Wanna write emails easier and faster? Generate better subject lines? Check spelling and grammar within emails? Send hyper-personalized emails? Automate the whole email marketing process? Great! Artificial intelligence (AI) is ready to do all this and more.
With AI, you can send the right message to the right people at the right time, enhancing your click-through rates (CTR) and conversions.
Read on to learn about AI tools for email marketing. We’ll examine its importance and how you can use it as part of your email marketing strategy. Before we delve into the specifics of AI for email marketing, let’s go over AI basics.
What is AI?
AI is about making machines mimic humans and perform tasks as we do.
There is a counterpoint in AI technology for everything we do as humans. For instance, machine learning (ML) makes computers learn how we learn. Computer vision makes machines see things like us. Natural language processing (NLP) makes computers understand human language as we speak it.
AI tools for email marketing
AI-based email marketing leverages a combination of technologies to improve and streamline email marketing.
- Machine Learning
- NLP
- Natural language generation (NLG)
- Natural language understanding (NLU)
From creating the email content to predicting the right time to send it, AI email marketing tools are the invisible hands you never knew you needed.
Take a look at the AI-powered email marketing tools available in the market.
Marketers can use these products separately or integrate them with the existing customer relationship management software (CRM) or martech stack. There are also platforms like IBM Watson or H2O.ai that companies use to build their own AI tools for email marketing.
Benefits of AI for email marketing
It’s no secret email marketing is the GOAT of digital marketing. With more than 4 billion email users and 300 billion+ emails sent yearly, it remains the most effective way of reaching out to leads and potential customers. AI makes it much more effective.
You generate an enormous amount of data with every email you send. AI leverages this along with big data. Using ML algorithms, it analyzes your target audience preferences, search history, web, and social media usages. Through the analysis, AI discerns customer behavior patterns and gets actionable insights.
Marketers who use AI for email personalization see 41% higher monthly revenue than those who don’t. Their CTR, on average, is better by 13.4%, and the open rate is almost 8% higher. AI has moved from a “nice-to-have” to a “have-to-have” technology for email marketing. Keep reading to learn how AI does such a good job with email marketing.
- Hyper-personalization: You can craft highly tailored emails – from subject line to content to send time
- On-brand content: AI tools standardize the tone, style, and delivery of content style based on what works and what doesn’t.
- Efficiency & productivity: With AI-powered automation, marketers take action on insights from AI tools rather than waste efforts on time-consuming, mundane tasks.
- Optimization on the go: AI tools assess email performance as they are sent and make real-time changes based on user engagement. And since the AI keeps learning, it adjusts to get the best possible results.
Top use cases of AI for Email Marketing
From what to send to whom and how to send it, here are a few common applications of AI tools for email marketing.
Email content creation: what to send
Content is the most crucial part of email marketing. AI and ML tools are invaluable for creating engaging email content.
AI email body writers
AI writing assistants that write email copy are some of the fastest-evolving AI applications. NLP makes it so computers can understand and generate text like humans. Powered with NLP, AI writing tools create different high-quality content. AI writing tools offer a wide range of email templates as a starting point.
The tools research, generate content ideas, expand text, and check content tone and grammar. SmartWriter, for instance, makes personalized cold outreach emails after combing through the web for information on the recipients. Hypernova Marketing, a cold email lead generation agency used SmartWriter and saw 2x increase in their reply rates.
Some tools check the tone and style of language to ensure the email content is on brand.
Check out this email that Rytr, an AI writing assistant, wrote with just a single-line prompt.
Subject line writers
Like AI email writers, AI subject line generators craft catchy, high-performing subject lines based on user input. All you have to do is provide the keyword, a prompt about tone and email content, and click generate. The tool gives you subject lines that capture your brand tone and style. It also optimizes the number of words and characters in the subject line for maximum clicks.
A split-test of the subject line generated by AI-tool Phrasee saw a 10% higher open rate and a 2% higher click-through rate than human-generated subject lines in an email marketing campaign.
Newsletter creators
Tools like Rasa.io analyze individual preferences and curate email newsletters with relevant in-house and industry content. Using tools like these makes the process faster and effortless.
Align, a SaaS company, used Rasa.io to create a smart weekly newsletter and saw a 37.5% monthly open rate and an 8.3% click-through rate.
Personal copy editor
AI tools like Grammarly and Compose.ai act as personal copy editors. They detect grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure mistakes. Users get suggestions to modify sentence structure and better words to use. This lifts the overall content quality.
Smart Segmentation: whom to send
Too many emails overload our inboxes today. Ensuring yours don’t go to the spam folder depends on who we target. The more targeted the message, the more engagement. Enter AI. It segments audiences based on customer data like clicks, search history, preferences, etc.
Based on the segmentation, AI tools create the email list without separating them manually. Some software gives you a list of contacts you can target based on your past data on your buyer persona.
Epsilon, an advertising company, used H2O.ai to build a machine learning model for smart segmentation of their clients’ buyer lists. Using ML drove their client’s direct mail response rate by 3-5%, where 3% translates into finding an average of 15,000 more highly relevant customers in a campaign.
Email content optimization: how to send
Optimizing the content to suit the audience determines the success of email campaigns. With ML, AI tools find what makes the audience tick and compose emails to get the most conversions and better email deliverability.
Personalize Content
82% of marketing professionals have reported higher opening rates from personalized promotion emails. AI tools like Zeta, Klaviyo, Drift, and Optimail analyze customer data and individualize emails based on that information. This goes beyond just saying “Hi John!”
These AI tools trigger mail campaigns tailored to customer web activity like payment skip, churn risk, or failure to sign up. Imagine a customer adds a product to the cart but doesn’t buy. The AI tool automatically sends a message offering discounts so that the customer completes the purchase. Such personalizations can more than double open rates.
A global resale marketplace used Vue.ai, an AI-based email personalization solution, and saw a 53% uplift in click-to-open rate (CTOR) on emails with Vue.ai recommendations.
A financial service provider in the US used Zeta to segment and personalize emails to inactive credit card holders and drove $1.37 million in incremental sales from a single email campaign.
Test and tweak content
Does the emoji in the subject line work? Does using stat impress more people this time? Does the call-to-action (CTA) button look…pretty?
Marketers traditionally use A/B testing to determine what’s working in an email campaign, but it’s limited to just testing two variants at a time. With AI, marketers can effortlessly do multivariate testing in real-time.
Using engagement data, AI software tests multiple email variants and analyzes what’s working and what’s not working in an email campaign. It then tweaks email content to increase open rates and click-throughs.
For instance, an AI system analyzes the open rates for an email campaign as it rolls out. It finds the subject line with emojis brings higher open rates than those without. With this result, the system automatically switches the subject line to the one with emoji.
Every email element – the body, CTAs, designs, and colors – can be analyzed and refined on the fly. Tools like Phrasee and Persado use AI to optimize subject lines and CTAs, while MailChimp optimizes message, tone, imagery, and email layout.
Virgin Atlantic, for instance, used Phrasee’s AI tool to test and tweak its email marketing campaigns and optimize its brand voice and saw an 11.4%uplit in average open rate and a 15.7% lift in average CTR.
Keep in mind using a content optimization tool is also a fantastic way to ensure your email content will be top-notch and allows you to get more conversions.
Customize promotions & Offers
Several AI tools curate product recommendations, promotions, and offers based on customer data. They produce a personal touch without personal effort.
Amazon uses an AI recommendation engine to suggest products based on user preferences and buying habits via email.
Delivery optimization: when to send
Email send time optimization is not new to email marketers. We estimate and schedule emails based on time zones and past email campaigns. AI makes send time optimization a breeze. They analyze historical email engagement data and predict optimal send times. They also refine the frequency of emails for each recipient so they get as much of a spam-free experience as possible.
Revulytics, for instance, used Seventh Sense to optimize its send time and saw a 44% increase in email open rates, and a 4.5% increase in CTR.
AI email marketing automation
From finding prospects and segmenting them to triggering personal emails and follow-ups, AI-powered email automation tools help you craft successful email campaigns. AI platforms analyze customer data across channels, tracking them from their entry and first interaction with the brand to their current stage in the customer journey.
Several email marketing automation software such as MailChimp, Klaviyo, Hubspot, and ActiveCampaign offer features like these.
Maison Miru, an online jewelry shop, saw a 190%+increase in email subscribers since automating its email marketing with Klaviyo.
Advanced AI tools detect intent in customer emails using sentiment analysis, identify urgent and high-value emails, and trigger the best course of action. You can easily connect these tools with your current marketing stack or other AI tools for sales in a few clicks.
Related Content
- How to Use Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing
- AI Robots Are Coming For Your Job – The Rise of AI in Business
- 5 Radical Ways AI Is Making Waves On Social Media
TL;DR: Use AI, boost conversions
If you want your marketing emails to do their best work, leverage AI tools. With AI, you can
- generate email content, including subject line, and email body
- edit email content automatically
- segments your audience
- hyper-personalizes email with offers
- provide custom recommendations
- Tests and tweaks email content
- optimize email delivery
- automate your entire email marketing process
With this, you not only lift your inbox placement, impressions, opens, clicks, and conversions but also your return on your email marketing investments.
So, what are you waiting for? Choose your AI weapon and boost your conversion.
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Written by our guest writer Soundarya Jayaraman, a content community writer at G2, the largest software marketplace.
She loves to learn and write about the latest technologies and how they help businesses. When she is not writing, you can find her painting or reading.
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