Local entrepreneur looks to redefine online newsletters

A local entrepreneur is attempting to redefine the way people receive and engage email newsletters. His concept, Cerkl, aims to correct issues with email communication by allowing users to have more direct contact with the organizations they care about.
 
"What I was seeing was a couple of problems. We as a community—people who care about an organization—don't really know what's going on in the organization," says Cerkl creator and former WhatIfSports founder Tarek Kamil. "If you think about what you receive in a newsletter from any organization that you support, it's very high level, it has to appeal to the masses, it's certainly not potentially meaningful to you."
 
To correct these engagement issues, Cerkl users can create personalized profiles to define what is meaningful and select what organizations can see their information, allowing organizations to hone in on what people are interested in reading.
 
"Our open rate in August was 79 percent across all Cerkl organizations, which is four times higher than the national average," Kamil says.
 
To address the issue of businesses only reaching out to people for money, Cerkl offers a separate platform for the business community.
 
"These local, regional, national businesses, they all want to reach this audience," Kamil says. "The business community can log on and they can basically sponsor all of this email communication that is going on."
 
Cerkl attempts to eliminate unwanted inbox content by personalizing each newsletter that reaches recipients.
 
"People's inboxes are fuller than ever. There's more websites, more apps, there's just more of everything. When that is the case, everything becomes noise unless it has meaning to you," Kamil says. "It's all about cutting through the noise. We want things that are meaningful to reach you."