8 Ways to Leverage AI in Email Marketing For Better Campaigns

Do you remember JARVIS, Tony Stark's AI assistant? It is quite a sophisticated AI, able to interact with human beings just as a living person. This isn't likely to happen very soon, but AI breakthroughs are surfacing up in the marketing world.

Artificial intelligence is vital in the realm of marketing, especially email marketing. Because of its cost-effectiveness and direct approach, many email marketers consider it’ll give their email campaigns a much-needed boost for better results. Read our guide to find the use cases of AI in email marketing and our vision for AI-powered emails.

Table of contents

• Can AI replace email marketers?

• Benefits of AI in email marketing

• 8 ways to use AI in email marketing

  • 1. Draft compelling subject lines
  • 2. Personalize your email copy
  • 3. Restructure your email campaign
  • 4. Clean up your email list
  • 5. Make smart segmentation
  • 6. Understand your customer lifecycle
  • 7. Customize email retargeting
  • 8. Make product recommendations

• Mailmodo’s vision for AI-powered email marketing

Can AI replace email marketers?

AI tools can only write about features and benefits. You're feeding information into these platforms, and the outcome is linear, it's features, and benefit-driven. The problem is that people don't buy just on features and benefits - they also buy on emotion. - The Email Marketing Show Podcast

Email marketers can use AI to add content blocks, but emotion and empathy are lacking in these tools. So, you can have machine-generated, data-driven email campaigns, but they cannot replace email marketers who help you read that data and humanize it. Email marketers use storytelling to humanize emails, which in turn increases consumer trust and retention. It’s not the same as personalization, which offers an experience tailored to the user's name, shopping behaviour, etc. This is why email marketers are here to stay for a long time.

Benefits of AI in email marketing

We’ve listed below some short and long-term benefits of incorporating AI in email marketing

• Increases revenue

Hotel Chocolat saw positive changes after using the right AI tool to enhance their sending frequency. Their unsubscribe rate dropped by 40% and they had greater open rates, which resulted in a 25% increase in revenue. This case study is proof that AI optimizes your sending frequency to help you generate more ROI.

Source: LinkedIn

• Decreases costs

AI-powered email marketing solutions make it easier to design winning campaigns, lowering the amount of money spent on advertising. According to a 2022 Statista report, 51% of respondents saw the cost of their firms' service operations functions reduce by more than 20% after incorporating AI in email marketing.

• Extracts large sets of user data

AI extracts actionable patterns from data sets, such as what works across large sets of data of high-performing emails. Based on AI experimentation, you can analyze that data for programming and reprogramming. By discovering the right information about your subscribers, you can prevent bombarding them with bulk generic emails in the future.

• Scaling AI email marketing campaigns

Did you know that by 2025, the worldwide AI market is predicted to be worth $118.6 billion? More and more brands lately are turning to AI platforms for email communication with customers. This has aided businesses in scaling email marketing campaigns while saving time on sales and FAQ maintenance.

8 ways to use AI in email marketing

Here are 8 ways AI is instrumental in redefining the email marketing landscape.

1. Draft compelling subject lines

According to Phrasee, using AI to write email subject lines can result in a 5-10% increase in open rates. Natural language processing (NLP) and natural language generation (NLG) are the two technologies that drive AI subject line generators. When a machine reads a text, it is referred to as NLP. As a result, the text is converted into machine-processable and understandable code. On the other hand, when a machine uses that code to generate its own words, it is referred to as NLG. Consider NLP to be the reader and NLG to be the writer.

Some of the world's most well-known firms, such as Groupon and eBay, have already incorporated AI-driven solutions into their email subject line strategies, resulting in millions of dollars. Like them, you can use IBM Watson Tone Analyzer to evaluate what types of emotions and style work best for your product or audience by running each subject line through it.

The subject line "Hi John, we have a great offer for you" has a high sentiment score and is fairly neutral, encompassing a range of social traits such as conscientiousness, agreeableness, etc. These characteristics can serve as your subject line copywriting benchmark in the future.

Source: Email Experience Council

2. Personalize your email copy

When sending bulk emails, some businesses choose to use AI writing assistants. It's ideal for businesses with a high number of consumers or clients. AI-email writing tools like Lyne.ai, Magic Sales Bot, Conversion.ai, Snazzy.ai, Lavender, SmartWriter.ai, and Lola AI can create emails for you based on the topic you specify in no time.

Take Lavender, for example. Lavender personalizes your outreach email intro by displaying social network updates, funding announcements, tech stack, job listings, and company information of your prospect based on their email address.

Source: Lavender

Personalizing the opening line of your cold emails is key to receiving responses. It demonstrates you've done your homework on your potential client. Here are some instances of personalization in opening lines:

• "Just finished reading the case study you wrote for {{customer name}}. It's fantastic how you were able to increase ad conversions on their Facebook page by 15%."

• "I was at {{event}} and saw you speak. Enjoyed the unique insights and looking forward to putting some of those ideas to test in the coming weeks."

3. Restructure your email campaign

With the use of AI-powered tools, you can split down email marketing campaigns into sub-campaigns to maximize inbox delivery. As email privacy becomes a significant concern, email marketers must place a greater emphasis on email delivery.

For example, you can arrange cart abandonment emails for a given time, with a specific frequency, or in reaction to a trigger using AI. Snag our abandoned cart email template to bring back a customer who left without purchasing.

Mailmodo automates reminder emails for users who leave products without purchasing them from your website. Read how Traya got 15% cart recovery rate with our interactive emails.

4. Clean up your email list

AI-powered technology can clean up email databases by removing out-of-date contacts and updating job titles, phone numbers, and other information automatically-improving deliverability across emails in the process.
- Mayuri Bhamare, Director at ACE Software n Web Solutions

Manually going through your email contacts is a time-consuming operation. Machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms ensure your email lists are healthy and do not get reported by your email service providers (ESPs). AI-powered tools clean up email databases by deleting out-of-date contacts and automatically updating job titles, email addresses, contact number, and other information, enhancing email deliverability.

5. Make smart segmentation

(3) 50% of the surveyors segment their list randomly during an A/B testing campaign based on open rate; This is alarming as right segmentation during A/B testing is essential to create balanced sampling without any bias. pic.twitter.com/FRGGZrrOQX

— Mailmodo (@mailmodo) January 27, 2022

Manually segmenting your email list is laborious, time-consuming, and prone to human mistakes. To automate the process, many marketers turn to AI solutions. Email marketers can use AI to categorize their email lists based on information gathered from existing clients. Purchase history, surfing behavior, and preferences are all included in this data. This information is used by the AI system to build email segments and send personalized emails to each of them. Thus, AI eliminates the need to guess which products would appeal to a certain buyer or what kind of writing they'll enjoy reading.

6. Understand your customer lifecycle

Recruiting potential clients is the first stage of lifecycle email marketing. Businesses use AI to sift through consumer needs and attributes to identify the ideal customer. The next step in the lifecycle is to engage with the potential customers in a way that ensures a good response rate. AI is also used to re-engage existing clients during the final retention stage. It helps you build a direct link with customers throughout their lives, ensuring brand loyalty.

7. Customize email retargeting

AI helps you fine-tune your email retargeting strategy by distinguishing between customers and sending them emails that resonate. While some buyers may purchase a product immediately after receiving your email, others may not respond to your email for a day or two. This is where AI can help by sending retargeting emails at the most opportune times. You can also include algorithmically selected items in your retargeting email to boost the value of your sales.

We help eCommerce industries send relevant retargeting emails by using predictive insights. To learn more about our process, read our guide on retargeting campaigns.

8. Make product recommendations

AI allows brands to track on-site activity and use the information to send customized product suggestions via email. Individual recommendations based on actual site and product data can be incorporated to emails in real time.

For example, customers were notified of an approaching exclusive sale in this email from Endy. They employed AI-powered recommendations to include things that the individual client had expressed interest in or that were comparable to those with which they had interacted on-site.

Source: Litmus

Mailmodo’s vision for AI-powered email marketing

Email marketing, being the most affordable and the easiest way to increase traffic, is here to stay, and AI could be a huge booster. AI can combine data analysis, personalization, copywriting, and deployment into one streamlined process that will have an enormous impact. - Aquibur Rehman, CEO of Mailmodo

As AI in email marketing is more widely adopted for personalization and contact segmentation, email marketers will be able to focus more on strategy and customer experience. Mailmodo helps marketers in segmenting their subscribers based not only on demographic information such as age, location, and purchase history, but also on specific behavioral signals. Take a look at our guide on email segmentation to create value-filled email campaigns that will increase your subscriber base.