If you haven’t looked at your subscriber list retention lately, you may be surprised how many subscribers are churning continuously. There are plenty of options out there for great products, so consumers aren’t sticking around for crappy batch and blast email newsletters anymore. They expect each message in their inbox to be relevant, timely, and valuable… or else they’re leaving.
To be relevant, timely, and valuable, brands must segment, filter, personalize, and optimize email delivery. That’s impossible without the right toolsets, but thankfully, artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating marketers’ ability to develop living, breathing campaigns that continue to optimize themselves with machine learning (ML).
This will enable marketers to send messages at a pace their subscribers are comfortable with, with content that’s both personalized and engaging.
The AI Revolution in Email Marketing
30% of companies all over the world will be using AI in at least one of the sales processes in 2020. By 2035, AI is expected to drive $14 trillion of additional revenue and a 38% rise in profitability!
In fact, 61% of email marketers claim that AI is the most critical aspect of their future data strategy. Here are seven ways that artificial intelligence is improving email marketing.
- Segmentation and Hyperpersonalization: Predictive scoring and audience selection utilize algorithms to hypothesize subscribers’ future behavior and fine-tune the content displayed to them in real-time.
- Subject Line Optimization: AI can facilitate the creation of subject lines that are most likely to resonate with the reader, nudging them to open the email. This eliminates the uncertainty of trial and error when drafting an engaging subject line.
- Email Retargeting: While some customers may respond to your abandonment email sent immediately after the abandonment, others may not be ready to purchase for a week. AI distinguishes between these customers and helps you send your retargeting emails optimally, significantly reducing the cart abandonment rate.
- Automated Send Time Optimization (STO): With the help of AI, brands can finally accomplish the marketing triad—delivering the right message at the right time to the right person. Aren’t too many promotional emails annoying? AI helps calibrate the send time by analyzing the subscribers’ activities, which depict their time preferences.
- AI Automation: AI is not just automation. It goes a step ahead to help in sending more relevant automated emails considering the subscriber’s past interactions with the brand and purchases.
- Better and Easier Channel Optimization: By analyzing the customer’s habits, preferences, and past and predicted behaviors, AI helps determine whether the message would resonate better with an email, push notification, or any other channel. It then sends the message to the appropriate channel.
- Automated Testing: A/B testing, previously a two-dimensional process, has now transcended to an omnichannel hyper-targeting model. You can test several variables in different permutations and combinations. Many systems send a sampling out, reach a statistically valid result, and then send the remaining subscribers the optimized copy.
AI in Email Marketing: Good, Better, Best
We’re not meeting AI’s full potential in email marketing… yet. In a Good, Better, Best approach to explaining AI in email marketing, we can break down the increasing sophistication and impact AI brings to email campaigns. Here’s how it might look:
Good Email and AI Integration
AI’s entry-level capabilities in email marketing can significantly enhance content quality and efficiency. Generative AI can rewrite or suggest variations for email subject lines, preview text, body content, and calls to action based on industry best practices. This helps marketers improve engagement rates with relatively minimal setup and training. With generative AI, companies can test and deploy content that is polished and compelling without needing a dedicated copywriter for every campaign.
Example Impact: A retail brand utilizes generative AI to draft subject lines that A/B test well, leading to an uptick in open rates without requiring the time investment of writing each variant from scratch.
Better Email and AI Integration
As AI is leveraged further, marketers can create dynamically personalized content that responds to each subscriber’s unique profile and preferences. This level incorporates data like browsing history, past purchases, and demographic information to tailor the message and the product recommendations and offers within the email. Dynamic content blocks can change based on location, time of day, and user behavior, making emails more relevant and individualized.
Example Impact: A media platform sends tailored B2C newsletters featuring recommended articles based on a subscriber’s past reading habits, increasing click-through rates (CTR) and boosting on-site engagement.
Best Email and AI Integration
Companies use a proprietary language model in the most advanced applications that understand their specific products, services, and brand voice. The AI doesn’t just craft well-written content—it personalizes messages in a way that resonates deeply with the recipient and feels on-brand. It can also analyze past customer activity and predict future interactions, allowing for hyper-targeted segmentation. This AI-driven strategy doesn’t just improve email engagement; it identifies new customer segments and automates advanced lifecycle marketing based on potential customer behavior patterns.
Example Impact: A B2B company with a proprietary model analyzes each customer’s history both online and offline, then sends personalized, dynamic, and real-time emails on an optimized schedule with relevant, branded tips for increasing efficiency. The AI identifies upsell opportunities and recommends product upgrades with messaging that feels like it’s written by the brand itself, resulting in a marked increase in renewal rates.
Industry Context
While many email marketing platforms have incorporated generative AI, most stop at surface-level content creation. They often fail to deeply integrate brand-specific nuances, past customer behavior, and predictive insights. This leads to a one-size-fits-all approach that misses opportunities for differentiation and nuanced personalization. Brands that adopt AI thoughtfully can deliver campaigns beyond automation and drive conversions by anticipating and responding to customers’ needs. Those who settle for out-of-the-box generative AI miss out on the competitive advantage offered by a truly tailored AI strategy.
By leveraging AI in a more sophisticated and brand-aligned way, marketers can turn their email campaigns into a true extension of the brand experience, fostering stronger customer relationships and more significant growth.
Here’s the full infographic with detailed descriptions of how AI revolutionizes email marketing.
