Email marketing is all about creating effective, accessible emails, and email marketers are always looking for innovative ways to boost their email marketing metrics. Marketers have tried to personalize their emails through tactics like using the receiver's first name in the subject line, but ultimately, these tactics just aren't enough.
As technology advances, AI is being integrated into many of the platforms we use every day — and email is no exception. It's become imperative to implement AI in your email marketing strategy to send more relevant emails that resonate better with your subscribers, thereby propelling the performance of your campaigns.
The Current State of Email Marketing
The modern-day email marketer analyzes past email metrics and, based on the insights gathered through these details, constantly revamps their email marketing strategy. They collect information about the subscriber’s demographics, past purchases, products searched for, total purchase value and more to enable more effective email personalization.
Scope with AI
Artificial intelligence is a technique that allows the computer to perform a particular function on the basis of the given data through trial and error. AI uses the three Ds: Detect, Deliberate and Develop.
- Detect: Discover the most predictive attributes or elements in a set of data.
- Deliberate: Weigh the most predictive attributes in comparison to each other and answer a question or share a recommendation.
- Develop: Mature with each iteration and alter the data based on the information collected after experimentation.
Four Ways AI Makes Your Emails Smarter
1. Allow for improved segmentation
As your business grows, it becomes difficult to manage all of your data and keep it organized. Artificial intelligence allows you to segment your user base and maintain the data more efficiently. By recognizing users who share similar buyer personas and categorizing them accordingly, AI systems can enhance the click-through rates of your email campaigns and drive better email conversions.
2. Build more personalized emails
The algorithms of artificial intelligence monitor the demographics, browsing behavior, purchases and other on-site activities that visitors to your website might take. Because of this, AI can help you personalize the images, placement of design elements and calls-to-action in your emails. It drives a more pleasant customer experience by creating the kind of emails the subscriber expects and prompts them to take the desired action.
3. Send the right content at the right time to the right people
Artificial intelligence helps marketers understand what kind of information appeals the most to their target audience, considering multiple variables. AI-powered tools utilize natural language processing to create email subject lines, body copy and CTAs in such a way that they seem to be drafted by humans. They abide by the tone and language of the brand to create cognitive and consistent content.
For example: Phrasee is an artificial intelligence platform that helps in drafting better subject lines for your emails after studying your brand personality and past email metrics. And as we all know: The better the subject lines, the better the email open rate.
4. Carry out efficient A/B testing
With AI-powered platforms, you can create better tests that let you identify the trends and strategies working the best for your subscribers. You can then make the necessary amendments considering the conclusion derived from AI.
You can A/B test the subject line, email copy, CTA placement, email design and visual elements. Consequently, you will be able to create better emails that help you achieve that email metrics goal.
What Tools Currently Exist for Artificial Intelligence
You can use a number of tools to facilitate artificial intelligence in your email marketing strategy. Here’s a comprehensive list to make things easy for you.
1. MailChimp: Many features like send time optimization systems, A/B testing tools and personalization come with MailChimp. They optimize the email marketing processes and make your campaigns successful.
2. Automizy: Automizy automates the email workflows that create dynamic and personalized user experiences. It works with split testing and tracking metrics for regular iterations in your email campaigns.
3. Drip: Drip lets you recognize the users who are most engaged with your content and keeps track of their actions on your website.
4. Seg: Segmenting users and targeting them according to their browsing history and past purchases can be best done with Seg, an extension of MailChimp.
5. Google's Cloud Prediction API: Through this API, you analyze your data and make precise predictions. Moreover, you can also assess the customer’s sentiments, build recommendations and track the user’s behavior.
6. Microsoft Azure's API: The artificial intelligence API by Microsoft Azure lets you build and train machine learning models, and then select the best algorithms taking into account the campaign requirements.
7. Amazon's API: Powerful and scalable applications for content personalization, customer churn prediction and list segmentation can be built through this API.
AI Case Studies
Amazon
Ecommerce businesses like Amazon have observed great results by creating a personal shopping experience for the customer. It uses an artificial intelligence platform that helps in delivering highly relevant and personalized emails with engaging offers and product recommendations. This is known as behavioral target marketing and Amazon has used it efficiently in their email marketing campaigns.
Have a look at the email example below.
Netflix
Netflix uses artificial intelligence algorithms that scrutinize the data generated by sources such as the watching list of the viewer. The recommendation engine analyzes this data and sends out most relevant recommendations for individual users, which significantly helped to increase subscriber engagement.
Key Takeaway
Artificial intelligence finds out customer details and determines how often the customer should be notified about promotional offers. It has made email marketing much simpler for the marketer and adds value to the emails beyond discounts. Marketers should embrace it — but continue to leverage general email best practices in the process.
