Despite being around for 50 years, email remains one of the most effective and popular digital marketing channels to nurture leads. The reason is obvious – email works. While brand marketers keep adding new tools, tactics and channels to their marketing toolkits, it is email that we, the consumers, have the habit to go through a few times every day.
According to the State of Emails Workflow Report, marketers spend up to 24 hours on average to produce an email campaign, with design, coding and reviews demanding most of the time. Even if a brand uses email to source its revenue, such a campaign production cycle is insanely lengthy – and if a marketer focuses primarily on lead nurturing and newsletter marketing, it becomes really difficult to track and justify email’s ROI.
So how can marketers optimize their efforts when it comes to one of the most important marketing tactics? The good news is that email is not a static technology. Just like many other aspects of how we use the internet, the possibilities of email have grown and evolved. As the availability of Artificial Intelligence increased, machine learning technology has greatly expanded what we can achieve through email marketing, driving conversions and enabling enhanced personalization.
In a nutshell, AI can help email marketers with the following tasks:
- Emotionally Intelligent Individualization
- Smart Customer Modeling and Segmentation
- Workflow Optimization
- Refined Content and Creative
- Predictive Analytics
How AI Is Used in Email Marketing?
The success of an email campaign is often dependent on a marketer’s experience, intuition and patience to run enough tests before learning what works and what doesn’t. Add up the fact that the consumer behavior often changes, which requires to start the learning process over, and you have a good explanation why email production requires such a crazy amount of time.
Luckily, these days are gone. AI can outperform even the most experienced email marketers, make more accurate predictions, and give exquisite recommendations for further improvement.
Here are some of the best use cases for AI in email marketing:
1. Emotionally Intelligent Individualization
Some of the most successful email marketing campaigns include emails that are very well personalized and look like they have been written by someone who is well known to the recipient.
AI technology brings this kind of personalization one step further by enabling emotional intelligence and, thus, individualizing each email. AI analyzes consumer behavior and studies their interests to generate data-driven insights, which include the Archetypical composition of one’s target segments. This makes it possible for brand marketers to create individualized emails that are tailored to each of their subscribers.
2. Smart Customer Modeling and Segmentation
Email marketers use AI to model their customers. In practical terms, this means defining the modeling outcome (e.g. learning the behavior traits of highest LTV customers), leveraging machine learning algorithms to look at various consistent trends (such as demographics, campaign engagement history and purchasing patterns) and using the generated insights to segment the consumer base.
Such customer modeling allows marketers to segment their customers in an emotionally intelligent way and adjust the campaign parameters to suit each segment best.
3. Workflow Optimization
When leveraging AI-generated insights, processes involved in email marketing become faster and more effective.
For instance, email flows can be adjusted for each target segment based on their historical behavior, triggering email with tailored creative and custom messages to optimize the user journey, content deliverability and the overall conversion. Once the AI-generated insights are integrated into the marketing mix, such workflow optimizations can be handled by any of the most popular marketing automation engines.
4. Refined Content and Creative
An offshoot to emotionally intelligent individualization is the AI’s capability to determine content and creative that is the most appealing to a brand’s target segments.
Anything from a subject line and email copy, to the email’s structure and the visuals that are used within it can be scored by AI to determine their general appeal, and how well they correspond to the big five personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
In other words, AI enables marketers to produce and deliver content that is the most appealing to their target audience this way boosting their campaign engagement and conversion.
5. Predictive Analytics
Assisted by the Automated Machine Learning technology, any marketer is able to adjust to the ever changing consumer behavior in seconds by prototyping new predictive models specific to their brand’s needs.
By leveraging AI, marketers are not only able to review and, when needed, adjust their campaign content or individualization automatically, but also capable of incorporating the insights into other broader analyses, such as analyzing cross-channel customer engagement to predict potential churn.
How to Start Using AI in Email Marketing?
If you are able to relate to any of the use cases outlined here and are looking for a way to optimize your email production cycle, it is a perfect time to get started leveraging AI capabilities and make your email marketing more effective.
The quickest and easiest way to accelerate AI adoption is to create your free Genus AI account and start using our Growth Platform, which is capable of modeling your customers, scoring your campaign content and providing guidance on how to engage your customers in an emotionally intelligent way.