Why Artificial Intelligence Is A Boon For Email Marketing
What happens when you combine a 40-year-old marketing technique with the technology of the future?
The email marketing domain has been improving rapidly over the past few years. Marketers are trying a variety of techniques to better target their audience through customer data analysis and a personalized approach. But you cannot keep employing more people to manually write personalized emails for your customers and potential clients. This is where Artificial Intelligence or AI comes in to optimize your emailing techniques while maximizing your return on investment. And no, this is not the type of AI that is going to take over the world.
Artificial intelligence simplifies the more complex projects and automates the simpler aspects of email marketing. Tracking your consumer’s interests through data collected through their interaction with your website and with your products on the different social media platforms has become optimized thanks to AI.
The AI frees the marketer to focus on relationship building, increasing contacts, and working on other prospects of client acquisition. Here are a few examples to better understand how a simple artificial intelligence algorithm can improve your email marketing strategy.
Use of AI in email marketing
1. Customization of email promotions
Artificial intelligence works in tandem with data analysis. The customer’s interaction history, habits, behavior, and spending capabilities are analyzed and segmented. Accordingly, the AI sends out promotion codes, discounts, and special offers to the targeted customers. AI also improves segmentation capabilities. While generic data analysis will help you create the major segments, you can use AI to create multiple smaller segments to better divide your customer’s data.
The smaller and the more detailed segments are fine-tuned by the AI and are constantly updated to keep up with the consumer’s behavior. You can use these functions to re-target your customers. For example, you can direct a campaign to send emails with specialized discounts for customers who only shop before the seasonal holidays. An HTML email developer will have their work cut short if they employ such AI.
2. Personalizing product recommendation
The potential of AI in email marketing is unbounded. As you know, product recommendation is one of the more common aspects of email marketing. With an AI you can personalize product recommendations based on behavior, spending power, and general buying patterns.
Say a customer buys a pair of earphones. Now you can’t send personal emails that promote other similar earphones and speakers at discounted prices. These emails are often ignored because the person has already bought what he needed. Here, an automated algorithm will compare the buying patterns of other customers who bought a pair of earphones with your target audience. It will then recommend products that are often associated with earphones such as a USB-C to jack converter or a multifunctional earphone volume module. The emails with diversified recommendations will have a higher click rate.
3. Finding the timings with higher click-rate
Yes, the time during which you send the email also affects the click-through rate. Research on HubSpot shows that emails sent have a significantly higher click-to-open rate during 10 AM, 1 PM, and 6 PM. This implies that the targeted audience interacts more with the emails during the early and closing office hours, along with a small spike during their lunch breaks. However, the pandemic has significantly changed these times since most people are working from home.
Usually, the email marketer will have to run manual test campaigns to determine the best time to send the mass emails. On the other hand, AI can automatically run several backtests and determine the time which will be most beneficial to the marketer.
Apart from that, a more advanced AI will inspect the individual times for different customers and send the emails accordingly. The data is often derived from the targeted audience’s previous engagement with the emails.
4. Automating the creation of content
A copywriter will take significantly longer to come up with subject lines that will compel your targeted audience to open the email. This is usually done with a lot of keyword analysis and experimentation. Meanwhile, AI has changed the game.
Artificial intelligence will analyze the keywords that trigger the audience to open the email. The subject lines can also be customized as per the tone of your company. These subject lines usually have a higher engagement rate as opposed to subject lines written by humans. The subject lines are also constantly updated as new data is collected by you. This application results in the generation of more leads and revenue.
Furthermore, this method can be applied to create the body of the email as well. However, this method is yet to be used widely amongst HTML email developers.
5. Optimizing the contact list
AI will help you analyze your marketing campaign into smaller segments. The performance measures delivered by these will be more reliable, transparent, and comparable. It will provide you with the option to send more targeted emails and maximize inbox delivery.
AI can also clean up your contact list and purge the outdated contacts and the contacts which have the least engagement. In addition to that, it will also update the phone numbers and the job titles of the existing contacts for better segmentation.
Conclusion
Artificial intelligence is a tool, mostly used by an HTML email developer, which improves upon human intelligence. The opportunities that AI provides are virtually limitless as it can be used for any function of email. The performance of your AI-assisted email marketing campaigns is only limited by your imagination. So are you ready for AI?
Author: Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest-growing full-service email marketing agencies that specialize in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion, and free HTML email templates in addition to providing email automation, campaign management, and data integration & migration services. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz, and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.