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Newsletter marketing tips in the AI era

Aren’t newsletters so 2020? Or 2010 even? No they’re not. Not by a long shot. As it becomes more and more challenging to navigate changing social media algorithms and keep up with content creation tasks there, newsletters have made a resurgence as a communications medium. But I would also argue that there is broader recognition of the ongoing benefit of having a 1:1 communication with your audience on a medium that you exclusively control.

We’re going to look at some compelling reasons why in the age of AI newsletters matter even more to your marketing efforts. But beware, there are also some changes outlined in marketing tips below, that AI will be tossing your way, which you need to be aware of.

Your FROM line matters more than your SUBJECT line

Marketers have preached the importance of your subject line for years. It is still absolutely critical in stirring interest to open that email. But there is a shift afloat, and it has its roots in trust, likely stemming from a deluge of AI generated content that is eroding trust.

Many (most?) businesses, if they have a newsletter, send it out as the company newsletter. You know the ones I’m talking about: ABC Marketing Corp monthly e-news… Hipcamp news… Tour Radar deals… eTurbo News… You get the picture. Oftentimes these newsletters are also sent from a generic company address, and not from an actual person you may know.

But recent research has found that emails sent from a person’s name have higher open rates than those sent from a company name.

Readers care about WHO the newsletter comes from

45% of subscribers say they are likely to read your email because of WHO IT’S FROM. 33% of recipients report opening an email based on the subject line. That means that who it’s coming from is now more important than the subject line.

Think about that for a moment. WHO it’s coming from is that important.

So in an age of AI, where vanilla content is generated on mass, and churned out from nameless and faceless company emails, who do you want to be sending your newsletter from? I’m guessing if it’s not from a known individual you may be reconsidering that right now? There’s a huge opportunity here for having a newsletter sent from a person who has developed a following, or fashioned a personal brand for themselves within your industry. If you’re a small company and that person is you, all the better. Just stop sending it from some faceless company email.

Personal connections build trust

Personal connections build trust. That’s going to be SO important in standing out against the deluge of AI generated content.

Did you know that roughly 46% of all email today is read on a mobile phone using the Apple mail app? That’s a very important statistic when you consider a change that Apple is making in the fall of 2024.

How AI embedded iOS18 from Apple will impact newsletters

This fall Apple will roll out of their AI-embedded iOS 18 operating system. They’re calling the AI “Apple Intelligence” but let’s face it, much of the help it will provide is based on capabilities of AI – artificial intelligence. There are numerous things that new Apple Intelligence will help you with, but one very important change for those of us with newsletters, is how the update will handle incoming emails.

With the change, Apple will automatically route incoming emails, relegating them to one of three buckets: primary, social and promotions.

Apple will route brand email and newsletters to the dreaded black hole of promotions. That is not where you want to be.

The change is not unlike what Google did a while back with Gmail, and I would expect that the Apple change will allow users to control their route settings and re-route emails incorrectly flagged to a particular bucket. But it’s still a potentially disruptive change if you are not fully aware of the potential consequences.

In beta testing research leading up to this change, it seems that newsletters that come from an individual person within a company and are written in the tone of a human being will stay in the primary box.

Yes coming from a person, not the company is a critical first step, but that second one is the big one to pass muster into the primary box. That email newsletter needs to sound personable and from a friend (since presumably AI will scan the content for hints of that).

I’ve long been a proponent of writing a newsletter in a very personable tone, but this change from Apple is a whack on the side of the head. I’ve always considered my Sunday morning marketing tips newsletters like “writing a letter to a friend.” I use conversational tone that sometimes breaks writing rules, but sounds like a person speaking. I drop in anecdotal bits about life and what I’m up to. I share business examples and stories based on personal experience. It’s deliberate, but also a style which I’ve found to be one I can own. And it keeps open rates high, and write back even higher. (See what I did there, starting a sentence with “and”? My grade 12 English teacher Mr. Berg would shutter.)

If you’ve yet to get the memo about being personable in your newsletters, now is the time to introduce it into your style. Start by sharing an anecdotal story that only you could tell in your copy. I’m not sure how AI is being trained on this, but that is one thing that you can distinctively own that differentiates you as human from a machine churning out copy based on prompts.

How to NOT use AI for newsletters

Yes generative AI is a useful tool. But not in the case of those first drafts where the writer matters (She said in bold  with an elevated voice)

Using AI for first drafts is great for how-to information, lists, and general information heavy pieces. But that first draft is still going to need personality added, some additional fact checking, and story examples only you could give.

Personally, I don’t use AI to create newsletters – ever. Because I strive for a personable tone and think of this missive of marketing tips as “writing a letter to a friend” every week, it just feels weird to ask an AI prompt to churn something out. Do I use AI to track trends or check to see what I might be missing on a topic? You bet. But that’s informing my existing thoughts with additional information to consider.

When the writer matters a lot – when the goal is to be personable, memorable, perhaps persuasive offering advice, AI is potentially useful for research. But even that will need to be fact checked. See above.

I can hear you saying, “But what if I prompt it to write something in the voice of (insert your name here), and I know I have enough published content online for the AI to write the way I do?” Or what if I feed it a bunch of my content to train on. Wouldn’t AI then generate something comparable? Perhaps. But I would never use it for more than a first draft. Your voice adds personal experience and stories. It adds spice to the words. And I’ve yet to see AI deal well with comic inference, or anything requiring emotional intelligence in order to interpret an nuanced meaning.

Own your own stories with your own words

AI will never be able to generate the stories that are truly yours. The personal examples you can share, the insights you have gained through trial and error – where you can share the actual story with others. That is where the magic will lie, in being able to stand out from AI generated vanilla content. And most importantly, when you do that it helps form a connection with a real human, and saves your newsletter content from being filtered to the promotions folder. You want to be in a recipients PRIMARY folder on Apple iOS 18 mobile phones.

A storytelling example

I shared the story about traveling to Lillooet to write a travel article for the Vancouver Sun in a recent blog post, and how meeting the vintner, who was a master marketer, was the unexpected surprise. That story, first used in my weekly newsletter, was a classic example of storytelling to make a point. If you missed it, you can read it here on my blog: Storytelling, Connection and Creating an Experience – a word of mouth winery tale  It’s a great example of personally storytelling to provide context for the marketing insights the article was speaking to.

Mary Charleson

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