Email marketing is truly the Sphinx of digital marketing as it keeps reinventing itself with new tech innovations, and this time it’s AI. While email marketing has been around since the 70s, AI became popular as a futuristic concept around the same timeline. However, they both have united 50 years down the line. AI addresses two vastly opposite email marketing aspects: Time needed for building HTML email templates and it’s ROI.
A team of email developers at any organization takes at least one full week to build an HTML email template. On the other hand, email marketing boasts an ROI of $44 against every dollar invested, and it’s the highest of all digital marketing channels. It helps reduce the efforts needed for running targeted campaigns and increase the ROI simultaneously. Today, we are going to discuss how AI helps improve email marketing execution.
#1 Tunes Your Send Timings Continuously
One of the most important factors that impact email open rates and overall engagement is the send time. For instance, sending a promotional email on a Monday morning will reap the lowest possible engagement as most people are busy scanning important work messages. Also, sending a promotional offer on payday sounds a better idea than sending one just a couple of days before one’s salary gets credited.
Machine learning is the best way to optimize send times consistently for individual preferences for reading emails, personal finances, and time zones for different audiences. AI can help build predictive models for different subscriber segments, campaign types, customer journey, and send times.
#2 Prompts Killer Subject Lines And Customizes Content
When we consider the 319.6 billion emails sent daily, content creation emerges as a mammoth challenge. Also, businesses may send around 8 versions of a single email to different mailing list segments. This consumes enormous resources, but AI can reduce the workload significantly.
Using Big Data and Machine Learning can help create prompts for subject lines for each segment using the past data. It aids in creating the best suitable bundles of images, headers, and even content block arrangements. With AI, you can curate these elements to fit the data consumption habits and match the reader’s intent.
#3 Helps Discover And Develop New Segments
Email marketers put tremendous emphasis on advocating segmenting, but its adoption is limited to basic demographics and user activity triggers mostly. But with AI, you can easily discover correlations between different triggers and actions to build dynamic segments. On the other hand, if the customer behavior changes, the algorithms will automatically detect them to accommodate necessary improvements in your segmentation game.
Even if they become obsolete, dynamic segmentation deletes them, thus helping your email marketing evolve continuously. Without AI, most businesses hardly make any changes in once created segments.
#4 Allows Businesses To Send Personalized Offers In-Mail
Promotional offers are one of the most common elements in email marketing campaigns. You can harness AI to send personalized offers to individual users for driving sales proactively. For instance, if you are running an upselling campaign, AI solutions for email marketing can help identify the users who spent $100 last month and send promotional offers for $200 order value while offering $250 worth of merchandise for users who spent say $150.
Of course, their gender, age group, and all other demographics-psychographics will be a part of the AI algorithm analysis, and this will make your offers truly personalized. Catering to individual requirements while sending promotional offers is truly a game-changer for email marketers.
#5 Improves List Hygiene With Active Analysis
Did you know that the average email list churn rate, i.e., the number of people leaving your mailing list, is 56%? On the other hand, many subscribers will stop engaging right after the first email when you send the promised gifts. Low engagement is especially detrimental to your email list hygiene, and it will start affecting your IP reputation and reach large. Thankfully, AI can identify dis-engaged subscribers and run win-back/retention email series.
If they still deny engaging, you easily enable opt-outs for such subscribers to maintain list hygiene. Data-driven decision making consistently for list health issues improves your ROI instead of running campaigns with a large yet dis-engaged mailing list.
#6 Bridging The Gap Between A/B Split Tests And Automation
A/B Split Testing and email marketing automation are arguably two of the best email marketing tactics. AI can bridge the gap between the two as it continuously tests the responses, tracks multiple touchpoints, and builds actionable insights for future emailing efforts. Email marketers can benefit from heavily optimized subject lines, content blocks, test them on their most engaged user base, and execute the campaign- all without pouring in endless hours. Thus, they can play the role of strategists and provide tangible results instead of spending their time doing it manually.
Putting It Together
So far, AI hasn’t become a complete replacement for human intervention, but it rather serves as an assistant that executes iterative processes better than us. All of the above functions are achievable for email developers and marketers, but they aren’t sustainable. In email marketing, AI can become a breakthrough as it enables businesses to follow all best practices at marginal pricing. Thus, you can expect AI to improve email marketing execution and make it accessible to all companies shortly.
Kevin George, the Head of Marketing at Email Uplers – one of the fastest growing custom email design and coding companies, specializes in crafting beautiful email templates, PSD to email conversion and free HTML Email Templates. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz, and breathes email marketing. He is a brand magician who loves to engage & share insights with fellow marketers.