What is AI email marketing?
AI email marketing signifies the fusion of technology and communication. This approach employs Artificial Intelligence to enhance email campaigns through personalization and automation. AI tailors content for individual recipients by analyzing user data while automating tasks like segmentation and optimization.
In essence, generative AI empowers marketers to send highly targeted messages efficiently, elevating customer engagement and outcomes.
Can AI replace email marketers?
If you want the short answer, No. I isn't going to replace email marketers. To be honest, it's not meant to do that either. AI is meant to act as a tool that allows email marketers to their processes and their campaigns.
AI can generate content, brainstorm ideas and even analyze performance of the campaigns and suggest changes to optimize future campaigns. But the decision making aspect of the entire process still lies in the hands of the email marketers. They will still be the ones to decide what's best for the recipients and for building trust and engagement.
It's also important to note that AI generates content based on what it has learned from what's publicly available on the internet. This data can be both correct or incorrect. So, the correctness of the AI generated content isn't reliable either. Despite Ai humanizer software getting better and better, [output from AI still requires a human in the loop to ensure that everything aligns well.
AI tools can only write about features and benefits. You're feeding information into these platforms, and the outcome is linear, its features, and benefit-driven. The problem is that people buy based on features, benefits, and emotions.
- The Email Marketing Show Podcast
So, while AI can help email marketers to a great deal by cutting the time and required, it cannot work autonomously and run full fledged email campaigns. The output from AI still requires a human in the loop to ensure that everything aligns well. Additionally, the planning, decision making and even the campaigns require a human touch to build that trust with the recipients.
Benefits of AI in email marketing
Below are some short and long-term benefits of AI email marketing strategy.
1. Increases revenue
It's not shocking that AI helps you increase the overall revenue. Hotel Chocolat saw positive changes after using AI technology to optimize its sending frequency. Their unsubscribe rate dropped by 40%, and they had greater open rates, which resulted in a 25% increase in revenue. This case study proves that AI optimizes your sending frequency to help you generate more ROI.
Source: LinkedIn
2. Decreases costs
AI email marketing solutions make it easier to design winning campaigns, lowering the amount of money you need to spend to keep operations running. This includes the different aspects of email marketing like designing emails, writing email copies, analyzing performance, and so on. According to a 2022 Statista report,51% of respondents saw the cost of their firms' service operations functions reduce by more than 20% after incorporating AI in email marketing.
AI extracts actionable patterns from data sets, such as what makes the high-performing emails work and what causes the failure of campaigns that don't do well. By discovering the right information about your subscribers, you can prevent bombarding them with bulk generic emails in the future. Instead, you can send them optimized and highly relevant emails that interest them. Professionals looking to build these skills can explore free courses with certificate to understand AI-driven data analysis
4. Scales email marketing campaigns
It was predicted that by 2025, the worldwide AI market will be worth $118.6 billion. Now, AI-powered tools are everywhere and they allow email marketers to perform tasks in a fraction of the time and at scale. This allows marketers to create, run and manage email campaigns at scale with a much lesser resource consumption.
10 ways to use AI in email marketing
Here are 10 ways AI is instrumental in redefining the email marketing landscape.
1. Draft compelling subject lines
According to Phrasee, using AI to write email subject lines can increase open rates by 5-10%. Some of the world's most well-known firms, such as Groupon and eBay, have already incorporated AI-driven solutions into their email subject line strategies, resulting in millions of dollars.
Like them, you can use IBM Watson Tone Analyzer to evaluate what emotions and style work best for your product or audience by running each subject line through it.
For instance, the subject line "Hi John, we have a great offer for you" has a high sentiment score and is fairly neutral, encompassing a range of social traits such as conscientiousness, agreeableness, etc.
Source: Email Experience Council
You can also check out Mailmodo's free AI email subject line generator that helps you create optimized email subject lines in seconds. Just set a context, tone, and intent for your email, and this tool helps you generate subject lines that are engaging enough to drive higher open rates.
2. Generate email copy
When sending bulk emails, some businesses choose to use AI writing assistants. It's ideal for businesses with a high number of consumers or clients. AI-email writing tools like AI email writer by Mailmodo, Lyne.ai, Magic Sales Bot, Conversion.ai, Snazzy.ai, Lavender, SmartWriter.ai, and Lola AI can create emails for you based on the topic you specify in no time.
Take Mailmodo, for example. With Mailmodo's AI email writer, you can select the target audience, marketing campaign type, and the tone of the mail and it will generate the email copy for you in seconds.
Take a look at this example of email copy generated by Mailmodo's AI email writer.
Source: Mailmodo
You can see that AI even added email personalization to it. Personalizing your cold emails is key to receiving responses. It demonstrates you've done your homework on your potential client. Here are some instances of personalization in the opening lines of a cold email:
"Just finished reading the case study you wrote for {{customer name}}. It's fantastic how you were able to increase ad conversions on their Facebook page by 15%."
"I was at {{event}} and saw you speak. Enjoyed the unique insights and am looking forward to putting some of those ideas to the test in the coming weeks."
3. Make personalized product recommendations
AI allows brands to track on-site activity and use the information to send customized product suggestions via email. Individual recommendations based on the actual site and product data can be incorporated into emails in real-time.
For example, this email from Endy notified customers of an approaching exclusive sale. They employed AI-powered recommendations to include things the individual client had expressed interest in or comparable to those with whom they had interacted on-site.
Source: Litmus
4. Clean up your email list
AI-powered technology can clean up email databases by removing out-of-date contacts and updating job titles, phone numbers, and other information automatically-improving deliverability across emails in the process.
- Mayuri Bhamare, Director at ACE Software and Web Solutions
Manually going through your email contacts is a time-consuming operation. Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms can ensure your email lists are healthy and do not get reported by your email service providers (ESPs). AI marketing tools clean up email databases by deleting out-of-date contacts and automatically updating job titles, email addresses, contact numbers, and other information, enhancing email deliverability.
5. Make smart segmentation
Manually segmenting your email list is laborious, time-consuming, and prone to human mistakes. In fact, it may even be difficult to decide what segments you want to create from the email list you have. To automate the process, many marketers turn to AI solutions.
Email marketers can use AI to categorize their email lists based on information like purchase history, surfing behavior, and preferences. Some ESPs like Mailmodo have this in-built into their tool. You don't have to fumble with logics to segment your email list.
You can use simple language and ask the the tool to 'create a segment of inactive recipients' or 'recipients who opened the email but didn't click'. It can also give you suggestions for new segments to create.
6. Automate email responses
Reverting custom queries can be tedious for businesses, and AI can be your companion here too. AI can help you send automatically generate and send a pesonalized response to the email received. It uses NLP and machine learning algorithms to understand the context of the incoming message quickly and generates an appropriate response. You can also give the marketing tool prompts or instructions on how you want your message to be in terms of tone, language, style, etc.
7. Understand your customer lifecycle
Recruiting potential clients is the first stage of lifecycle email marketing. Businesses use AI to sift through consumer needs and attributes to identify potential customers and leads that are most likely to convert and target them better.
Likewise, AI can also identify customers that are inactive and create campaigns to re-engage them. It helps you build a direct link with customers throughout their lives, ensuring brand loyalty.
8. Customize email retargeting
AI helps you fine-tune your email retargeting strategy by distinguishing between customers and sending emails that resonate with them. While some buyers may purchase a product immediately after receiving your email, others may not respond to your email for a day or two. This is where AI can help by sending retargeting emails at the most opportune times. You can also include algorithmically selected items in your retargeting email to boost the value of your sales.
We help eCommerce industries send relevant retargeting emails by using predictive insights. To learn more about our process, read our guide on retargeting campaigns.
9. Plan email campaigns
AI ins't just helping in the machincal tasks, it's great for planning and brainstorming as well. There are AI tools out there, like Mailmodo's AI email campaign planner that can generate the idea for your next email marketing campaign. Mailmodo's tool can generate a full multi-email marketing campaign along with the template suggestions for each email.
10. Generate email templates
AI can also generate full-fledged email templates for your email marketing campaigns from a single prompt. You can obviously customize your templates based on the brand guidelines that you have.
Mailmodo's AI template generator let's you input content you plan to add in the email and it generates the template accordingly. Additionally, it allows you to optimize any of your old templates that you might have on the platform with its Remix with AI feature.
Mailmodo’s vision for AI-powered email marketing
Email marketing, being the most affordable and the easiest way to increase traffic, is here to stay, and AI could be a huge booster. AI can combine data analysis, personalization, copywriting, and deployment into one streamlined process that will have an enormous impact.
- Aquibur Rehman, CEO of Mailmodo
As AI in email marketing is more widely adopted for personalization and contact segmentation, email marketers can focus more on strategy and customer experience. Mailmodo is on a mission to enable email marketers to make the most of AI using their tool.
Mailmodo already has already started using AI in multiple ways and here are a few things that Mailmodo does with AI right now:
- Generate subject lines
- Generate email copies
- Create segments
- Generate email templates from scratch
- Optimize older email templates
- Generate a full-fledged email campaign strategy
Additionally, there are many other tools and AI-powered features that we’re working on to make the most of AI in email marketing and make the lives of email marketers easier.
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