Artificial intelligence makes a ton of things in different parts of our lives easier - from a surge in voice command bots (Siri, Google Home, And Alexa are just a few that come to mind) to AI-powered systems being added to electric and hybrid vehicles, AI is making our daily lives more efficient. But it’s not just our personal lives that AI touches; it also improves different aspects of our professional lives - one of those being the email marketing performance of B2B and B2C organizations.
Email marketing has, for some time now, benefited from automation, especially considering that small businesses and agencies are always on the lookout for ways to better manage and automate the customer life cycle. And while AI can be a little daunting to more conventional marketers who haven’t used it before, artificial intelligence offers a direct and cost-effective means to conduct and carry out email marketing-based campaigns. AI-powered tools stand to drive long-lasting results for organizations that aren’t afraid to dip their toes into this burgeoning and innovative technology.
To that end, let’s explore how AI can be used to improve your business’s email marketing performance and how it can truly thrive when marketers combine added human emotion and empathy into their marketing content.
Before we cover the benefits of introducing AI to your email marketing strategies, let’s quickly consider why AI found its way into email marketing in the first place.
In case you don’t already know, AI broadly refers to the different technologies and related algorithms that help machines tackle tasks that would otherwise require an actual human being to accomplish. It’s what makes those handy virtual assistants that we mentioned earlier work so well, it’s behind the recommendations you get when shopping online, and when it comes to email marketing, it’s what makes the algorithms under a software application’s hood so good at giving marketers data-driven insights into their campaigns.
Alright, so you’ve gotten a quick definition of what AI is and how it found its way into email marketing – now it’s time to show off some ways you can use artificial intelligence in your email marketing campaigns.
Retargeting tactics leverage advertisements to engage potential clients with whom your brand may have previously interacted but never committed to a transaction. It helps marketers connect with the audience they’re after with the right content at the right time. And while marketing teams come and go as often as the years pass, email retargeting is a tactic that’s here to stay -- nearly half of all marketing pros think retargeting is a useful and heavily underused email marketing tactic.
Email retargeting, coupled with AI, lets organizations connect with prospective clients with whom they’d otherwise never speak again. It gives marketers a chance to get people up to speed with their brand. How? By using algorithmic functions.
AI uses many algorithms to distinguish between prospective clients and the kinds of conversions they’ll likely reward marketers with. AI is so smart about this that it can even curate the specific types of content that a prospect wants to see (something that’s relevant to them, like a loyalty program or attractive discount) and subsequently make it likelier for marketers to generate juicy conversions.
Let’s face it: any marketer knows that a surefire way to get more eyes on an email is with a compelling subject line. Your subject line indicates what the rest of the email will talk about. Do you want to lure bloggers and privacy-minded folks into checking out your anonymous web hosting service? You’d want to grab their attention fast with something like “thwart unwanted attention” in your subject line. Got an AI-driven email marketing product you want marketers to know about? Things like “data-driven” and “automation” should be in the subject line.
But putting together great subject lines that stand out isn’t that easy (it’s actually pretty tedious if you’ve ever tried it yourself). Thankfully, AI is good at automating tedious and laborious processes. AI-driven algorithms can do the jobs of dozens of copywriters and generate subject lines that drive big increases in ROI. Plus, AI can monitor how successful an email marketing campaign is to optimize subject lines that marketers can use during subsequent campaign loops.
Everyone likes a good promotion because promotions are one of the best ways to improve how well your content reaches its target audience. Personalized promotions make impressions on attractive prospects and make it much easier for you to establish lasting and more meaningful connections and collaborations.
It’s important that you do everything in your power to make sure that you’re holding on to prospects and, whenever possible, converting them into clients who last. You can do this by feeding them a steady source of personalized deals, samples, and promotions related to their interests. AI makes creating this drip feed easier for marketers by ingesting data related to client purchasing habits and highlighting which promotions marketers should consider using when reaching out to different prospects.
Marketers can achieve greater levels of promotional personalization with AI. Buyers will become keener on interacting with the content you send them, especially if you’re using AI to help automate the process of building promotions that speak to the unique needs that different prospects have.
AI is here to make email marketing a breeze for senders. It’s no surprise that it can be intimidating for traditional marketers to embrace artificial intelligence, but once they do, they’re bound to realize that AI makes for a deliberate and cost-effective email marketing approach. It’s recommended that marketers work together with AI to drive greater ROI and more effectively and efficiently scale their marketing campaigns and subsequent campaign loops.
We hope this article has helped you realize not only how to use AI when it comes to your email marketing campaigns but how much AI can improve your email marketing performance, too.
