oh, well, I've never heard of a newsletter before. That's amazing. They say, oh, we tried to do that, but it was so hard. We just couldn't put the resources forward on a regular basis to create great content. And that's actually the key issue that most people have is they don't feel like the investment in content is something they can afford. Well, this is really at the center of the problem that we aim to solve with Rasta.io specifically. But the general, and I can talk about that in a minute, but the general idea is about curation.

9:36So curation is really the idea of getting the best possible content, not just about your product or your company, but actually intentionally circles that would surround your topic. So if your topic is real estate, for example, then you might talk about the homebuyer's journey, which might include things about finding great schools for your kids, or it might be about community events, or it might be about gardening. But it's broadening the circles of content that you consider to be part of your domain to really find reasons to be there regularly. Because real estate might be super interesting to some people.

10:14But if you're a realtor or a real estate brokerage and all you do is talk about real estate, well, after a while for your average reader, that gets a little bit old. So you have to first extend what you consider to be your topics. And then you curate, meaning get the best possible content from any source. And that is something that is a little bit unnatural for many business people and certainly for marketers within larger organizations, because their whole thought process has historically been, you know, how do I go out and drive people back to my website? How do I make my offers? How do I drive conversion?

10:47Which are important concepts, but that's not what curation is about. Curation is about maximizing the value to the reader, not to yourself. Amit, you know that newsletters are great. I've been sending newsletters to Fire Nation since 2012. So I've seen the power. I've seen the connection that they provide. I know that they're great. But if we all know that they're great, and so many people know that newsletters provide that form of connection, why don't more businesses actually do them both regularly and well? Well, I think part of it extends from the earlier point related to the regularity or frequency.

11:23It's tough work to do a good job on a regular basis. So oftentimes, you'll find businesses will say, yeah, we have a newsletter. or yeah, we used to have a newsletter, but it didn't work out that well. And so we don't do it anymore. And much of that often has to do with infrequent communications. They'll do them, you know, once a quarter, once every six months. And, you know, the data that we have at our company shows very clearly that highly infrequent newsletters like that, it is better than nothing, but not a whole lot better. Frequency really is key. So it's tough is one part. The other part of it is kind of extending the comment about curation being somewhat of an unnatural act for marketers who've been trained since the beginning of their experience usually to drive traffic back to their own sites or their own channels.

12:08It's really counterintuitive to write a newsletter that's informative and that's educational or entertaining. Most people try to really just take their same old sales message and package it into something they call a newsletter. And I've seen that time and again where you sign up for a newsletter from a company, and I do that on a very regular basis because I'm quite curious what people are doing. And you get a sales pitch and then another sales pitch. And it might be labeled slightly differently, but their newsletter essentially is a bag of the latest offers they've got. And those types of newsletters really fall flat simply because they're not helpful.

12:43They're just telling you another reason to buy, buy, buy. And those types of newsletters do not perform if they don't have any deeper thought or really helpful underlying intent. Fire Nation, I hope you're really absorbing and taking in everything that Amit is saying about how this can and really needs to be a powerful part of your business. This needs to be one of your legs. You're going to have multiple legs and things that you do, but this is a very powerful one. And we have a lot to talk about. We're going to be talking about specifically how Rasa.io can help solve this problem. The different types of businesses and sizes that actually could benefit from newsletters overall in general, the overall cost of doing and implementing things like this in your business, and so much more when we get back from thanking our sponsors.

13:31Success Story, hosted by Scott D. Clary, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Success Story features Q &A sessions with successful business leaders, keynote presentations, and conversations on sales, marketing, business startups, and entrepreneurship. One of Scott's recent episodes was with none other than Jack Canfield, where they discuss adapting to life's twists and turns. Listen to Success Story wherever you get your podcasts. Amit, we're back and we've been talking this entire episode so far about the power of newsletters, specifically when you do it right.

14:04You know, we've talked about the consistency, providing real value, making sure that you're inclusive of your customers' needs, wants, and desires. how specifically does Rasa.io, how does that platform that you've created work to solve the problem that so many businesses face with these newsletters? Well, you know, Rasa.io as a platform is designed to fit into the group of systems and channels that you set up for your marketing. So newsletters in general, and specifically those that are powered by our platform, are intended to be part of your overall messaging infrastructure. So by By no means are we saying abandon social or don't send other types of emails.

14:46But the newsletter is a key part of that that's either completely overlooked or it's just not done particularly well. So the thing that we looked at is the fundamental business problem again is businesses are being forgotten. And then the problem that underlies why people aren't sending out great newsletters on a regular basis is that it's too much work. So when we dig into that, our first priority in our platform was to make it super easy to use. And that's not just for big companies with lots of tech and lots of people, but for any size business, whether it's a solopreneur again or a 10-person company or a 1 ,000-person company or above, to make it easy, easy, easy.

15:27So that's number one. And so we do that by having an automation in place that probably wouldn't have been possible a few years ago. We're utilizing artificial intelligence, which is actually somewhat besides the point in terms of what we do. But it's just interesting that underneath the hood, the AI that we have is capable of doing a lot of the curation for you. Your job as the business owner or the marketer is to simply train that AI on the types of content that may be interesting in general to your audience, not down to the specific person or segment, but really just in general. And then the platform learns from there.

16:05So that's the first piece that we had to crack is how do we make it possible for your average business owner, not your technology genius or anybody like that. You're just your average business owner to send a great newsletter in less than 10 minutes per issue. And that's what we've hit. We generally speaking are 10 minutes or in some cases people spend zero minutes. But 10 minutes or less because most business owners think that's reasonable. And then we wanted to make the newsletter even better. But the fundamental thing is about ease of use and less time. So you've mentioned a little bit about the sizes of different companies.

16:39Now let's talk about the types as well. Give us an example of some types of companies that this really makes sense for. And maybe even Amit, give us an example or two of one of your favorite clients or just one of your favorite businesses that you've seen really applying these principles very well. It's all over the map. We have clients of every size and we have clients in a variety of industries. But what I would tell you is some of the most exciting ones in my mind are the ones that didn't necessarily think they had a good reason to be with their audience on a regular basis. I'll give you a couple of quick examples.

17:16One actually just goes back to what I started talking about with realtors. In the real estate world, the average transaction cycle, it's a 10-year gap. So right now in the United States, the average amount of time between home purchases and home sales for the average household is about 10 years. And that goes up and down a little bit over time. But that's a long, long period of time. And so, you know, realtors have this challenge. They might have formed a fairly close relationship with you during your home buying journey. But after that, you know, there's not a whole lot for them to do. There isn't a reason for them to say, hey, I can help you buy or sell a home.

17:53So they have to get creative. And they've been doing that. Realtors have been really savvy in finding good reasons to stay connected. A lot of times it has to do with holidays or special occasions and things like that, which are nice touches but don't really build depth of understanding of their client. So some of the realtors we're working with are doing some really cool stuff. They're gathering content around a wide range of topics. And so some of these topics can be things like community information. It could be about education. It could be about, you know, restaurants or cultural activities.

18:26It could be actually even about a broader range of things. But the key here is then that the other part of our AI that I haven't yet described is a personalization engine. So let's say I'm a realtor and I gather 50 or 100 different sources of potential content that might be interesting to the quote unquote average reader of my newsletter. But I have, let's say, 3 ,000 people on my email list. Well, those people are all very different. So I might have information about great elementary schools in the neighborhood. Or I might have information about a really cool performance that's coming up. But these pieces of content don't necessarily appeal in the same way to every reader.

19:09So a big part of the magic of what our AI does is it picks the content for every individual reader based on their long-term interaction with the newsletter. So if I'm a parent and I have small children and I start reading about schools or issues and challenges in raising children, I'll get more content of that style, of that type from that Realtor's newsletter over time. And if I'm reading a lot about performing arts, I'll get more of that content over time. So that's an oversimplification of the way the AI actually works, But the idea is that the realtor in this example can just say, hey, let's basically cast a wide net and get a lot of great content, content that's interesting, that's trustworthy and so forth, but not worry about which people receive which pieces of content too much.

20:02So real estate has been awesome because, again, it's a category where people don't have a reason to stay connected all that often, but now they do. Another example is in the coaching realm. So we deal with a lot of business coaches and you can broaden coaching to people who are just advisors or consultants. Once again, these folks tend to have infrequent engagement cycles or put another way. They just don't talk to their customers that much in between projects. So in these cases, the newsletter is able to fill that gap and it's able to provide really expert content. And I'll give you an example.

20:38One of our clients is a group out of Nashville, Tennessee, a group called Petra Coach. And they're a fantastic organization that coaches scale-up organizations, which are companies that typically start off at a couple million and up. And they're scaling fast. And their expertise over there is to grow businesses quickly. And they have a methodology for it. And they've done it extremely well over a long period of time. Their average client sticks with them for a couple of years, sometimes a lot longer. and meets with them at least once a quarter. But between those meetings, they don't have a natural interaction with them.

21:12So the newsletter has given them the ability to share a tremendous amount of great content. And in their case, one of the coolest things about it is they learn about each of their clients because part of the whole idea behind our system in having this high-frequency engagement is to learn more about each of these readers and then to feed that data back to the CRM system, which is another topic I can tell you more about. But really the key to it is, is we've taken these fields where people don't have a super high engagement frequency. They don't talk to their customers on a highly regular basis.

21:46And we found a good reason for them to be in front of their customers on a very regular basis now through the newsletter. Now, there's a ton of value you just went through. And I think the Fire Nation can all see the importance of implementing like this. But, you know, a question has to be, what was something like this cost? The power of the technology that we have in place is really cool. But a lot of people assume that tech like this, it must be for the Fortune 500. It must be super expensive. And that's a big part of our purpose at Rasta.io. So we are a purpose-driven organization. We're a devotee of something called conscious capitalism, which is a really powerful kind of philosophy in business of being purpose-driven and focusing on an underlying why, why your business should be there.

22:28And our organization is here to better inform the world. That's the reason we exist. And our goal is to democratize access to this type of artificial intelligence and make it accessible to any business anywhere in the world, whether they're a tiny for profit, if they're a not for profit, regardless. So the short answer to your question is our product starts out at free. And we've made our free plan intentionally quite valuable. You can send up to 10 ,000 messages a month. You can do that across a variety of styles of email templates. So there's a lot you can do with a free plan. So it's not a limited plan that's designed to push you to pay.

23:09And we think probably 90 % or more of our users will always be free. And we're really happy about that because that's a big part of our purpose as an organization. Of course, we are a business, so we do have to have revenue. And it's important for us to find ways to scale our revenue effectively. So we have paid plans as well that start off at$29 a month. and of course go up from there based upon the volume and the frequency of the number of messages you send. So we tend to be competitive with generic email tools, but we're not designed, by the way, to replace something like a MailChimp or a Constant Contact.

23:43We're designed to complement those tools, but we are priced competitive in terms of messaging volume with those types of products. Well, you brought them up. So let's talk just really briefly about your competitors. I mean, We've heard about MailChimp. We've all heard of ActiveCampaign. What are some reasons why somebody would actually be better served by using a tool like Rasa.io for their newsletter? You know, first of all, we don't really consider those folks in what we call the email service provider category to be competitive. They're really complementary. In fact, we've built integrations with MailChimp and with Constant Contact and with a number of other frequently used products.

24:19those are tools that are just used for sending every kind of email you can imagine. They're general purpose email tools. And certainly the email newsletters that are sent today mostly come from those kinds of platforms. So we view them as complimentary. And so we've integrated so that the contact lists are synchronized and unsubscribes are synchronized and so forth. But it's real important to think about Rasa.io as a very specialized type of an email. It's not general purpose email. So that's one quick thing. As far as, you know, people who don't fit us and fit better in a MailChimp world or constant contact, you know, a big part of our goal is to help people get to the right solution.

25:00And so we actually write a lot of content on our website that compares and contrasts, not in a typical vendor way, which basically just says everything's better with us, because that's not true. We think that people who want to curate and people who want to personalize fit like a glove for Rasta.io. If you believe in sharing third-party content, our platform will save you unbelievable amounts of time because we'll automate most of that. If you believe that sharing helpful content regardless of the author, that's the key. And there are brands out there who don't like that. They don't feel comfortable.