AI and The Future of Email Marketing

Email marketing has always been one of the most effective digital marketing strategies because of the low entry barrier and high ROI.

Automated email marketing has many unique benefits, such as personalization, higher conversion rates, and data analysis.

With Artificial Intelligence (AI), marketers can streamline their email marketing processes to minimize guesswork and maximize returns. So, it is no surprise that marketers include AI tools in their everyday marketing campaigns.

However, many have wondered if AI will take over the part of email marketers due to its significant and helpful role in marketing today,

This article explores AI’s current role in email marketing and what it holds for the future of email marketing.

The Effect of AI on Email Marketing

AI (Artificial Intelligence) refers to the varied technologies that analyze, interpret, and use information. AI is influencing the future of marketing in many ways. These include:

●     Personalization

With the number of promotional emails sent daily, brands must look for ways to make their email subscribers open their emails. AI offers brands the chance to personalize emails.

This personalization ranges from simply adding the clients to the mail list down to predicting and aligning their internet behavior with services and products from the brand.

With enough data, AI can accurately predict the type of products a client might need and recommend the best pricing range and delivery method. These allow marketers to send personalized emails leading to better customer engagement and high conversions.

●     Optimization

In the past, email marketing used to be a matter of trial and error. A marketer would apply different strategies and measure their results to pick the most effective option. This approach costs a lot in terms of time and resources.

AI minimizes the guesswork in email marketing. It can suggest the right keywords, draft a compelling email copy, and even find the best delivery time for each subscriber.

It can make all these recommendations by analyzing data from previous email campaigns and other available data points.

Many firms also utilize AI to determine the optimal time to send emails to subscribers based on gender, demographic, and active online time.

●     Automation

Automation is a given feature of AI and plays a significant role in email marketing. With AI, marketers can automate many important yet tedious aspects of email marketing.

For instance, many brands send confirmation emails after a visitor opts to join their email list. This confirmation email ensures that the customer is willing to receive promotional messages from the brand.

AI handles all of these processes. When visitors submit their email, they get a confirmation email in their inbox. Once they confirm their subscription, they also get an onboarding email. The marketer can personalize these emails based on the customer’s name and interests.

●     Segmentation

Segmentation is an essential strategy in email marketing. It helps marketers send personalized messages based on the stage of a customer on the buyer’s journey. Despite the usefulness of this strategy, it is hard, if not impossible, to implement without AI.

AI is responsible for tracking a visitor’s online behavior and generating data points from their interaction with the items on the website. These data points accurately predict the customer’s intent and provide the right nudge to help the customer make a purchase.

AI considers all the stable variables like gender, age, and location and combines them with the dynamic variables like interests, active online time, and recently viewed items.

These data points help marketers segment their email list into categories and send personalized messages to each segment with recommendations tailored to the individual.

Can AI Fully Replace Email Marketers?

The use of Artificial intelligence is steadily increasing in email marketing, and marketers are outsourcing many aspects to AI. That is because AI can analyze and adapt big data faster and more efficiently than humans.

As AI continues to take over significant aspects of email marketing, people wonder if human email marketers will not go extinct in a few decades.

While it is hard to predict the future, we can take clues from available information. AI works mainly as a tool. Humans design the types of campaigns and the times to run them. They define the budget, scope, and goals of the campaigns. They only bring AI to streamline the process and achieve the goals.

AI can create show-stopping subject lines and high-converting content. Still, the human elements (empathy and emotion) are exclusively within the domain of human copywriters.

So, even though data-driven, machine-generated content might be the key to an effective campaign, they cannot thrive without experienced, thoughtful email marketers.

AI works based on data points, so it’s limited. Proficient email marketers can create creative ways to connect with audiences with no data points. 

Aspects of Email Marketing Where AI May Take Over

Although email marketers are still in charge, AI performs better in many areas.

Some of these areas are:

·      Keyword Generation

AI does a far better job choosing the right keywords based on the terms people use in their search. The right keyword assures your reader that you understand their needs and have the required solution.

·      Data Analysis

AI can provide recommendations for increasing CTRs (click through rates), conversion, response, and open rates through data analysis.

These recommendations include the best delivery times, email scheduling, product/service recommendations, and aligning email content with user behaviors.

·      Email Lists

Spam emails and inactive addresses can harm the most effective email marketing strategy. Errors from such addresses can hurt your sender score and deliverability and even get your email blacklisted.

AI tools can prevent such addresses from getting on your email list. It will also scrub any email that goes dormant or becomes suspicious. Although your email list might shrink, you will get better conversions and more accurate results.

Examples of AI-Based Tools

There are a lot of software-as-a-service (SAAS) companies that offer AI-based marketing tools to brands and marketers.

• ai: Jasper is a great AI solution that helps people to create data-driven, AI-created high-converting content.

• chat: Collect.chat is an AI-powered chatbot that responds to your customer’s inquiries and provides personalized experiences. It also collects data to enhance your email marketing campaigns. You can integrate it with email software like Mailchimp.

• email: ActiveCampaign is an all-in-one marketing automation tool. It can help you build an omni channel marketing strategy and specifically with email marketing automation and machine learning.

Conclusion

AI-powered email marketing has come to stay. It is the cheapest and most efficient way to get good results. Combined with a solid email marketing strategy, it can increase customer engagement and boost sales.