As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, marketers are left wondering, how can this actually benefit me? If you aren’t building robots or spaceships (which most marketers aren’t), the opportunity for AI is still prevalent in your current marketing program.
Intelligent email marketing is a great place to start with AI in your marketing campaigns because you can easily implement effective solutions that don’t require extra time to complete. These solutions can create a powerful impact on the bottom line. The good news? The tools necessary for success are available to most marketers.
Keep reading for quick and easy wins for your email marketing campaign.
The marketers that feel like email is outdated aren’t harnessing the power of email marketing AI tools. A study done by Statista shows that email volume continues to climb year after year which results in more opportunity to set yourself apart in your messaging. Email is a channel that is always under your control and there’s a lot of potential within your subscriber list if you strategize the right way.
For marketers, it’s easier than ever for small teams with limited budgets to apply personalization, automate processes, and gather and analyze their data with the right tools.
So, how do we make our email marketing intelligent? We break down intelligent email marketing into five pillars: starting with human intelligence, using tools as needed, having clear objectives and goals, measuring and reviewing results, and adapting efforts based on data.
In this case, we are talking about use cases that would’ve required a human years ago, but now are easier than ever with AI. An intelligent email marketing program can offer you better subject lines, smarter testing, content relevancy, segmentation, optimized send times, and refreshed email lists.
There are tools available today such as Phrasee and Touchstone that utilize AI’s data algorithms and capabilities to rate your subject line or that use natural language generation to produce multiple variances of different subject lines.
We’ve seen workflows that look somewhat like this: if someone visits page x, then follow up with email y. A more advanced and efficient way of doing this would be looking at a consumer’s pattern behavior across channels and making predictions about who would need to reach out to that lead (i.e. sales representative) or if they should be moved to a later stage in the funnel.
Marketers can customize the content in their email campaigns with tools like HubSpot’s Smart Content. Using this, marketers can customize email blasts based on certain characteristics of subscribers. So, you’re sending one email but parts of the email look different depending on the personalization of that recipient.
Send times are crucial to the open rates of your emails. Optimizing these send times allow marketers to personalize on a 1-to-1 level based on when people are most likely to open and engage. Platforms like MailChimp and Seventh Sense allow marketers to optimize email delivery times and frequency for maximum email performance using AI.
When a user hasn’t been active for years or a new lead misspells “Gmail” in their email, a tool that helps you to keep your email list clean can be extremely beneficial. A platform like NeverBounce can identify inactive contacts that are showing patterns of declining engagement that you would want to remove, as well as correcting user input mistakes.
These insights came from Designing an Intelligent Email Marketing Program, an AI Academy for Marketers course presented by Ivan LaBianca of Seventh Sense.
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