Some say that email marketing is dead, but the rise of AI surely proves that this strategy is more alive – and converting – than ever.
Artificial intelligence or AI has taken the internet by storm in the past years. It has since played a huge part in various digital marketing strategies, including email campaigns. More and more marketers and businesses alike are integrating AI tools into their email marketing to speed up the process and achieve better results.
For this post, we’ll discuss how you can use AI for email marketing and why your brand needs to adapt to this new trend fast. Read on to see how you can get started!
The advantages of AI-powered email marketing
You’re probably wondering, why AI in email marketing? While there are fears building up in the proliferation of AI, here’s why it’s something you should embrace it for your digital marketing efforts:
- It saves time. When you use AI to write email campaigns or automate your email marketing, you’re practically saving time and effort. Over time, this will be equivalent to long hours saved and more work done on your marketing team.
- It provides personalization. Your customers are inundated with marketing messages day in and day out. At some point, this level of market saturation, many of your customers will tend to ignore email marketing content. That’s unless you offer personalized and targeted content that AI can easily do.
- It offers easy optimization. Email marketing AI can enhance your campaigns with custom suggestions. For example, an AI tool can suggest better subject lines or assess the quality of your campaigns based on a set of metrics.
- It automates the process. Instead of manually adding customers to a new email journey, you can use an AI email marketing platform to automatically route them to specific campaigns.
- It drives better results. AI helps you understand your customers better and makes it easy for you to send targeted content. This means better results and higher revenue for your company.
- Your competitors are using it. More and more companies are maximizing AI for email management. After all, it helps save time while giving better results – a perfect formula for small to medium-sized businesses.
5 strategies for AI email marketing that actually work
With all the great benefits it could bring, the big question now is this: how can you apply artificial intelligence to email marketing?
Here are some AI strategies for digital marketing that can give your emails a boost:
1. Write an attention-grabbing subject line.
Let’s start at the very first thing your customers see once they receive your email: the subject line.
This is the make-or-break part of your campaign, which serves as the key to conversions later on.
Basically, you want your subject line to be good enough for customers to open the email. It’s so important that about 64% of subscribers will decide either to open or delete your email based on your subject line alone.
So, how can you do it with artificial intelligence? Let’s take Mailchimp’s subject line helper, for example:
As you write your subject line, Mailchimp will provide suggestions for improvement ‘based on best practices’. While it doesn’t write the subject line for you, it provides a solid guide to optimize your copy for higher open rates.
2. Write a personalized copy within minutes
Once your customer has opened the email, it’s now ‘showtime’ for the email content. It’s very important to personalize the email based on your customer’s purchasing behavior, interests, and level of engagement to encourage them to click your CTA (call to action).
However, it’s not always easy to come up with a compelling copy, does it? Good thing you can use AI tools to keep your creative juices flowing with ideas and talking points.
For this, Voila AI can come in handy with pre-set commands based on the copy that you want to write. It can churn email newsletters, blog posts, content ideas, and more within a few seconds:
From there, you can make some minor tweaks and adjust the copy based on your preferred messaging. You can also fine-tune your AI-generated email by typing in various prompts.
Aside from that, you can also use ChatGPT for content ideation by inputting details about your business and what you want to say on your email.
3. Create stylish email graphics on the fly
More often than not, small to medium-sized business owners don’t have the time to sit down and spend hours creating graphics and creatives for their email.
In that case, email marketing AI tools will save the day. For example, Mailchimp, one of the most popular email platforms, has an AI-powered Creative Assistant that can generate style options for your campaigns:
Once you connected your website into your Mailchimp account, you can easily generate different branded templates for various email types. The best thing is you don’t have to do any Photoshop work—you just have to type in your email content and your campaign is almost good to go.
4. Clean up your email list quickly
If you’ve noticed in the previous point, I mentioned that your AI-powered email is almost good to go. I said ‘almost’ because you still have to do one important thing: clean up your email list.
Cleaning up your contact or email list involves deleting invalid, bouncing, or inactive email addresses. This way, you’ll get more accurate results on your analytics later on.
If not, these non-engaging email addresses will ruin your click rate and open rate even if your digital marketing strategies are actually performing well.
However, if you have thousands of contacts on your list, how you can do it fast? Doing it manually is time-consuming, so is there any way you can purge your list quickly?
Well, guess what? AI can do that, too!
AI tools can scrub your email list based on your contacts’ activity. You can delete contacts based on how well they are engaging on your emails, if they’ve already unsubscribed, or if there are duplicate contacts.
5. Automate your upselling or cross-selling
Another great thing about AI and email marketing is that you can easily send product recommendations based on your customers’ initial purchase.
This is a great way to turn your first-time customers into repeat and loyal clients in the long run. At the same time, it allows you to promote your products without having to manually reach out to customers one by one.
You can use an AI tool to analyze your customers previous purchases. From there, you can generate a list of products you can recommend on follow-up emails.
The good thing is that you can also set up an email automation for these follow-up recommendations. That way, when someone makes a purchase on your business, they will enter your email journey right away.
Overall, this AI-powered feature will ensure that you have all bases covered in your marketing. You can get more sales and customers, not to mention that you save a ton of time and effort.
6. Segment your lists for targeted content
Sending out the same email to all your contacts won’t deliver the best possible results. Instead, you need to segment them based on purchasing behavior, preferences, and other demographics.
From there, you can set up email campaigns with personalized content that matches your profile. This will help boost your open rate, click rate, and conversion.
Above all, you can use AI tools to segment your contacts, so you don’t have to sort them out manually. This frees up your team from the laborious task of managing your business’ contact lists, not to mention that AI offers high levels of accuracy.
AI tools for email marketing you should explore
To make the most out of your email campaigns, you should consider adding these AI platforms to your digital marketing toolkit:
1. Mailchimp
If you’re looking for an all-in-one platform for your marketing campaigns, Mailchimp would be a good option. They have AI-powered features that can streamline your business processes.
One of Mailchimp’s key strengths is generative AI, which uses a set of algorithms to produce realistic and unique content.
This makes it easy for brands like yours to generate content, design product emails, automated drip campaigns, and so on. Mailchimp’s AI can also send your campaigns at the ideal time based on your contact’s location and your business niche.
Aside from that, Mailchimp has a drag-and-drop editor that’s easy-peasy even if you’re not much of a tech-savvy.
If you want to get started with Mailchimp, our email marketing services are here to help. We can set up your account, create your campaigns, and maximize all the AI features to make your brand stand out!
2. Seventh Sense
Another email marketing tool that uses AI is Seventh Sense. This platform helps you find out the best sending time for your emails specific to the behavior of each subscriber on your contact list.
If you’re unsure when to send your emails, Seventh Sense can offer a big help. It’s an integrated tool of HubSpot, a major CRM platform used by businesses worldwide.
3. Omnisend
Omnisend is a helpful tool for e-commerce businesses who want to send targeted messages to their contact list. This platform has an SMS marketing platform aside from their email marketing features.
Aside from that, Omnisend offers a bunch of free tools, such as a subject line checker, to fine-tune your email campaigns.
4. ChatGPT
If you’re familiar with AI, you definitely heard of ChatGPT before. This powerhouse tool offers a massive advantage for content ideation, be it for your email’s subject line, email body, and so on.
Aside from email campaigns, ChatGPT can also be a powerful tool for other marketing strategies, such as blogging or social media management.
Limitations of AI in email marketing
As much as artificial intelligence can speed up and automate a huge part of your email marketing efforts, it also comes with some drawbacks. Here’s why you can’t fully rely on AI to run your email campaigns:
- It lacks the human touch. Artificial intelligence has gone to so much advancement, but it still lacks the human empathy and level of personalization. So, while AI tools can write your emails, it’s still important to edit and tweak the copy to make it more appealing to your customers.
- Lack of creativity. AI tools use various algorithms and data to generate content. If you fully rely on it to write your emails, your campaigns will soon sound similar. This will be boring and generic for your customers, which will soon impact your open and click rates.
- Customers prefer real people. If you’re using emails as a main mode of communication to your customers, AI should only be a complementary solution. After all, customers prefer talking to an actual person and not just chatbots or electronically-generated email responses.
- AI still requires human control. Even intelligence systems that can generate thousands of ideas within minutes still need a human at its helm. You still need to feed it with a custom prompt to achieve your desired results.
- Highly reliant on data. The data reliance of AI tools are actually a good thing IF your data is clean. If not, these AI platforms could be the downfall of your campaigns. In that case, make sure that you have sufficient data to feed the ‘machine’ that keeps your email marketing efforts running.
Get expert help for your AI-based email marketing today!
If you want to get started on email marketing this 2024, Top Position is here to help. Our digital marketing agency offers email marketing solutions for small to medium-sized businesses.
Aside from that, we also offer a full digital marketing suite, including web development, lead generation, social media design, video production, and search engine optimization services, to name a few.
Reach out to us to speak with our marketing specialist and learn more about how we can boost your email campaigns!
