Michael Epps Utley {kind=image/jpg}
Just a few short years ago, email marketing seemed dead. People’s inboxes were overloaded with emails they didn’t want or just didn’t pay attention to. Eventually, the vast majority of marketing emails were relegated to the junk bin.
The spam problem persists, but email is far from dead. With email marketing, businesses own their data (their list of email addresses) and can cut through the ever-changing algorithmic minefield set by Google and its competitors. And thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), email marketing has become easier than ever to keep up, allowing businesses to target campaigns to the specific needs of individual consumers.
Put simply, a personal email is the new cold outbound.
This guide explains how AI can improve all aspects of your email marketing, from generating messages to optimizing performance.
AI in Email Marketing: The Basics
Artificial intelligence in email marketing uses machine learning to personalize content, optimize send times, segment audiences, score leads, maximize lifetime customer value, and deliver a better, more effective email marketing experience.
Predictive AI provides email-related insights based on historical data. Generative AI goes beyond this, leveraging insights to generate emails and campaigns tailored to specific user needs at speed and scale. The two types of AI work together to automate, optimize, and personalize the email marketing process.
How AI in Email Marketing Improves Performance
As AI learns about the people on your email list, it enables you to segment them and deliver highly personalized, targeted content at scale. By using AI, you increase your chances of understanding and meeting their needs in your email communications. For instance, a general healthcare practitioner could use AI to send information about gerontological medicine to seniors and pediatric tips to parents (always staying within HIPAA and privacy regulations, of course).
With its ability to analyze historical customer engagement patterns (such as open, click-through, and conversion rates), predictive AI can help identify the best times to send emails to different people on your list. When people receive emails tailored to their patterns and preferences, it reduces email fatigue and increases engagement and activity.
AI can also play a big role in A/B testing, delivering different email variations to your subscribers to help identify which perform better. AI tools can provide a quick read on performance, allowing you to leverage better variations more quickly.
AI and Email Content
AI can help in the email development process, as well. It helps create messages and select images, colors, and design elements that resonate with different segments of your target audience. AI can also be valuable for generating ideas and outlines and for personalizing messaging. For instance, it can customize a single email to recommend different products and services based on previous purchase habits and likelihood of buying more from your company. Marketers can prompt AI to quickly create many new variations of an original email to cater to different consumer segments.
The key with using AI to develop email content is to always maintain human oversight. Email recipients may be getting more used to copy and images that appear AI-generated (and others might not recognize the difference), but many will recoil if they notice the emails they’re receiving aren’t accurate or personalized to their needs.
One of the most effective ways to integrate AI into your email marketing process is to provide the tool you’re using with a set of parameters as a foundation for the copy and imagery it produces (think of this like a template). Feed your AI model brand guidelines (fonts, colors, tone of voice, etc.), audience information, previously written copy, and anything else that might be relevant for creating your email campaigns. Then, refine each output as needed.
Also, based on how your subscribers interact with your marketing and sales efforts, AI can determine the next best email to move them forward in the marketing and sales process. Your AI-powered email content now aligns with your specific customer preferences and business goals, making it easier for you to tailor your messaging.
Making the most of AI in email content creation can simultaneously streamline the process, scale customization, and improve results. Just remember to keep a human in the loop in all your marketing activities.
Challenges Using AI in Email Marketing
Of course, there are clear benefits to using AI in email marketing, but there are also significant challenges and consequences if you don’t use it correctly. Here are some common problems.
If not handled correctly, AI may not learn quickly enough to keep pace with changing consumer behavior. If AI does not keep up with thinking patterns, you may serve up messages too quickly or slowly to close a deal, or send meaningless emails that could make people unsubscribe (remember: human in the loop).
Ethical concerns related to data privacy, security, and consumer trust require specialized legal and compliance attention. Make sure you involve appropriate legal and compliance people in your AI-powered email marketing campaigns.
Technical expertise is essential to use AI in emails successfully. Either get training, hire experienced staff, or work with email marketing experts like those at GoEpps, who understand the intricacies of leveraging AI in email marketing.
Using AI in email marketing requires a solid data foundation and knowledge of how to leverage it. This is another situation where you will need to get training, hire an expert, or partner with an experienced agency to ensure you optimize the data generated by AI in email platforms.
AI in Email Marketing Improves ROI
AI models can be trained to deliver insights from every customer interaction. Their algorithms continuously adapt and learn with each interaction, so you’re able to get better results for your email marketing efforts now and in the future.
AI email analytics can be allowed to connect with your entire dataset, not just what is accessible through your email platform. It combines information about customer interactions across email, website, and purchase channels—analyzing preferences and trends to identify future opportunities.
Best Practices for Leveraging AI in Email Marketing
Here are some best practices for leveraging AI in your emails.
Build an ethical, strategic, and technological foundation by implementing transparent data practices, ensuring data privacy compliance, and fostering a culture of ethical AI usage within your organization.
Establish clear goals and plans for how you want to apply artificial intelligence in email marketing. Having a roadmap will help keep your program on track.
Start by taking advantage of AI features like send-time optimization, content selection, and subject line testing. Work up to creating multi-variant emails that allow for diverse content versions tailored to specific customer segments.
Leverage real-time personalization to automatically tailor email content that aligns with customer behaviors and preferences.
Start simple by just leveraging your email data. Then move on to using additional data sources to create a broader picture of each customer across marketing, sales, and service. The customer insights you get from integrating additional data will help you develop more personalized emails.
Try out different ways to prompt AI to generate fresh content and ideas. Your AI output is only as good as your input.
When you do A/B email testing, never test multiple things at once. It’s important to ensure you have a control group so you can clearly understand what is affecting the results.
Go advanced and explore the possibilities of building custom AI models tailored to your unique business needs.
Leverage these tips to help build a successful AI-powered email program.
AI Email Marketing: The Final Word
AI can help ensure consumers open and read your emails. It has moved email from a runner-up marketing platform to a leader. From creating content to testing performance, AI can help identify the best ways to improve your email marketing.
AI has transformed cold outbound email from manual, mass-blast templates into hyper-researched, automated, and super-targeted campaigns. Instead of writing emails manually, marketers now use AI for deep account research, dynamic buyer-intent profiling, optimized sending times, and behavior-based follow-up sequences.
If you are finding it challenging to master the AI email marketing game, contact GoEpps to get started. We can help you bring your email marketing up to date and make it more effective.
