AI in email marketing: tools, best practices, and benefits

AI is becoming more and extra integrated into our lives, simplifying daily interactions with work tasks and planning. That’s what we say, “You are {role}. Your {task} is {help me}”.

Email is an evergreen acquisition channel. The average open rate for branded emails is 21%, which is good for businesses of all sizes. Email can be a great channel for nurturing leads into customers and can also help with customer retention by keeping your brand fresh.

AI is helping email marketing professionals in many ways, but it’s still evolving. Marketers need to answer plenty of questions before fully taking advantage of the technology. How do we integrate AI into our strategy? How will we know AI will target customers the way we want?

What is AI in email marketing?

AI in email marketing uses platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, etc., that utilize machine learning algorithms to personalize content, determine the best send times, segment and analyze audiences, generate content ideas, remove spam-triggering words from content, etc.

While predictive AI provides insights based on historical data, generative AI can use this information to create new, relevant content or solutions based on user needs at speed and scale.

They collaborate to automate, optimize, and personalize the email marketing process. Both aim to improve email engagement and customer satisfaction.

AI is embedded in many marketing platforms. As long as you understand how the technology works, it can help you optimize and deliver great email marketing campaigns. For example, AI can assign a lead score indicating the conversion likelihood by analyzing a customer’s response to various email campaigns and website interactions.

AI can also provide insights into the potential revenue generated by each customer over their lifetime with the brand. You can also prompt AI to create profiles of lookalike audiences, enabling you to expand your reach to new prospects who are more likely to engage and convert.

How can AI help boost email marketing performance?

Generally, generative AI is where “creativity meets innovation and personalization takes center stage.” They’ve tapped into its ability to create natural language-based segments for more nuanced messaging.

By identifying customers' preferred communication patterns, you can segment them to deliver personalized, targeted content at scale. Leveraging AI boosts your ability to understand and address customer preferences effectively. This not only improves customer experiences but also ensures they are inclusive, reflecting a diverse range of choices.

By analyzing historical customer engagement data like open, click-through, and conversion rates, predictive AI can determine the optimal times to send an email or a campaign. This ensures subscribers receive emails based on their behaviour, boosting engagement or increasing the chances that your email will be opened by someone who does not know your brand.

You should always do A/B testing for your emails, a strategy where you provide different email versions to your audience to help you figure out which variation performs better. The responses readers take are clear-cut, meaning they choose between two-option reactions or actions, such as opening or not opening an email.

Using AI to test email subject lines helps you identify which drives higher engagement rates. It also maximizes open and clickthrough rates, allowing you to refine your messaging and email design - discovering what resonates most with your audience.

You can significantly boost your A/B testing efforts using AI to generate more ideas faster.

What are the challenges with AI in email marketing?

AI in email marketing offers significant potential, but there are also several challenges:

1. Data Quality and Quantity: AI relies heavily on data to function effectively. Inaccurate, incomplete, or biased data can lead to poor decision-making and incorrect predictions. Ensuring the data used for training AI models is clean and comprehensive is a significant challenge.

2. Personalization Complexity: While AI stands out in personalizing email content, creating meaningful, dynamic, and relevant content that resonates with diverse audience segments can be difficult. It requires understanding customer behaviors, needs, and email engagement data.

3. Human Touch: AI content might lack human touch, sometimes making emails feel impersonal or robotic. Seeking the right balance between AI content and personalized, human-driven content is crucial, so you need to be attentive to content you generate and always double-check it.

4. Over-reliance on AI: AI can automate many tasks, but over-relying on it without human oversight can lead to errors. For example, an AI system may send an email at a time or to a group that doesn't match the marketer's intended audience, resulting in lower engagement.

5. Continuous Learning: AI requires constant learning and training to stay effective. As customer preferences and behaviors evolve, AI must be regularly updated to maintain relevance and accuracy.

And the usage of AI for complex tasks requires technical knowledge and prompt engineering skills.

How can AI help with my email content?

AI enhances your email content by providing personalized messages. For instance, a marketer at a clothing retailer can design an email featuring product recommendations based on customer purchases and browsing behavior. AI can then generate ten variations of that email tailored to different customer segments.

With all that email content, you can now implement one-to-one personalization. Ensure your AI knows the data and customer engagement patterns to achieve the best results. Leverage historical data from your CRM system to create dynamic content, offers, and recommendations tailored to each customer.

How does AI in email marketing improve ROI over time?

AI models are designed to extract insights from every customer interaction. Their algorithms are constantly developing, and their context grows, helping you achieve improved results in A/B email testing and other campaigns.

AI in analytics can help you check across your entire email dataset. Integrate data from other sources to achieve more precise results: customer interactions from email, website, and purchases. AI will analyze needs and trends to provide deeper insights.

With your customer base’s specific patterns, tendencies, and connections identified, you’re that much closer to being able to segment them. It’s easier to target communication with segmented audiences.

AI-powered content boosts email engagement and increases click-through rates. By personalizing emails, AI ensures content resonates with the recipient, saving you thousands of hours, money, and driving higher conversions.

What are the best practices for using AI in email marketing?

There’s no doubt AI email marketing is the wave of the future. Here are some AI fundamentals you can’t afford to skip:

Start by building an ethical, strategic, and technological foundation. This means implementing transparent data practices, ensuring data privacy compliance, and fostering a culture of ethical AI usage internally.

A few other tips:

• Start with embedded, no-code AI features like send-time optimization, content selection, and subject line testing. Gradually move to creating multi-variant emails, offering diverse content tailored to specific customer segments.
• Explore real-time personalization, adjusting email content based on immediate customer behaviors and preferences. Then, build custom AI models suited to your business’s unique needs.
• Use your email data as the foundation. Combine insights from marketing, sales, commerce, and service to build richer customer profiles.
• Leverage AI for personalization to segment your audience more effectively.
• Experiment with prompting AI to generate fresh, creative content.
• For A/B email testing, avoid testing multiple elements at once. Ensure you have a control group to measure results accurately.
• Establish a system for analytics, iteration, and retargeting. This should link email performance with web and app conversions, as well as commerce and sales data, to maximize business impact.

Conclusion

The future of AI in email marketing looks promising, with advancements that will make campaigns more personalized, efficient, and impactful.

As AI continues to evolve, it will enable even deeper levels of customer segmentation and hyper-targeted messaging, allowing brands to create unique experiences for each recipient.

Predictive analytics will become more refined, helping marketers forecast customer behavior more accurately and optimize email content for maximum engagement.

We can also see a trend in increasing integration with other technologies, such as chatbots, voice assistants, and video avatars, creating a more integrated, cross-channel experience.

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Tools (in the arbitrary order)

• ActiveCampaign
• Brevo
• MailerLite
• Klaviyo
• Ortto
• HubSpot
• GetResponse
• Drip
• MailChimp

FAQ

1. What is AI in email marketing?
   • AI in email marketing uses machine learning algorithms to personalize content, segment audiences, and automate email marketing tasks. It leverages tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and other platforms to analyze customer data and improve engagement.
2. How can AI help boost email marketing performance?
   • AI can optimize email delivery by predicting the best times to send emails, segmenting audiences for personalized content, and testing different subject lines to improve open and click-through rates. It also aids in creating more relevant content for diverse customer segments.
3. What are the challenges with AI in email marketing?
   • Challenges include managing data quality and quantity, ensuring meaningful personalization, maintaining a human touch in content, avoiding over-reliance on AI, and ensuring continuous learning to keep up with evolving customer behaviors.
4. How can AI help with my email content?
   • AI can generate personalized email content based on customer behavior, create variations of emails for different segments, and help achieve one-to-one personalization by utilizing customer data and engagement patterns.
5. How does AI in email marketing improve ROI over time?
   • AI improves ROI by increasing engagement and conversions through personalized content, optimizing email performance, and providing deeper insights into customer behavior. Over time, AI models refine their algorithms, leading to better targeting and segmentation.
6. What are the best practices for using AI in email marketing?
   • Best practices include using no-code AI tools for basic functions like send-time optimization and subject line testing, personalizing content in real time, and leveraging AI for A/B testing. Additionally, building a foundation for ethical data use and privacy compliance is essential.
7. What’s ahead for AI email marketing?
   • The future of AI in email marketing will bring even more personalized and efficient campaigns, with advancements in predictive analytics, customer segmentation, and cross-channel integrations. Tools like chatbots and video avatars will enhance the customer experience further.
8. What are some popular AI email marketing tools?
   • Some popular tools include ActiveCampaign, Brevo, MailerLite, Klaviyo, HubSpot, GetResponse, Drip, and MailChimp. These platforms offer AI-powered features for optimizing email campaigns and improving customer engagement.
9. How does AI help with A/B testing in email marketing?
   • AI enhances A/B testing by quickly generating multiple variations of emails, testing different subject lines and content, and analyzing results. This helps marketers identify the most effective strategies for increasing open and click-through rates.
10. Can AI help with customer retention through email marketing?

• Yes, AI can help retain customers by automating personalized email campaigns that keep the brand top of mind, sending relevant content based on past interactions, and ensuring emails are timely and engaging.

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