Driving business growth with market and competitive intelligence

Learn how AI-enabled Market and Competitive Intelligence Platform enables your newsletter engagement with more prospects

W hen we sent out the last issue of our market intelligence fortnightly newsletter, we also launched our first global Market Intelligence survey. The responses have started pouring in. And what we’ve noticed so far is a common trend — the market intelligence function is being increasingly linked with business objectives which roughly translates into demonstrating business expansion driven ROI. What is even more interesting is that this trend is common across Fortune 1000s and SMBs. We’ve been seeing our clients pursue a similar position and we’re helping them do it through a sophisticated newsletter management suite that is pre-integrated into our market intelligence platform. Our clients use the newsletter manager to send out industry-centric curated newsletters. Based on who’s reading the content, they are able to pass on these subscribers as leads to their sales and marketing teams. That’s the most simple step they have been able to take towards demonstrating the tangible value of their function and the ROI has been extremely encouraging.

To that end, we’ve made significant improvements to our newsletter management suite and relaunched it. It is one of Contify’s most powerful features for engaging stakeholders both internal and external. We’ve built it entirely from scratch so that you don’t have to use separate software for sending out newsletters if you’re using Contify. Our newsletter manager lets you design company-branded templates, maintain lists of subscribers, curate the content that goes into your newsletter, and get analytics on who’s opening your newsletters and what they are reading.

In fact we at Contify ourselves use the newsletter creator aggressively. We have a newsletter on market and competitive intelligence best practices and trends which is read by over a 1000 professionals globally. We use Contify to send out this newsletter every two weeks. After each issue, we look at the analytics to see who are our most active readers and what content is the most popular. Based on this data we improve every issue. When we started the newsletter, it had an open rate of less than 15%. After four issues we average at around a 30% open rate. The best part is that as far as email marketing goes, we are able to keep our costs really down. Even better, it takes only about an hour to set up the newsletter, populate it with content and send it. Before we built the newsletter creator, putting together a newsletter could take up one entire day.

Here are a few ways in which you can use the Newsletter Manager:

1. Curate Content

For content managers who are short on time, producing content for newsletters is often the most exhaustive task. Doing it yourself means that you’ll be spending too much time that better be spent on more high-value tasks. Delegating to your team means that you’ll not be satisfied with the output and there’ll be too many iterations involved. But sending a curated newsletter, which acts as a source of insightful information to the reader doesn’t have to be so difficult. We have found that curated email digests on content that is relevant to your target audience and also positions you as a thought leader is something that can be created in minutes. We’ve further simplified the process by integrating the newsletter manager with Contify’s award-winning competitive intelligence tool. Simply filter to the content that you think your subscribers will find interesting and add it to your newsletter.

2. Design Templates

This is another part of creating newsletters that takes too much time and often involves dealing with designers and tech support. With our template creator, you can design company-branded newsletters by simply formatting the color palette and inserting a header with your company logo. It can’t get simpler than this.

3. Manage Subscribers

Almost all companies with even the tiniest of marketing budgets use some sort of system for managing subscribers. For some it could be spreadsheets, for others it could be an email marketing tool. But managing these systems for new additions or unsubscribe requests could become a pain. With Contify, you can upload a list of pre-existing subscribers or set up an inbound lead generation engine by connecting a form on your website to Contify (just ask your site-administrator to integrate — it takes less than 60 seconds). Once you’re set, you can manage all your subscribers from one application. Best of all, you’ll have complete control over your lists.

4. Analytics

Our newsletter manager comes with a fully loaded analytics module and we keep adding more ways to slice and dice data to get more market and competitive insights. Once you start sending out newsletters, you can use the analytics module for competitive intelligence analysis on what content is performing well with which subscribers. You can also easily identify your most engaged subscribers. In fact, as a market intelligence team you can do your bit to contribute to business goals by passing on your most engaged subscribers (external stakeholders) to your sales team as qualified leads. They’ll be grateful — believe us, we’ve been there.