Do you remember JARVIS, Tony Stark's AI assistant? It is quite a sophisticated AI, able to interact with human beings just as a living person. This isn't likely to happen very soon, but AI breakthroughs are surfacing in the marketing world.
According to Statista, 51% of email marketers believed AI-supported email marketing was much more effective than traditional email marketing. Because of its cost-effectiveness and direct approach, many email marketers consider it’ll give their email campaigns a much-needed boost for better results. Read our guide to find the use cases of AI in email marketing and our vision for AI-powered emails.
Table of contents
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 engagement and outcomes.
Artificial intelligence email marketing refers to the same as AI email marketing, so don't get confused with that.
Can AI replace email marketers?
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
Email marketers can use AI to add content blocks, but emotion and empathy are lacking in these tools. So, you can have machine-generated, data-driven email campaigns, but they cannot replace email marketers who help you read that data and humanize it. Email marketers use storytelling to humanize emails, increasing consumer trust and retention. It’s not the same as personalization, which offers an experience tailored to the user's name, shopping behavior, etc. This is why email marketers are here to stay for a long time.
Benefits of AI in email marketing
Below are some short and long-term benefits of incorporating artificial intelligence in email marketing.
Increases revenue
Hotel Chocolat saw positive changes after using AI technology to enhance 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
Decreases costs
AI-powered email marketing solutions make it easier to design winning campaigns, lowering the amount of money spent on advertising. 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.
Extracts large sets of user data
AI extracts actionable patterns from data sets, such as what works across large data sets of high-performing emails. You can analyze that data for programming and reprogramming based on AI experimentation. By discovering the right information about your subscribers, you can prevent bombarding them with bulk generic emails in the future.
Scaling AI email marketing campaigns
Did you know that by 2025, the worldwide AI market will be worth $118.6 billion? More and more brands lately are turning to AI platforms for email communication with customers. This has aided businesses in scaling email marketing campaigns while saving time on sales and FAQ maintenance.
8 ways on how to use AI in email marketing
Here are 8 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%. Natural language processing (NLP) and natural language generation (NLG) are the two technologies that drive AI subject line generators. When a machine reads a text, it is referred to as NLP. As a result, the text is converted into machine-processable and understandable code. On the other hand, when a machine uses that code to generate its own words, it is referred to as NLG. Consider NLP to be the reader and NLG to be the writer.
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.
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. These characteristics can serve as your subject line copywriting benchmark in the future.
Source: Email Experience Council
Mailmodo's free AI email subject line generator helps you write 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. Try it out for yourself!
2. Email personalization
Personalizing the first name of your audience or customer is cool, but have you tried going beyond that? AI can be a powerful way to personalize your email campaigns in many ways. Let's look at some of them here:
Write 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 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. AI email writers can be powerful enough for you to create email content faster.
Take Lavender, for example. Lavender personalizes your outreach email intro by displaying social network updates, funding announcements, tech stack, job listings, and company information of your prospect based on their email address.
Source: Lavender
Personalizing the opening line of 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:
"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."
💡Related guide: Checkout our collection of An Ultimate Guide to Creating Personalized Emails
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
3. Automate repetitive and tedious email operations.
There are several email operations that most email marketers do manually that can be easily done with the help of AI in lesser time and effort. Here is what AI is capable of doing in this scenario:
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. Machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms ensure your email lists are healthy and do not get reported by your email service providers (ESPs). AI-powered 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.
Make smart segmentation
(3) 50% of the surveyors segment their list randomly during an A/B testing campaign based on open rate; This is alarming as right segmentation during A/B testing is essential to create balanced sampling without any bias. pic.twitter.com/FRGGZrrOQX
— Mailmodo (@mailmodo) January 27, 2022
Manually segmenting your email list is laborious, time-consuming, and prone to human mistakes. To automate the process, many marketers turn to AI solutions. Email marketers can use AI to categorize their email lists based on information gathered from existing clients. Purchase history, surfing behavior, and preferences are all included in this data. The AI system uses this information to build email segments and send personalized emails to each of them. Use AI for email marketing automation to make things easier and create automation for a better conversion rate. Thus, AI eliminates the need to guess which products appeal to a certain buyer or what kind of writing they'll enjoy reading.
Automate email responses
Reverting the same custom queries can be tedious for businesses, and you would want to find a way to automate it. Here, AI can be your companion. AI can help you send personalized and automatically generate a response relevant to the email received. It uses NLP and machine learning algorithms to understand the context of the incoming message quickly and generates a response that resonates well with the message. You can also give the tool prompts or instructions on how you want your message to be.
Check out various AI email responders in this guide.
💡Related guide: Checkout our collection of How Can AI Email Automation Streamline Email Operations
4. Customer Success
Customers are your priority, and it's important that you leverage the power of AI to keep them happy so they come back to you again and again. Here's how you can win your customers' hearts with AI:
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 the ideal customer. The next step in the lifecycle is to engage with the potential customers in a way that ensures a good response rate. AI is also used to re-engage existing clients during the final retention stage. It helps you build a direct link with customers throughout their lives, ensuring brand loyalty.
Restructure your email campaign.
With the use of AI-powered tools, you can split down email marketing campaigns into sub-campaigns to maximize inbox delivery. Email privacy has become a significant concern, so email marketers must emphasize email delivery more.
For example, using AI, you can arrange cart abandonment emails for a given time, with a specific frequency, or in reaction to a trigger. Snag our abandoned cart email template to bring back a customer who left without purchasing.
Mailmodo automates reminder emails for users who leave products without purchasing them from your website. Read how Traya got 15% cart recovery rate with our interactive emails.
💡Related guide: Checkout our collection of Abandoned Cart Email Series for eCommerce and D2C Brands
Customize email retargeting
AI helps you fine-tune your email retargeting strategy by distinguishing between customers and sending emails that resonate. 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.
For email marketing tools for different use cases in this guide.
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 helps marketers segment their subscribers based on demographic information such as age, location, purchase history, and specific behavioral signals. Look at our guide on email segmentation to create value-filled email campaigns that will increase your subscriber base.
