Email Marketing has been around forever. There are plenty of articles any of us can Google about Email Marketing. Why is it important, How to master Email Marketing, and so on.

Let’s throw a game-changer in between the equation – Artificial Intelligence!

Yes, you heard it right. Artificial Intelligence is slowly but surely taking over our Email Marketing efforts. Brands & Businesses which are not aligning themselves with the use of Artificial Intelligence in their Email Marketing campaigns are evidently been left behind. This applies to email extensions too.

And rightfully so!

In a world where everything is evolving & getting fine-tuned why should Email Marketing and email marketing tools like web apps and email extensions be any different.

Around 80% of Business professionals strongly believe that Email Marketing is needed for stronger customer retention.

Anything to further enhance its power, it is a no-brainer people are going to jump on it.

So let’s dive right in and see how you can leverage Artificial Intelligence for your Email Marketing efforts.

What is Artificial Intelligence

It is a bundle of many different native technologies like Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Computer Vision & few more.

The bottom line is that all of these technologies combined help machines (programs) perform certain cognitive tasks to the level at which humans perform them or even at a higher level than humans at times.

Ever talked to Alexa or Siri- Yes, Artificial Intelligence is right there in your daily life. They all do what they do using Artificial Intelligence.

AI is used to offer customers new products or services based on their search/viewing histories or patterns. It’s all around us and it has leveled up so many things in our lives already.

It’s time for Email Marketing to make use of AI to enhance its effectiveness.

Why use Artificial Intelligence in Email Marketing

Just like any other area which has been touched by Artificial Intelligence, Email Marketing can be optimized, driven, and be much more effective if done right using AI. For any marketing campaign, there are two really important aspects that need to be optimized and AI does just that for Email Marketing –

1. Reduce Costs

Creating and Winning Email Marketing campaigns becomes super easy & straightforward with AI. It has the potential to save countless man-hours you or your team puts in behind your Email Marketing campaigns to make them a winning proposition. Time is money after all!

2. Increase Revenue

AI can dramatically increase the ROI on your Email Marketing campaigns as it helps to increase the percentage of Open and Click rates driving more money in from your existing campaign than ever before.

AI makes it all possible by incorporating the data points and existing insights available to make every aspect of your campaign optimized for conversion. It effectively reduces the guesswork regarding small but critical parameters of your Email campaigns for which we all are guilty of or have been in the past.

Artificial Intelligence In Email Marketing Best Practices

1. Subject Lines

What really is the point of going through all the efforts of putting together a campaign if no one is going to open your email? Yes, Subject Lines are the first hit point with your customers and if you lose the battle here, your email will never see the light of the day. With the study of historical data of your top-performing Emails as well as your recipient’s behavior trends, AI can ensure your email is at least opened and given a thought about by personalizing Subject Lines.

AI uses machine learning and algorithms to analyze every individual campaign to design subject lines that attract higher click-through rates.

2. Personalization

To significantly boost click-through rates, personalizing every aspect of your Email for the best experience to the end recipient does the job. And no, we are not talking about something as basic as mentioning the first name of the recipient in the first line of the Email. It is more of a personalized campaign based on the interest group of your various email contacts. AI determines the content type user responds to and helps you design your personalized campaigns for them which is the most powerful optimization you can possibly perform for your Email Marketing efforts.

The demand of today’s consumers is very high and they have become increasingly selective. When it comes to Personalization, let’s understand what aspects can be personalized with the help of data collection –

• Name
• Gender
• Geolocation
• Marital Status
• Age
• Profession
• Purchase History
• Cart Behaviour
• Purchase Value
• Time of purchase decision

There can be more data points besides the one mentioned above, but these should cover the basics. With time, you can develop and maintain this data to design personalized campaigns to convert all categories of customers.

An important question that needs to be answered here is where you can collect all these data. After all, the more data you have, the better is the personalization and more successful are your campaigns. Some of the data collection windows are –

• Sign Up Form
• On-Site Quizzes

  

• Product Feedback

  

• Location from devices
• Surveys

  

• Product Voting

  

• Events

  

• Social Media Giveaways

  

• Contests

  

• Web Tracking

3. Optimizing on the GO

AI can help define target data points on various parameters of your Email campaigns. They monitor these data points and continuously help you to tweak your campaign accordingly to ensure the best ROI. Any anomalies are pointed out so that future campaigns can make use of that information effectively.

4. Recommendations

Depending on recent searches, clicked, and viewed products, AI uses algorithms and helps auto-fill the user sections for “Recommended Products”, “Favorites” or “Staff Picks” with products a particular user might be particularly interested in.

5. Newsletters

AI can personalize your newsletters down to the single user by curating content specifically for that particular user based on past data and trends available. This would mean you sending out a personalized newsletter to each and every single contact on your Email List which can skyrocket the engagement levels.

6. Segmentation

You can automate different pricing policies for different customers depending on their purchase pattern and purchase value history. This can significantly increase your conversion rates. Recommending products in the price range of specific customers will increase click-through rates.

7. Retargeting

If done right, Email Retargeting can significantly drop your cart abandonment rate and give a major boost to the sales figures.

AI can help significantly as it helps to distinguish between the customers and let you design an appropriate Retargeting strategy.

8. Deliverability

To improve the overall deliverability of your email campaign so that the maximum number of emails reach their intended audience, AI can do the following for you –

• Send Time Optimization – AI can help you optimize the best/most probable time to send an email at the single user-level ensuring maximum open rates. Customers who prefer opening emails after lunch will receive them post-lunch, morning ones will receive emails in the morning. This is usually achieved by factoring in the open rate and click rate of email campaigns.
• Mini Campaigns – AI can help to segregate your main campaign and develop mini-campaigns for different groups of recipients based on their preferences. This is a very powerful aspect to substantially increase the open and click rates.
• Clean Email Lists – AI can help clean up your Email Lists to make your campaign more effective. AI can update titles/numbers or remove out of date data automatically.

How to use Artificial Intelligence in Email Marketing

Talking about Automation is one thing but let us take a deeper look at how exactly you can incorporate Artificial Intelligence in Email Marketing campaigns.

1. Filling customer feed with relevant content

2. Automate data and customer preference collection based on user behavior

3. Utilize smart blocks to make custom templates to be used when you want

4. System Integrations for contacts info base

5. Create a bulk campaign with specific conditions as triggers

6. Create Workflows

Tools for driving Artificial Intelligence in Email Marketing

By now, we know the power Artificial Intelligence holds for optimizing Email marketing and the immense untapped potential for Business owners. Let us have a look at some of the tools you can use to help you deliver better results when it comes to AI in Email Marketing.

1. Boomtrain

Marketing tool using AI to personalize content for different users on auto mode with the single agenda of increasing engagement and conversions. User behavior is analyzed for various parameters to design a highly personalized email campaign for the user to boost the engagements with the content sent their way. It replaces the work your team might be doing to manually segment the customers on set parameters and designing campaigns for particular segments.

2. Return Path

Handles email deliverability like a pro. They team up with email providers across the globe and ensure a great user experience is delivered. It ensures that wanted email reaches the inbox while spam is kept out of it which significantly increases the trust factor among potential customers. Every Email not delivered is a potential sale loss and Return Path expertly ensures there are no such losses.

3. Atomic Reach

Creates high-quality converting content consistently to ensure big results over time. Atomic Reach gives your content scores on parameters such as structure, emotion, sentiment, readability, and more. When you get such insights from your content, you can easily fine-tune and optimize further to design the near-perfect data-backed content served right at your customer’s inbox.

4. Lead Gnome

This is a reply email mining platform seamlessly integrating with CRM solutions all done on auto mode. Every reply that you garner from your Email Campaign is studied, synchronized with your CRM, and acted upon accordingly. It sorts the replies and moves the auto-replies to a different folder while maintaining a different one for the actual user-generated replies. Integrating with HubSpot, Salesforce, and Oracle this tool enables users to create workflows based on auto triggers such as notifications and follow-ups. Refer to the case study of Quickmobile by Cvent for Lead Gnome in action.

5. Optimail

This replaces Traditional A/B Testing by continually monitoring user behavior and pattern and optimizing the personalization, content, and timing of your email campaigns. It can help to increase engagement, reduce spam, and increase conversions.

6. Seventh Sense

This is an amazing tool that makes sure your emails get to your intended audience at the time they open their email. It really does wonder to the email deliverability by studying the most probable time a user is going to engage with emails and sending your emails to the inbox right at that time. Integrations with Hubspot, Marketo, and all are also an added feature.

Scope of Artificial Intelligence in Email Marketing

A lot of Marketers today do not realize nor understand the power of Artificial Intelligence. If they can only understand how to use AI in their daily roles, productivity can be at an all-time high for just about anyone leveraging AI.

AI can help marketers to better utilize their time and resources by automating daily tasks. Also, with the help of data sets and results thrown out by AI, marketers can hyper optimize their campaigns and exponentially increase the ROI.

It can improve every single aspect of your campaign and finetune your efforts so as to send out a personally curated campaign for each and every single target audience on your list.

Through Emails, marketers can learn about the problems and opportunities in front of them to be leveraged with the help of artificial Intelligence. Learn to back your efforts with proven data and you will already be way ahead of others in the field.

As AI continues to evolve day by day, it is time to leverage this powerful tool and incorporate it into your Email Marketing efforts to stay ahead of the pack.