Newsletters remain a focus of many publishers. But crafting compelling newsletters and managing email blasts can be time-consuming. That’s where finding the best email solution for news publishers specifically becomes crucial. And a closer look reveals that Echobox Email might be a better fit than legacy email solutions like Mailchimp, particularly when it comes to maximizing efficiency and engagement through the power of AI automation.
Here’s why Echobox Email could be the secret weapon for your email marketing strategy versus a legacy solution.
AI-powered personalization for higher click and open rates
Echobox
One of the most difficult elements of a successful newsletter strategy is personalization. But it’s also vital. Unlike social media, where detailed segmentation is all but impossible, email lets you understand the habits and interests of individual subscribers. It’s understanding this data and implementing the insights that’s tricky. So, the best email solution for publishers is one that can do all this for you.
Echobox Email leverages artificial intelligence to automate and optimize personalization to each individual subscriber. This includes everything from scheduling personalized send times for each subscriber to make sure your newsletter arrives at the right time, driving open rates, to personalizing content and content ordering that allows you to avoid a one size fits all approach with tailored content for each subscriber’s preferences, boosting click rates.
Take Hearst Italia, for instance. Hearst Italia publishes some of the largest magazine brands in the country including Elle, Esquire and Cosmopolitan. Hearst Italia switched to Echobox from a complex and time-consuming manual workflow. Within months, their brands were seeing a 31% increase in click rates through Echobox’s send time and content personalizations.
Legacy
Legacy solutions, while offering some automation, often require more manual workflows. While Echobox has been built with AI at its core, legacy solutions’ AI features are often grafted onto manual workflows. This not only limits the potential time savings, but also the features’ effectiveness.
Effortless scaling for growing audiences
Echobox
One indication of a high-performing newsletter strategy is growth, and Echobox Email can be an integral part of that. By combining AI personalization with fully automated newsletter production, you can scale your offering at the click of a button.
In the case of Groupe Sud Ouest (GSO), one of France’s largest media companies with a swathe of regional papers, audience growth was top of mind. GSO had ambitious growth targets for newsletters given their wealth of content, but found it difficult to translate this into an effective strategy.
Within 10 months of using Echobox, GSO grew subscriptions by 400%. As Aurélien Robert, CRM & Loyalty Manager at GSO, put it: “In 10 months we’ve seen about 30% of the subscriber growth that we achieved in 10 years with our previous email solution.”
Legacy
Scaling newsletters with a legacy solution poses its own challenges, especially workflow. Producing a fully optimized newsletter takes time. Producing many fully optimized newsletters can take more time than many have at their disposal. And this is the problem. Without effective automation, for a legacy solution, the barrier to creating a greater number of personalized emails is simply the time it takes to produce rather than having the content available.
Reduced time spent producing emails
Echobox
Newsletter teams are busy! So, while expanding subscriptions and the number of newsletters you send, efficiency is a must.
Echobox Email can automate the entire email production process. Connect your content feeds to Echobox Email and it will use engagement data from your website and social media pages alongside individual engagement data from subscribers to send emails populated with the right content for each person at the best time.
GSO, for instance, saved around 80 hours per week across its 24 brands through the use of automation.
With its AI-powered auto-population, pre-built templates, drag-and-drop editing tools, you can create high-performing newsletters in a fraction of the time it might take with a legacy solution. This frees you up to focus on the kinds of innovation that matters most.
Legacy
Most legacy solutions were built upon manual workflows. But importantly, the biggest legacy solutions weren’t built with publishers in mind.
A typical non-publisher use case, might mean sending a few newsletters per week with copy written specifically for the job. For publishers, the picture looks very different. With a range of articles to choose from on top of sponsored content and ads in addition to a far higher cadence and variety of newsletters, each individual edition of a newsletter can involve a significant amount of labor.
Beyond drag-and-drop editors, generic templates and a sprinkling of automations, there’s little that many legacy solutions can offer in the way of real time savings for busy publishers.
Beyond efficiency
While Echobox Email excels in automation and ease of use, it doesn’t compromise on core functionalities. Because the best email solution for publishers is one that can take care of the basics, too:
- Advanced Audience Segmentation: Just like legacy solutions, Echobox Email allows you to segment your audience based on demographics, interests, and behavior. This ensures your content reaches the right readers, further boosting engagement.
- Journeys: Echobox Email allows you to configure journeys such as welcome series and re-engagement journeys so you have all the tools you need to build and retain subscriber loyalty.
- Detailed analytics and reporting: Track the performance of your email campaigns with in-depth analytics provided by Echobox Email. Gain valuable insights on open rates, click-through rates, and subscriber behavior to continuously refine your email marketing strategy.
- Seamless Integration: Echobox Email is compatible with a range of CRMs, CDPs and ad servers like LiveIntent and Google Ad Manager, making it simple to integrate into your existing tech stack and monetize your newsletters
The Verdict
Legacy solutions can be powerful email marketing platforms. However publishers often have to modify their workflow to fit the tool, rather than the other way around. With a focus on maximizing efficiency and engagement through AI automation, effortless scaling, and reduced email production time, Echobox Email may well be the best email solution for publishers.
