Artificial Intelligence provides marketers with tools to make better decisions and increase the effectiveness of their campaigns. Here, we will explore the uses of AI in email marketing, an area that is crucial for any company seeking to build bonds of trust and loyalty with its customers.
Email marketing is one of the most widely used marketing tactics. It doesn’t matter if your goal is just to communicate and engage (newsletter), to inform about a recent taken action by the client (transactional), to sell (promotional), or to retain customers. Leveraging AI for email marketing can help you produce more effective campaigns. How?
Subject lines for your emails, target campaigns with enhanced precision, and choose the most adequate timing to deliver your message. All of these actions can be better by AI, leading to improved ROI for your marketing campaigns.
Overall, AI based email marketing allows you to find the way through mazes of complex information to help you reach the main goal of any marketing campaign: striking the right cord at the right time.
But how exactly does AI achieve this? Let’s take a closer look.
How AI is used in email marketing
The concept of Artificial Intelligence encompasses a wide range of different technologies, many of which can have a significant impact on digital marketing strategies and performance. With its data processing capacities, AI technologies allow us to analyze, interpret, and make use of information at a scale that was inconceivable not long ago.
Traditional marketing strategies defined target audiences based on broad characteristics of groups of people. But the introduction of digital technologies such as data mining, Artificial Intelligence (AI), or Machine Learning (ML) has given marketers the tools to measure, track, and classify potential customers in a much more specific manner.
For years now, marketers have valued email marketing as a tactic that helps them reach their audience directly, more frequently, and with better-tailored messages. With AI, email marketing has become more powerful than ever.
AI can perform many of the tasks that are involved in an email marketing campaign. These include:
Optimizing subject lines
A good subject line should be designed to stand out in the cluttered landscape of a receiver’s email inbox. It should also positively predispose potential customers and lead to higher click-through rates. On the contrary, bad subject lines tend to be ignored. Or, even worse, interpreted as spam.
Copywriters and email marketing specialists know how hard it can be to hit the nail on the head with an effective subject line. It usually took long hours of experimentation and thorough analysis. AI has made it much easier.
Using machine learning algorithms, AI analyzes data from previous email marketing campaigns and their performance over time. It then moves on to use this analysis to generate subject lines that are more effective and attract a higher click-through rate.
Fine-tuning personalization
If you want your emails to be opened and improve your conversion rates, you need to make sure they are relevant to those who receive them. Otherwise, even if opened, they are very likely to be deleted.
Today, consumers are aware that they give away tons of personal information as they interact with websites and apps. So it is no wonder that they expect brands to understand them with content that they really care about. A study by Campaign Monitor found that emails with a personalized subject line have 26% more chances of being opened.
AI allows marketers to cut through the noise by creating personalized and engaging content. To achieve this, it uses predictive analytics. Based on machine learning and statistical algorithms, it anticipates how each receiver will react depending on the type of message they receive.
Email marketing personalization strategies can be divided into three different components:
1. Segmentation
The goal of segmentation is to divide the audience into smaller groups in order to develop targeted messages that are more likely to resonate within each group.
AI can help you create more specific segmentations by identifying patterns in users’ behavior. For example, it can determine how likely it is that a certain subscriber opens an email given a series of conditions. This allows you to reach subscribers with the most effective possible content at the best possible time.
2. Automation
As businesses become bigger, providing individualized treatment to each customer becomes more difficult. AI-based email automation allows marketers to send timely and relevant emails to their customers with an individual approach
3. Dynamic content
As explained above, online customers expect more and more that the content they receive is related to their interests. But in times in which we are overflowed with information, our interests change rapidly. Access to real-time data allows AI algorithms to adapt content on the go as the interests of individual customers change and evolve.
Optimizing send times
The impact of a message cannot be dissociated from the context of its reception. This is why choosing the right time to send your emails can be just as important as the content itself.
Before AI, marketers had to rely on a combination of experimentation, analysis, common sense, and intuition to decide on the frequency and timing of emails. The problem with this is that it involves too much guessing and chance.
AI algorithms analyze a series of data points to determine the best time for sending out an email to customers. It can even automate this process at a personalized level. This way, it exponentially increases the chance of your emails being opened and read.
AI-powered email marketing: delivering resonating messages
For years, email has been widely considered the most effective and highest ROI marketing tactic. But when potential customers are receiving hundreds of emails every week, it is crucial to make use of the best available tools to deliver powerful messages that resonate with your target audiences.
In physics, the word resonance describes the response of an object to a sound that shares the same or similar frequency of the natural frequency to the object itself. In marketing, the concept of brand resonance describes the capacity of a company’s message to touch the emotions and hopes of the audience.
Marketers designing email marketing campaigns can now think of AI as the most powerful ally to create trustful, loyal, and emotionally intense bonds with their customers.
If you want to learn more about the latest advances in artificial intelligence and digital technologies, keep reading our blog. Also check our Software Development Services section.
