Want to write faster and easier emails? How to create better subject lines? Check the spelling and grammar in emails. Hyper-personalized emails? Automate your email marketing. Great! Artificial intelligence (AI), is capable of all these things and more.
AI allows you to send the correct message at the right moment, increasing your conversion rates and click-through rate (CTR).
Learn about AI tools in email marketing. We will examine its importance, and show you how to use it in your Email Marketing Strategy. Let’s review the basics of AI before we get into AI in email marketing.
What is AI?
Artificial Intelligence is the process of making machines perform like humans.
AI technology has a counterpoint for all that we do as human beings. machine-learning (ML), for example, teaches computers how to learn. Computer vision allows machines to see the world as we do. Natural language processing (NLP), makes computers understand the human language we speak.
AI tools for email marketing
AI-based email marketing combines technologies to improve email marketing.
- Machine Learning
- NLP
- Natural language generation (NLG)
- Natural language understanding (NLU)
AI email marketing tools can do everything from creating email content to predicting when to send them. They are the invisible hand you didn’t know you needed.
Look at the AI-powered tools for email marketing available on the market.
Marketers can integrate these products with existing martech or CRM software or use them separately. Companies can also use platforms such as IBM Watson or H2O.ai to create their own AI tools.
AI in email marketing: Benefits
Email marketing is the most effective digital marketing tool. Email marketing is still the most effective method of reaching leads and potential clients. With over 4 billion users and more than 300 billion emails sent annually, this remains true. AI makes it more effective.
Every email you send generates a huge amount of data. AI uses this data along with big data. It analyzes the preferences of your target audience, their search history, and how they use social media, using ML algorithms. AI can then use this analysis to determine customer behavior patterns and gain actionable insights.
Marketers that use AI to personalize emails see 41% more revenue per month than those who do not. The average CTR is 13.4% higher and the open rate is almost 8% greater for those who use AI. AI is no longer a nice-to-have technology, but a must-have one for email marketing. Continue reading to find out how AI is so effective at email marketing.
- Hyper-personalization: You can craft highly tailored emails – from subject line to content to send time
- Branded content: AI Tools standardize tone, style, and delivery style of content based on what’s effective and what isn’t.
- Productivity & efficiency: With AI-powered automation, marketers can take action based on insights provided by AI tools, rather than wasting time on mundane, time-consuming tasks.
- Optimizing emails on the move: AI Tools assess email performance while they are being sent and make changes in real-time based on engagement. Since AI is constantly learning, it can adjust to achieve the best results.
AI in Email Marketing: Top Use Cases
Here are some common uses of AI for email marketing. From who to send what to and how to do it.
What to include in your email content?
Email marketing is all about content. AI and ML tools can be used to create engaging email content.
AI email body writers
AI-based writing assistants that compose email copy are among the most rapidly evolving AI applications. NLP allows computers to understand and produce text just like humans. AI writing tools are powered by NLP and create high-quality content. AI writing tools provide a variety of templates to start with.
The tools can research, create content ideas, expand the text, and check grammar and tone. SmartWriter makes cold outreach emails personalized after searching the internet for information about the recipients. Hypernova, an agency that generates cold emails for lead generation, used SmartWriter to see a 2x increase in response rates.
Using tools to check tone and style can help ensure that the content of the email is consistent with the brand.
Here’s an email written by Rytr, a writing assistant AI, using only a one-line prompt.
Subject line writers
AI subject line creators are similar to AI email writers in that they create catchy subject lines using user input. You only need to provide a keyword, prompts about tone, and the email content, and then click Generate. This tool will generate subject lines that reflect your brand’s tone and style. The tool optimizes the words and characters of the subject line to maximize clicks.
In an email campaign, a split test using a subject line generated by the AI tool Phrasee resulted in a 10% increase in open rates and a 22% increase in click-through rates compared to human-generated subject lines.
Newsletter Creators
Tools such as Rasa.io can analyze user preferences and curate emails with industry and in-house content. These tools make the process easier and faster.
Align, a SaaS company used Rasa.io for a smart newsletter. It saw a monthly open rate of 37.5% and an 8,3% click-through rate.
Personal copy editor
AI tools such as Grammarly and Compose.ai are personal copy editors. They can detect mistakes in grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure. The user is given suggestions on how to improve sentence structure, and what better words to use. The overall quality of the content is improved.
Smart Segmentation – Who to send?
Inboxes are flooded with emails today. Depending on whom we are targeting, we can ensure that your email doesn’t end up in the spam folder. The more specific the message, the greater the engagement. AI is the answer. It can segment audiences based on customer data such as clicks, search histories, preferences, etc.
AI tools can create an email list based on segmentation without having to separate them manually. The software can give you a list that you can use to target contacts based on past data about your buyer persona.
Epsilon, an advertising agency, used H2O.ai’s machine learning model to create a smart segmentation for their client’s buyer lists. Using ML, Epsilon increased its direct mail response rates by 3 to 5%. This translates to finding 15,000 additional highly relevant customers.
How to optimize email content?
Email campaigns are successful when the content is tailored to the audience. AI and ML tools can identify what makes an audience tick, and then compose emails that will get more conversions and better deliverability.
Personalize content
82% of marketing professionals report higher opening rates for personalized promotional emails. AI tools such as Zeta Klaviyo Drift and Optimal use customer data to personalize emails. It’s more than just saying, “Hello John!”
These AI tools trigger email campaigns that are tailored to the customer’s web activity, such as payment skips, churn risks, or failures to sign up. Imagine that a customer adds an item to their cart, but does not complete the purchase. The AI tool will automatically send a message with a discount to encourage the customer to complete the purchase. These personalizations can double the open rate.
Vue.ai is an AI-based solution for email personalization. A global resale market used it and saw 53% more click-to-open rates (CTOR) in emails that included Vue.ai’s recommendations.
One financial service provider used Zeta for the segmentation and personalization of emails sent to inactive cardholders. This resulted in an incremental $1.37M in sales.
Test and tweak the content
Does using emojis in the subject work? This time, does using stats impress more people? Is the button for call-to-action (CTA), pretty?
A/B tests are used by marketers to test two variations at a given time. AI allows marketers to perform multivariate tests in real-time.
The AI software analyzes engagement data to test multiple email variations and determine what works and what doesn’t in an email campaign. The AI software then adjusts the email content to increase click-throughs and open rates.
An AI system, for example, analyzes the opening rates of an email campaign when it is being sent out. The system finds that subject lines with emojis have higher open rates. The system switches to the subject line with emojis automatically based on this result.
Each email element, including the body, CTAs, and designs, can be analyzed on the fly and optimized. Phrasee, Persado, and MailChimp all use AI to optimize CTAs and subject lines, while MailChimp optimizes the message, tone, and imagery.
Virgin Atlantic used Phrasee’s AI tool, for example, to test, tweak and optimize their email marketing campaigns. They saw an increase of 11.4% in the average open rate and a lift of 15.7% in the average CTR.
Use a tool to optimize your content. This will help you create better email content and increase conversions.
Customize Promotions & Offers
AI tools can curate offers, promotions, and product recommendations based on data from customers. They create a personal touch, without any personal effort.
Amazon offers a recommendation engine based on the user’s preferences and purchasing habits. This is done via email.
When to send: Delivery optimization
Email marketers are not new at optimizing email send times. Estimate and schedule emails using time zones and previous email campaigns. AI optimizes send times. They use historical data to predict the optimal time for sending emails. The emails are also tailored to each recipient’s preferences, ensuring that they receive as little spam as possible.
For example, Revulytics used Seventh Sense for optimizing its email send time. They saw a 44% improvement in open rates and a CTR increase of 4.5%.
AI Email Marketing Automation
AI-powered tools for email automation can help you create successful campaigns. From finding prospects to segmenting them, and triggering emails that are personalized and follow-ups. AI platforms track customer data from the moment they enter the brand, through their first interaction, and to the current stage of the customer journey.
Many email marketing software, such as MailChimp and Hubspot offer these features.
Maison Miru is an online jewelry store that saw a 190%+ increase in email subscribers after automating its email marketing with Klaviyo.
AI-based tools can detect the intent of customer emails by using sentiment analysis. They can also identify emails that are urgent or high-value and take appropriate action. These tools can be easily integrated with your existing marketing stack or other tools for sales.
TL;DR – Use AI to boost conversions
AI can help you create the best marketing emails. With AI, it is possible to automate many tasks.
- Create email content including the subject line and body
- Edit email content automatically
- segments your audience
- Hyper-personalize email with offers
- Custom recommendations
- Email content: Tests and tweaks
- optimize email delivery
- automate your entire email marketing process
This will not only improve your inbox placement and impressions as well as your clicks, clicks, opens, and conversions, but it will also increase your return on investment for your email marketing.
What are you still waiting for? Choose your AI weapon to boost your conversion.