While social media marketing is buzzing, emails remain reliable for building brand awareness. Besides being inexpensive, email marketing is an efficient way of announcing sales, re-engaging customers, and pursuing new leads.
Zippia noted 347.3 billion daily sent emails around the world in 2023. While the inboxes are evidently crowded, well-written and targeted emails can still draw exceptional open rates.
But manually emailing a long list of leads and customers can make it easier. Sometimes these emails reach consumers too late, offer irrelevant deals, or need more accurate personalization.
Such mistakes in your email marketing plan waste time, hurt your brand image and cause customer churn. Haphazard emails will compromise your pitch and disengage existing customers.
Want to avoid these pitfalls? We’ve compiled a guide on leveraging AI’s convenience for email marketing, saving time, and driving better ROI.
Benefits of automating email marketing with AI
AI-automated email marketing has several perks, from enhancing customer personalization strategy to optimizing resources. Here are some notable ones:
1. Increased efficiency and time savings
To see tangible results, your emails must reach customers at the right stage of their journey. Manually crafting each marketing email and sending them on schedule is a tedious and error-prone task.
Automation eliminates repetitive tasks from email marketing. This frees up your team’s time and allows them to focus on the big picture. AI-powered email system saves time and resources, streamlining your campaign initiatives and ensuring the best possible results.
With email automation, companies can analyze customer behavior and forecast better. AI analytics also examine campaign performances by benchmarking them against competitors. This lets you improve your marketing initiatives and ROI.
2. Improved targeting and personalization
Personalization is key to successful marketing campaigns. To nudge leads to your desired direction, tailor your emails to their preferences.
But personalization is more than adding your lead’s first name in the email. It depends on understanding your target audience’s struggles and pain points.
AI-automated email campaigns are better equipped to gather real-time customer data. The system learns about the customer’s purchasing behavior and your target market’s pain points, habits, and interests. It automatically determines what offers and recommendations will resonate with your customers.
AI can also help you re-target website visitors with personalized emails. For example, if a customer abandons their cart, the system can send reminders via customized emails. The system records the visitors’ desired products and notifies them of future discounts, updates, and availability.
With precisely targeted emails, you increase the chances of conversion and boost customer retention.
3. Increased open and click-through rates
AI-powered email marketing helps you make small tweaks that add to enormous improvements. The system analyzes customer data, understands what appeals to them, and suggests retable subject lines likely to catch the lead’s attention. This increases open rates.
Automation accurately segments your email list and keeps the email content aligned accordingly. The send time is better suited to customer behavior, increasing engagement. It also suggests better CTAs, which further boosts click-through rates.
Darshan Somashekar, the founder of Backgammon Online, adds, “We use AI to edit our emails and subject lines when we do outreach to see if brands want to advertise on our games. As a result, we’ve seen open rates and responses improve.”
4. Enhanced customer experience
Exceptional customer experience is a prerequisite for any successful business. McKinsey research states that improved customer experience has increased sales revenue by 2-7% and profitability by 1-2%.
Automation in email marketing simplifies and streamlines the customer’s interaction with the business. This directly impacts their experience and creates long-lasting bonds with your brand. Chatbot widgets in your emails resolve queries faster and improve customer satisfaction.
Easily comprehensible and personalized CTAs make it easier for them to take the desired action. It reaches the customer at the right journey stages with relevant offers and information. This lets them make informed choices and enhances CX.
How AI can help automate email marketing
1. Segmentation and personalization
A “one size fits all” attitude does not work in marketing. You can’t approach each customer with the same email template. It must fit their individual needs.
AI-powered systems capture customer data in real time, painting a comprehensive overview of your customer’s needs. It automatically gathers information on past purchases, monitors their online behavior, and divides your contact list accordingly.
Then the system crafts and sends relevant emails with informative content and notifications. Disengaged customers receive content specially designed to pique their interest. Automated follow-up emails pursue quality leads with attractive offers. AI also segments new customers, triggering personalized welcome emails with no delay. Your contacts also get notifications on abandoned carts, new product launches, and restock alerts.
2. A/B testing and optimization
As discussed before, email marketing works best when it’s targeted. Proper A/B testing can optimize your campaigns with accurate insights on what works best for your target market.
Sending two different email variations for each customer segment becomes difficult for a scaling business. AI automates and streamlines the process by emailing relevant but different emails to your segmented list. It also analyzes the gathered results, revealing the right versions for each lead.
For example, an e-commerce marketing manager may have to segregate email lists manually to test the success rate of their email campaign. But with AI-powered email marketing tools, they can automate this process. Plus, these tools use machine learning (ML), which can gradually help optimize email.
Your A/B testing can be as simple as testing different subject lines to compare open rates. Let’s say these are your 2 options-
- Version A: “Shop Now and Save 20% on Your Next Purchase!”
- Version B:“Don’t Miss Out: Limited Time Offer Inside! ⏰”
Based on the open rate of each, you’ll be able to determine what your audience resonates with. Here, it’ll be between putting a number in the subject line versus using an emoji to draw more attention.
3. Content creation
AI suggests content ideas and subject lines based on customer data. You don’t need to go through each lead’s preferences manually. AI does it for you via Natural Language Processing (NLP), creating highly readable and engaging email copies that drive conversions.
AI also generates smart newsletters relevant to each recipient, improving your subscriber engagement. AI content writing tools even suggest how to make AI content undetectable when you use it for larger pieces.
Let’s say you’re running a campaign for your upcoming Spring collection. You can use ChatGPT to help you with your email. For example–
You can even use AI-image editors to enhance your product photos and videos for your emails using tools like Canva, Midjourney or Synthesia.
4. Predictive analytics
AI automates predictive analytics by examining historical data of your previous campaigns and customer response. It can detect surges in demand and identify areas of improvement with no human intervention.
For example, e-commerce brands can use AI tools to analyze customer data and behavior to predict subscribers who’ll make a purchase or abandon their cart. Based on these predictions, they can send personalized emails with targeted content, product recommendations, and special offers to encourage purchasing.
AI can also analyze effective emails for each customer segment and tweak their content and timing accordingly. Such automation saves time and improves email relevance and effectiveness.
5. Automate workflows
Sending the right emails to the right people is tricky without automation. Misnaming a customer can cost you their business.
While a simple automation system can simplify the process, advanced AI implementation takes it up a notch with refined targeting. It learns as your campaign progresses, improving your email marketing over time. Such systems include relevant deals, engaging content, and persuasive welcome emails to the right people at the right time. All you need to do is to set up the right triggers.
Best practices for leveraging AI in email marketing
Want to implement AI in your email marketing? Follow these best practices:
1. Understanding your audience
The secret behind successful marketing campaigns is an audience-centric approach. Begin by understanding your customer’s lifecycle and identifying the ideal buyer.
Focus on their browsing patterns, purchasing history, and preferences on your site. You can create surveys for existing customers and new leads and gather feedback on CX, your current email marketing, offers, newsletters, etc. While you are at it, consider their age, gender, geo-location, hobbies, and pain points. This will help you optimize the AI in email marketing and ensure alignment at every stage.
2. Using data to drive decision-making
Inaccurate data sets will derail your whole email marketing strategy. So, ensure your AI-powered email software uses reliable sources for customer data.
While relying on your gut instinct is sometimes necessary, your primary focus should be on the data. Go through the AI-generated analytics report and take proactive actions on gathered insights. Don’t skip even the most minuscule details and weigh your options for resolution before making any concrete decision.
3. Continuously testing and optimizing
AI brings significant ease to email marketing. But lack of progress tracking mechanisms may lead to stagnant growth.
Monitor your chosen AI software performance after every email campaign to ensure constant improvement. Examine quantifiable results and benchmark them against your competitor’s growth. This lets you see where you stand and what you should improve in your automated email marketing.
If the results don’t reflect steady progress toward your growth, it’s time for an update. Monitor relevant KPIs like open rate, click-through rate, and conversion. Tweak the triggers at regular intervals to measure efficacy.
4. Optimization of email send times using AI algorithms
Marketers know the importance of reaching the customer at the right time. To perfect your email delivery time, fully leverage the AI algorithm.
Deploy your AI email solution to examine the purchase history of existing customers and break the campaign into sub-sections internally. This will structure the queue and maximize delivery via targeted emails.
AI systems will detect the date of purchase and find out the tentative time of their next purchase. Attach reminders with relevant offers, increasing CX and boosting chances of conversion.
Conclusion
For a beginner, AI implementation in email marketing strategy may seem intimidating. But, with the right tools combined with your creative flair, it can revolutionize conversion rates and ROI.
An AI-automated email marketing system:
- Targets the right customer segments at the right time
- Improves user experience
- Eliminates repetitive tasks
- Runs analytics and perfect strategy
- Boosts efficiency
However, what tools you choose for your email campaigns makes a big difference here. Ensure your opted solution accommodates your specific goals, is scalable, integrates with your existing tools, and offers exceptional data security.
To build a base of loyal fans, avoid errors, and increase marketing ROI, go for AI-automated email marketing today.
