Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as one of the most powerful tactics to raise the bar of email marketing campaigns. Effective email marketing is all about delivering the right content to the right people at the right time and AI helps you achieve this. There was a time when manual intervention was needed to craft relevant content for individual subscribers. However, with the advancement of AI and automation workflows, it became easier to send personalized emails based on subscriber behavior. No wonder, it is expected to yield $14 trillion of additional revenue and a 38% increase in profitability by 2035.
Before we look into the details of how to employ AI in email marketing, let’s throw light on basic principles of how it works.
Mechanism of Action of AI
AI is a tool with the help of which the computer can use a given set of data and perform a particular function through trial and error. The three steps in which AI works are:
i. Detect
First of all, AI discovers the most predictive attributes or elements in a set of data to ascertain which ones to consider and which ones to overlook.
ii. Deliberate
AI, then, compares the most predictive attributes and accordingly makes a recommendation or answers a question.
iii. Develop
AI can program and reprogram itself and mature with every iteration. Subsequently, it can modify and assess the data according to information or consensus derived from experiments.
With that said, we shall now discuss how you can adopt AI in your email marketing campaigns.
1. Subject Lines
According to conventional practices, a proficient copywriter would be allotted the task of drafting engaging subject lines, considering the target audience and their buying preferences. AI algorithms have made it possible to evaluate the results of your past email marketing campaigns and improve the subject lines to generate a better open rate and click-through rate.
You can use tools like Phrasee that works on the principle of “Natural Language Processing” to craft subject lines that can grab maximum subscriber attention.
2. Personalized emails
Targeted personalization improves customer engagement rate as suggested by 74% marketers. Predictive analytics helps to create complex algorithms that ultimately enable the creation of unique emails. Through AI, marketers can understand the behavioral patterns of the customers and predict their next purchase. Subsequently, you can use this information to assign predictive scores, thereby eliminating the inconsistencies of orthodox lead scoring method.
With the help of AI, you can build groups of audience who display similar kind of behavior. These groups of predictive audiences can bring higher revenue by enhancing subscriber engagement. Marketo and Salesforce offer such tools that allow you to execute AI-powered email marketing.
3. Email retargeting
Traditionally, marketers used to send out cart abandonment emails to all the customers within the same timeline. AI gives you the liberty to retarget the customers at the right time by considering their behavior and response time. For example: Some customers may respond to a cart abandonment email sent immediately while some others might take the decision to purchase a week after the cart abandonment. AI allows you to differentiate between these customers and send the retargeting emails at an optimal time while cutting down the cart abandonment rate. Salesforce provides a feature known as Commerce Cloud Einstein that proves to be a boon for ecommerce marketers by providing access to detailed predictive insights. These insights can be used to send customized recommendations to customers.
4. Automated testing
Once used as a two-dimensional process, A/B testing has now advanced to an omnichannel hyper-targeting model with the help of which you can carry out complex testing. It lets you test a number of variables in different permutations and combinations. Bandit testing helps you automatically get a hint about what kind of traffic your versions will get. In case it is found that one of the versions is performing better, bandit testig will attempt to increase traffic to that variant and reach to a statistical significance faster.
Wrapping Up
Subject lines, copy, testing, and retargeting – these are the top four elements in which you can incorporate the magic of AI. Besides, AI also lets you reach out to the person with intelligent and more humanized automated emails. So, if you are wondering how you can take your email marketing a step ahead and beat your competitors, AI is the answer for you.
Author bio
Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest growing custom email design and coding companies, and specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and free responsive HTML email templates in addition to providing email automation, campaign management, and data integration & migration services. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.
