How Anushka Rathod is nurturing a finance community ft. Interactive emails

Challenge

An investment banker turned finance content creator, Anushka Rathod, started her journey to help people gain financial literacy. She started sharing bite-sized videos to explain complex financial concepts on platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Soon, many of her videos got millions of views, and her social media following grew to 1.8M+ and continues to soar one reel at a time.

However, she realized that these platforms were good for sharing short snippets, but they had certain limitations -

• Social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn restrict word count, while Instagram limits video duration.
  
• The algorithm is unpredictable and your content can easily disappear on social media feeds.
  
• Social media posts generally address the audience, and building one-on-one relationships with them is nearly impossible.
  
• If a platform bans your profile, you can instantly lose access to all your content and audience.
  

Goal:

Anushka wanted to nurture her social media audience by sharing lessons about personal finance concepts on a more reliable and algorithm-agnostic platform. This initiative would help her build an engaged community independent of any third-party app and its algorithm. Moreover, this community would eventually become a launchpad for new opportunities to make financial literacy universally accessible.

“We wanted to cultivate a passionate community of finance enthusiasts nurtured through our social media channels. This community would serve as a valuable testing ground and launchpad for future ventures.” - Anushka Rathod.

The Approach:

Anushka started an email newsletter called “Crore Club” using Mailmodo. She wanted this email newsletter to be personalized, in-depth, and interactive. Let’s look at Anushka’s Crore Club strategy -

Automated email flows to nurture on autopilot: Anushka sends an automated welcome email to all Crore Club subscribers that outlines its structure and frequency. This campaign starts the relationship on a note of trust.

Similarly, Anushka sends a reminder email to all Crore Club’s inactive subscribers, showing them what they’re missing by not engaging with the newsletter.

Personal Finance Calculator inside an email: Crore Club’s subscribers don’t have to visit any other webpage to find calculators and make an informed decision. Instead, they can save time and get a quick estimate with an interactive calculator inside their emails.

Edutainment with gamification, GIFs, and memes: Anuhska’s Crore Club speaks the language of her audience. The newsletter is sprinkled with funny GIFs and relatable memes. She uses interactive widgets like quizzes and carousels to break down complex financial concepts and gamify their learning.

Prioritizing feedback: Anushka ensures that her community can give her feedback without friction. She has embedded interactive forms, polls, and rating widgets inside her newsletter so subscribers can share their opinions without visiting any other page.

Leveraging analytics: Anushka and her team constantly check performance metrics such as open rates, click-throughs, and engagement trends on Mailmodo’s dashboard and optimize their future campaigns accordingly.

Check out an edition of Crore Club’s newsletter below.

The Outcome

Since the launch of Crore Club, the newsletter has built a strong community of personal finance enthusiasts. Moreover, all her campaigns have enjoyed an average click and submission rate of around 2X more than the industry average. Interactive widgets such as in-mail calculators, quizzes, and polls have been popular among subscribers and are key to growing engagement.

“We've built a thriving community of finance enthusiasts who are highly engaged and receptive to our content. By nurturing this community through targeted email marketing, we've laid the groundwork for successful product launches and a loyal customer base,” said Anushka Rathod.

Key learnings for your next marketing campaign

You can grow and engage a community with newsletters Despite rapidly changing technology, emails have stood the test of time. With emails, you can build an owned audience that doesn’t depend on any third-party app or is impacted by the ever-changing algorithms.

Moreover, interactive emails allow you to get creative. Whether adding GIFs, carousels, or full-blown games, interactivity has made everything possible inside emails.

Your engagement and conversion will increase with emails You prefer social media because of its reach, but did you know that email conversion is higher? For example, interactive emails make promoting a product and getting registrations for an event 3X times easier and more fruitful.

You’ll get more feedback to tailor your newsletter.

The first rule of growing a newsletter is understanding subscribers' wants and providing actionable value. With interactive forms and ratings, your subscribers can share feedback without leaving their inboxes.

Similarly, you can track details like link performance, submissions, and clicks to analyze what type of content works for your subscribers.