How to Use Artificial Intelligence to Supercharge Your Email Marketing

At the Marketing AI Institute, we read dozens of articles on artificial intelligence every week to uncover the most valuable ones for our subscribers and we curate them for you here. We call it 3 Links in 3 Minutes. Enjoy!

Nail Your Email Marketing with AI and Personalization

Getting into someone’s inbox isn’t too difficult, but getting them to actually read your email can be extremely challenging. Thanks to artificial intelligence-powered personalization tools, it doesn’t have to be.

Salesforce recently shared in a blog that, according to BrightEdge, 29 percent and 26 percent of marketers consider personalization and artificial intelligence the next big trends in marketing, respectively.

To get you started, they also shared six tips you can incorporate today. Here are a couple of our favorites.

Smart Segmentation is key to increasing email open and click rates. Your subscribers have different demographics, purchase behaviors, and interests and your emails should showcase that. Use machine learning to analyze your subscribers’ purchase patterns and dynamically segment users into separate lists.

Optimized subject lines and body copy are essential in today’s world of email marketing. Intriguing subject lines encourage your subscribers to open your email and enticing copy and CTAs convince them to take a specific action. With AI, you can optimize subject lines and copy based past performance. We recommend Phrasee or Persado to get started.

Check out the full list here.

Solving for Catastrophic Forgetting in Algorithms

According to Futurism, “Catastrophic forgetting is one of the top reasons experts don’t expect to see human-level AI anytime soon.”

What is catastrophic forgetting, you ask? It’s basically what happens on the first day of school every year–you show up without any of the knowledge you accumulated in the school year before.

Something similar happens to algorithms, but it’s worse.

An algorithm is trained to do one thing very well, like recognize faces. However, if we try to train it to multi-task and also recognize emotion, it completely forgets everything it knew about facial recognition, hence catastrophic forgetting.

This is an obstacle scientists have been working to overcome for years. However, Google DeepMind senior research scientist Irina Higgins may be on her way to figuring it out.

Higgins and her team have developed a way for algorithms to “‘imagine’ what the things it encountered in one virtual environment might look like elsewhere.” Basically, this new algorithm is able to think more like a human. Instead of assuming everything it comes across is “new,” it can use background knowledge to connect it to something it has seen in the past.

We haven’t reached “artificial general intelligence” yet, but thanks to Higgins, we are well on our way.

Your Next Job Interview Could be Conducted by an AI-Powered Video Camera

Job interviews are hard. They require lots of preparation, winning over the interviewer(s) and can even be somewhat awkward. Well, that may all be about to change.

According to CBC News, Knockri is an AI startup that uses video recording to interview candidates. In the interview, everything from your answers, sentiment, and eye movement are being analyzed.

It may seem cold and calculated, but it could be the key to ending discrimination within hiring.

Founders Jahanzaib Ansari, Maaz Rana, and Faisal Ahmed developed Knockri as a way to fairly interview all applicants without bias. Companies like IBM have already started utilizing Knockri for consulting and client-facing positions.

After interviews are complete, Knockri creates a short list for employers that only includes candidates’ scores, not their names or faces. The scores are calculated based on how well candidates’ answers fit certain job attributes.

So far, Knockri’s lists have been more diverse than traditional hiring processes, including 17 percent more people of color and six percent more women.