- What is AI Email Marketing?
- Benefits of AI in Email Marketing
- Popular AI Email Marketing Tools
- Case Studies of AI Email Marketing
- Steps to Implement AI in Email Marketing
Q: What is AI email marketing?
A: AI email marketing involves using artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to optimize and automate email marketing campaigns, enhancing personalization, segmentation, and overall performance.
Businesses have been using email marketing to successfully connect with and sell to their target audience since 1978 via ARPANET, some five years before the official launch of the internet.
Four decades later, it is still one of the main forms of digital marketing. And with the integration of AI in email marketing, we can safely conclude that it will not lose relevance anytime soon.
Fundamentally, AI email marketing provides opportunities for marketers and business owners to harness the powers of machine learning in marketing. It streamlines complex marketing processes and boosts the effectiveness of their campaigns through personalization, automation, and optimization.
Forward-thinking businesses use AI email marketing tools—there are lots of them now—to create personalized email campaigns, which is very important for attracting and retaining the modern consumer.
A McKinsey Next in Personalization Report reveals that 71% of consumers expect personalized communication from businesses, and 76% get frustrated when that sense of personalization doesn’t exist.
The report also shows that businesses that capitalize on this need generate 40% more revenue from personalization than their counterparts. However, personalization is only one of the various gains that AI email marketing brings to the table.
From a general perspective, AI email marketing tools are vital for small businesses aiming to keep up with the surge in ever-changing digital consumer trends. They can harness the predictive capabilities of AI in email marketing to forecast consumer behaviors and design email campaigns that hit all the right marks.
This article goes over the benefits of AI in email marketing, popular tools you can leverage to streamline your email campaigns, insightful case studies of AI email marketing, and how to implement AI email marketing.
First, what is AI email marketing, and how does it work?
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What is AI Email Marketing?
AI email marketing involves the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to optimize and automate email marketing campaigns.
These technologies analyze historical and current user data to identify behaviors and patterns useful for personalizing email campaigns to suit your audiences’ preferences, compelling them to take necessary actions that lead to sale acceptance and conversion.
Besides the enhanced customer experience and satisfaction that comes with email personalization, AI in email marketing does a lot more to streamline workflows and improve overall campaign performance.
AI augments marketing activities through automation and predictive analytics, ensuring that efforts are data-driven and more effective while freeing up time for the team to plan and manage a more extensive, large-scale marketing campaign.
Benefits of AI in Email Marketing
The proliferation of AI applications in industries has resulted in significant improvements in how business and organizational processes work. Today, small businesses use AI for various tasks and activities across departments to streamline operations.
With AI in email marketing, small businesses are seeing all-round improvements, which are boldly showcased by the following four key benefits of AI email marketing.
Automation
AI email marketing tools save lots of time and resources by automating tedious, repetitive tasks such as
- Mailing list segmentation: You get great results from your email marketing campaigns when you send the right message to the right audience. You wouldn’t sell meat to vegetarians, and neither would you want to send “Happy Father’s Day” emails to young women—unless you are inviting them to use one of your products to make Father’s Day special for someone in their life.
- AI analyzes various data points, such as customer behavior, response history, your company’s campaign goals, and the products/services being marketed, to automatically divide your email recipients into segments. Thus, your emails will end up in the right inboxes.
- Email scheduling: Send too many emails in a short timeframe and your loyal customers may end up unsubscribing from your mailing list. If you hardly send any, you risk losing touch with your customers.
- AI can evaluate customer behaviors and performance metrics of your email campaigns to help you or your marketing team create and automate an optimized email schedule. This ensures that customers get sales emails when it would most engage them.
- A/B testing: Businesses running AI-driven email strategies can also use the generative and predictive capabilities of AI to:
Test email copy ideas
Run real-time predictive targeting to determine what a customer might prefer in the future.
These help create natural-sounding copy variations that are optimized to be contextually relevant to each target customer, thus boosting conversion rates.
There are various applications of AI in email marketing automation, such as auto-customizing automated email receipts and auto-generating copies for different audiences.
All in all, email automation with AI helps small businesses save lots of time, costs, and resources, enabling teams to focus on other business-critical activities.
Personalization
If you analyze the points above from the lens of personalization, you can see how using AI to segment mailing lists, run split tests, and optimize mailing schedules could result in a more tailored experience for the recipient.
There’s more.
AI can analyze large datasets, spanning through your customer database, to identify shopping behaviors and track on-site activity, location, or purchase history to:
- Write email copies that fit the recipient customer’s preferences.
- Personalize product recommendations based on the recipient’s activities.
The customization capabilities of AI in email marketing enable marketers and small business owners to create personalized email campaigns, guaranteeing that the right message gets to the right audience at the right time.
Predictive Analytics
As in A/B testing with AI, marketers can utilize AI’s machine learning and predictive analytics algorithms to run predictive targeting. This enables businesses to forecast customer behavior and campaign performance.
On the one hand, AI email marketing tools can use the outcomes of the forecast to make automatic decisions and adjust to changing patterns and user behaviors during a marketing campaign.
For instance, AI can determine when a customer’s on-site behavior implies the likelihood of skipping a purchase and sends a triggered email to encourage them to make the purchase.
On the other hand, businesses use the outcomes of AI predictive analytics to make data-driven decisions for continuous email marketing optimization.
Enhanced Engagement
All the forecasting, personalization, and automation happening in AI email marketing amount to maintaining relevance and customer engagement, which in turn leads to higher conversion rates.
Building on the instance provided above, AI can help marketers create dynamic content blocks, which change the content of emails based on user behavior, data, and preferences.
Let’s assume that the customer’s behavior indicates that they will make the purchase. The AI software would instead send an email that encourages the customer to also buy a complementary product that guarantees a better experience with their intended purchase.
Now imagine that you have a product on sale, leading to unusually high traffic on the website. Ordinarily, you wouldn’t be able to keep up with rightly engaging and providing appropriate recommendations to all your customers at once.
But with the right AI email marketing tool on the clock, the whole process is extremely smooth and streamlined.
This real-time adaptation to user interactions enhances overall user engagement, enhancing the performance of your marketing campaign and boosting your retention rate.
Popular AI Email Marketing Tools
From email validation, personalization, and automation to smart segmentation and content optimization, Mailchimp has it all.
Businesses use Mailchimp’s email marketing and automation platform to get more opens, clicks, and sales.
Mailchimp offers various AI-driven email strategies and features, including but not limited to:
- Automated customer journey builder: This feature tracks customers’ activities and triggers dynamically personalized emails based on their browsing and purchase data.
- Content optimizer: This feature allows you to analyze and compare your email data to industry benchmarks, draw insights, and get recommendations on optimizing your email content and overall campaign.
- Intuit assist: This generative AI feature helps Mailchimp users create on-brand content with pre-designed templates that match different brand tones and goals.
- Smart segmentation: This feature enables you to streamline customer targeting with advanced logic like buying behavior, spend amounts, and predicted attributes.
- HubSpot
HubSpot has a wealth of email marketing tools that promise to significantly improve your personalized email campaigns and email marketing automation.
HubSpot’s AI email marketing software helps you create email workflows and email drip campaigns, setting up conditions and triggers to send the right email to the right audience at the right time.
Some other features from HubSpot include:
- AI email writer and content assistant: This tool is used by businesses to generate high-quality sales outreach email content and marketing campaigns to drive more conversions.
- Inbox automation: This tool scans your emails and provides task recommendations based on email content. It is also useful for building your customer base, as it can extract information from every first-time email recipient or sender to auto-populate and create a matching customer profile.
Mixed with their suite of marketing tools, HubSpot’s AI email marketing tools make the right recipe for clicks and conversions.
- SendGrid
SendGrid offers several AI-based marketing tools to improve the email experience for business owners, marketers, and their audiences.
Some AI-driven email strategies and features from SendGrid include:
- Neural protection: This helps businesses boost their email deliverability rates by identifying and minimizing risky sending patterns. Essentially, this feature monitors your sending behaviors and outgoing messages to identify patterns that might be hurting your brand reputation. Then it intelligently creates appropriate email schedules that align with your audience’s preferences and inbox service providers’ (ISP) standards.
- Deliverability insights: SendGrid’s AI email marketing tools scan your campaign’s real-time performance and metrics to provide data-driven recommendations and insights.
- Email validation: SendGrid AI helps clean your email list through real-time detection and elimination of invalid email addresses, thus reducing your bounce rates and further improving overall deliverability.
Essentially, SendGrid provides real-time data insights and automated workflows to enhance email deliverability and engagement.
- Phrasee
Marketers use Phrasee to better understand what tone and language resonates most with their target audience, create on-brand, high-performing messages, and optimize message delivery.
Some Phrasee AI features for personalized email campaigns include:
- Magic buttons: Struggling with creating a great subject line or CTA that would compel the recipient to click? The Magic Button can help you generate email content that does the job.
- Performance prediction engine: Trained on years of copy-based experiments, this engine can accurately and reliably predict the sentiments and language most likely to resonate with your audience. For better email marketing optimization, it reviews your historical data to determine what drives the most clicks.
All in all, Phrasee focuses heavily on ensuring that your email content is hyper-personalized and on-brand.
Case Studies of AI Email Marketing
Groupon and eBay: IBM Watson Tone Analyzer
It can be difficult to craft the perfect subject line that gets the audience clicking. Marketers at Groupon and eBay know what that feels like and acknowledge the need to improve their subject lines.
Using the Watson Tone Analyzer from IBM, these e-commerce giants used AI-driven sentiment analysis to refine the tone and language of their messages and create the perfect email subject lines for their unique audiences.
This simple adoption of AI-driven subject line strategies led to significant revenue increases worth millions of dollars.
Interactive: Adobe Marketo Engage
Adobe Marketo Engage uses the power of gen AI to improve email templates through the predictive content capabilities of Adobe Sensei. Ultimately, it enhances buyer targeting and engagement and boosts sales through hyper-personalized email campaigns that efficiently compel customers to make a purchase.
Interactive, an IT company in Australia, uses Marketo Engage to run automated email campaigns and other AI-driven marketing strategies across the board.
When prospects visit Interactive’s website, they accumulate points as they engage in different activities, including visiting different web pages, downloading content, opening emails and requesting information.
Marketo Engage uses this real-time information to create automated lead paths that go from the website to the sales rep and back to the website again. It ensures quick and personalized responses to each prospect’s behavior.
Alongside other Marketo Engage features, this helped Interactive to refine their marketing strategies and become more accurate with their lead targeting, resulting in over 250% sales-accepted leads.
Superhuman AI
With Superhuman, writing consistent and engaging emails has never been easier. All that Superhuman AI email software requires from you is one line of key phrases, and it will throw out a fleshed-out email for you.
And it doesn’t do that blindly.
It reviews your previous emails and works to match your tone, ensuring consistency and precision in all your messaging.
Many marketers and small business owners use Superhuman AI to save time while crafting email content that sells. They also use it to segment their inbox by topics and organize messages.
Steps to Implement AI in Email Marketing
Now that you know the benefits of AI email marketing and some AI email marketing tools, how do you implement AI in email marketing campaigns?
The truth is that you can implement AI at different levels of your marketing campaigns and get positive results.
However, a bottom-up approach guarantees a more in-depth personalization experience for your audience while ensuring consistency and organization across your campaigns.
Here are five (5) steps to effectively implementing AI in email marketing:
For instance, you can have a workflow for first-time website visits, cart abandonment, live chat inquiries, or any other task that needs to be automated in your email marketing process.
You can also use AI email marketing tools to automate your email database cleanup and email responses.
AI uses natural language processing (NLP) and leverages machine learning in marketing to understand the context of an incoming message and generate a response that resonates well with it.
Wrapping Up: AI for Email Marketing
AI is fast becoming an essential tool for email marketing.
Repetitive or tedious tasks like cleaning up your email list, segmenting your audience, and responding to enquiries around the clock are now things that can all be done in a few minutes with email marketing automation.
Email personalization no longer means including the customer’s or prospect’s first name in the email. Customers are getting more hyper-personalized emails with content and recommendations that suit their preferences and needs based on their activities and behaviors.
Overall, email campaigns are now supercharged with continuous optimizations and workflow enhancements, leading to opens and conversions that drive companies’ sales through the roof.
It is clearly not enough to just “know” what AI email marketing is all about.
Further Reading:
- Technologies Powering Virtual Office Spaces
- Empowering Independence: A Guide for the Modern Independent Business Owner
- Maximizing Customer Value: A Guide to Customer Retention Analysis
- Green Marketing Definition: What It Is and How It Works
You have to take the necessary steps to implement it and join the league of future-proofed small businesses using AI to streamline their email marketing campaigns and other business operations.
As a small business, it helps to know that you don’t have to break the bank to implement AI email marketing. Platforms like HubSpot and Mailchimp have some free AI tools you can use to test the waters before diving in.
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