The Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI) is a non-profit trade association that represents more than 1,300 for-profit scrap recycling companies. These companies range from small recycling businesses to large multi-national corporations. Collectively, they operate over six thousand facilities worldwide.
Membership includes processors, manufacturers, brokers, and other consumers of recycling commodities. Known as the Voice of the Recycling Industry™, ISRI promotes safe, environmentally responsible, and eco-sustainable recycling through networking, education, and advocacy.
Founded in 1987, ISRI’s members represent a wide range of various recycling industry sectors, including both ferrous and non-ferrous metals, electronics, paper, textiles, glass, rubber, and plastic. In that time, the association has long provided multiple email newsletters to subscribers across the organization’s membership base representing multiple areas within the recycling industry. The association decided to team up with rasa.io to streamline its newsletter distribution campaign, combine all of its content into a single newsletter, and free up valuable time and staff power.
ISRI is saving time, effort, and money with rasa.io
Before partnering with rasa.io, Mark Carpenter, Vice President of Communications at the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, says that his association produced multiple newsletters to serve its different membership sectors.
“We were constantly posting content to the website, then laying it out a second time in the newsletter template,” he explained. “The only way to maintain consistency across the organization was to have all the newsletters distributed by the communications department, which had to coordinate obtaining all the content, editing, and publishing it.”
Mark says that what initially attracted him to rasa.io was access to its AI functionality.
“As our membership has a number of different interests,” he continued, “I saw this as a way of eliminating multiple newsletters and combining all the content under one header.”
Using rasa.io’s AI technology to streamline ISRI’s newsletter process
The job of rasa.io’s AI is to analyze each of your members’ behavior to learn about their interests, preferences, relationships, and more and then automatically tailors your content to that subscriber’s individual needs. Over time, AI shares new content ideas based on market trends that are likely to be a good fit for that reader, drawing from internal and external resources related to your organization.
In the case of the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, two members in very different segments of the scrap recycling industry can receive the same newsletter, with different information and content tailored to their specific market. An ISRI member involved in recycled textile manufacturing can receive information that is specific to their niche industry without scrolling through e-waste disposal or recycled metal fabrication articles.
How did this sort of individual targeting affect ISRI’s communications staff?
Before using the rasa.io platform to create smart newsletters using next-level personalization, Marks says it would take hours for his team to create a newsletter product that rasa.io’s AI can create in minutes.
Aside from producing in-house content and posting it to the ISRI website, he says that all of the other work is automated.
“It takes a matter of minutes to review the content and pull anything we don’t want included,” Mark said. “Depending on how you do your newsletter, rasa.io reduces the time by 90%. I feel like we added another staff person.”
“Depending on how you do your newsletter, rasa.io reduces the time by 90%.
I feel like we added another staff person.”
ISRI easily integrates internal and external content into its rasa.io newsletters
With rasa.io, associations can build brand trust and value by providing subscribers with quality content, whether written in-house or pulled from another external source.
“Along with the launch of our newsletter, we sunsetted the print publication of our magazine and went fully digital,” Mark explained. “This newsletter serves as the main distribution of the content, which is typically 1-2 news stories per newsletter, which is three times per week.”
All of ISRI’s in-house material is published on the association’s website, and then rasa.io’s AI automatically pulls it as a lead story in the organization’s newsletter. ISRI also incorporates industry trade publication stories into its newsletter content marketing.
“Our newsletter is a one-stop-shop for the industry,” Mark says. “The trade publications ask to be included and check to see how much of their own content is in there. This helps with revenue generation now too.”
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Using the ISRI newsletter to generate ad revenue
Like other organizations reaping the benefits of ad revenue from sending smart newsletters, since partnering with rasa.io, the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries has easily met its advertising goals.
“Our ad space is sold out, and it is our top revenue generator among the news products,” Mark explains. “It is easy to run campaigns [with rasa.io] and takes minutes to set up.”
With that in mind, Mark says that ISRI advertisers targeting customers in the scrap recycling industry have enjoyed being part of their newsletter ever since the association began using rasa.io because readers have come to rely on ISRI’s digital newsletter for all of their industry needs.
Thanks to its partnership with rasa.io, ISRI’s subscriber list is on par with some of the industry’s largest publications, which is a major advertising draw. Another big draw, Mark says, is rasa.io’s strategic insight and valuable data reporting. That data can be easily transformed into real-world strategic planning for advertisers.
“The improved metrics also is a big selling point,” he explains. “Our ad sales team can easily report on performance, and the metrics speak for themselves.”
By creating next-level, smart newsletters for its subscriber base using rasa.io, ISRI continues to grow
Until it discovered rasa.io, it wasn’t easy for ISRI to find new ways to become an indispensable part of its subscribers’ lives. Thanks to rasa.io’s AI-powered technology, the association now provides value and authority in ways that Mark and his team never thought possible, and the association is reaping the benefits.
In all of our case studies, rasa.io has found that when subscribers are exposed to the personalized content that comes from AI-assisted content curation, and it becomes part of their daily life, they can’t help but rave about the newsletters they receive.
Since the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries teamed up with rasa.io to create and distribute its association newsletters, Mark says that the organization’s newsletter opens and article clicks have at least tripled, the number of visitors to the company’s website has increased, and the way in which the association engages with members has greatly improved. In addition, they have seen a significant drop in those who are unsubscribing from the newsletter. In fact, Mark points out that most individuals who unsubscribe are those who leave their jobs in the industry.
“We have also seen a number of non-members sign up for [our newsletter] on their own,” says Mark, who notes that, since partnering with rasa.io, ISRI’s subscriber list has grown by nearly 20%.
That’s what we call the perfect example of AI subscriber-recruitment magic.
