For many, checking email is a daily activity over a morning cup of coffee, making it the perfect way for businesses to reach a wide audience. With 4 billion email users globally in 2020, 59% of consumers said that marketing emails influenced their purchase decisions, further proving the power of an email. Additional benefits of email marketing include the ability to customize outreach and achieve increased brand awareness. When email marketing efforts fall flat, however, reasons can often include issues such as a lack of personalization, or an unclear call-to-action. While pulling off a successful campaign can be a daunting endeavor, artificial intelligence (AI) technology proves to be a groundbreaking tool — from elevating personalization to enhancing optimization.
The key to personalization and creative collaboration
Personalization is key in digital marketing, as it enables businesses to tailor marketing efforts to their targeted audience. As a result, personalization brings to light a number of advantages, from increased engagement to fostering stronger relationships. Personalization also helps drive conversions, as potential customers are more likely to become paying customers when they connect with a business’ messaging. Today, businesses can take personalization to the next level within email marketing endeavors with the help of AI. One Forbes article notes that integrating AI into email marketing can increase both open rates and conversions, further expanding on how the technology works. “By analyzing past interactions, purchases and browsing behaviors, AI algorithms help craft emails that feel personally written for each recipient.” As such, AI works to provide curated content, offers, and recommendations that better align with both the customer’s individual preferences and your brand.
Personalization plays an immense role in B2B cold emailing, a marketing strategy that involves reaching out to others without prior contact. This is particularly important when it comes to garnering engagement, from an attention-grabbing subject line to engaging content within the email itself. These elements not only make an email easier to read, but heighten the chances that a reader will take action. As such, structuring your email for success is imperative, and involves several key characteristics — for example, best practices typically involve keeping paragraphs (and sentences) short and clearly staging your call-to-action, to highlight a couple key points. While the use of cold email templates can streamline the email creation process while enabling you to hit all of the key points within your email, other tools can further supplement the creative process. The use of AI (such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT) can help immensely in delivering quality, personalized content, though it’s important to think of such tools as creative collaborators rather than automating the process completely. This will ensure that your emails retain a human touch — and are edited, proofread, and screened in order to elevate chances of a successful marketing campaign.
Enhancing deliverability
The ability to successfully deliver an email is imperative in any email marketing approach, and is another aspect of marketing in which artificial intelligence can make a significant impact. A LinkedIn post by DailyStory explains the concept best, pointing out areas in which AI technology can prove to be useful — for example, it’s noted that AI can remove inactive contacts from your database, automatically update phone numbers (in addition to other recipient details). AI can also optimize the email send time, enabling the ability to send at the individual level for different recipients. This could come in handy for worldwide brands, as the technology could, in theory, deliver email at the best time for those in different time zones.
Understanding your target audience is an essential aspect of any marketing strategy, and ultimately sets the stage for a successful campaign. While marketers have long been identifying target audience segments and planning out marketing messages around them, one Forbes article points out that artificial intelligence can streamline this process by undertaking such tasks in a quicker and more efficient way. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, for instance, can help identify specific segments that could help achieve distinctive messaging. This works by providing the AI with information on your product or service in addition to existing database demographics. In addition to aiding with personalization in the email’s content, the Forbes post identifies subject line iteration as another use for AI-driven tools like ChatGPT.
The subject line of an email is particularly valuable within an email marketing campaign, as this is often a driving factor as to whether a reader will open the message. Due to its importance, subject lines typically require an immense amount of thought and time in order to create the ideal message (in what is often a fragment of a sentence). AI-powered tools, however, can help captivate your readers right off the bat by taking prior data into consideration. This will help in grabbing an individual’s attention before they open an email, all without all of the guesswork and time that goes into brainstorming the perfect subject line. While marketers will need to edit and screen the results of the AI, this will still save valuable time that can be put towards other valuable aspects of a campaign.
Email marketing is a key component for a number of businesses around the world. With AI technology continuing to rapidly advance, there’s no question that it can elevate email marketing campaigns in creative ways — from enhancing personalization efforts to generally optimizing a campaign from content creation to deliverability.
