How to use AI in email marketing: A practical guide

Email marketing is one of the best ways to communicate with your audience and generate leads. What happens when AI comes into play?

4 minute read

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AI is a tool for driving better results

With 69% of marketers using email marketing to disseminate their content, email remains a pivotal tool for businesses to connect with their audience, build relationships, and drive conversions. However, with the rapid evolution of AI, traditional digital marketing strategies seem to give way to new ways of communicating with audiences.

AI is revolutionizing how email campaigns are conceptualized, executed, and optimized, leading to enhanced engagement, personalization, and ultimately, better results. Why should you care and how can you incorporate AI into email marketing campaigns?

Understanding AI in email marketing

Artificial intelligence, in the context of email marketing, refers to the application of advanced algorithms and machine learning techniques to automate and optimize various aspects of email campaigns. From analyzing user behavior to predicting preferences, AI-driven email marketing goes beyond simple segmentation and delivers highly targeted content that resonates with individual recipients.

Natural language generation AI solutions are trained to analyze large datasets and work with big data to make predictions and provide recommendations that significantly boost email marketing personalization and segmentation.

The current state of AI in email marketing

While AI in email marketing might sound like something coming from the (near) future, artificial intelligence is already everywhere when it comes to your campaigns.

From spam filters and inbox organization to product recommendations and optimized send times, AI’s multiple use cases are the reason email marketing is still one of the most powerful tool to take your business to the next level.

Here's an overview of the state of AI in email marketing today:

Personalization: With the help of AI marketers can send more relevant and engaging emails, leading to higher open and click-through rates.

Segmentation: AI-driven segmentation is more sophisticated than ever, with marketers using machine learning algorithms to identify and group subscribers with similar characteristics or behaviors, enabling more targeted email campaigns.

Predictive analytics: Timely and relevant emails are not a privilege for the few. AI can predict user behavior, such as the likelihood of a subscriber making a purchase or unsubscribing, allowing marketers to send campaigns to the right person, at the right time.

A/B testing: AI-powered A/B testing tools help marketers optimize email subject lines, content, and send times to maximize engagement and conversions.

Automation: Automated email scheduling, list management, and even responses to common customer queries are among the most commonly used strategies, thanks to AI-driven automation tools.

Behavioral triggers: AI is being used to trigger emails based on specific user behaviors, such as abandoned cart reminders or re-engagement emails for inactive subscribers.

Data analysis: AI-powered analytics tools help marketers gain deeper insights into email campaign performance and customer behavior, enabling data-driven decision-making.

Anti-spam: AI is used to improve email deliverability by identifying and filtering out spammy content.

7 ways to integrate AI into your email marketing campaigns

Thanks to AI, sending better emails is now easier than ever. Integrating AI into your email marketing campaigns can help you do better content marketing, improve engagement, and optimize your campaigns for better results.

Here are the best ways to integrate AI into your email marketing efforts:

  1. Personalize your emails: Creating compelling and relevant email content that resonates with your audience is one of the most challenging aspects of email marketing. Thankfully, AI allows users to create smarter, more effective, and more creative email copy that converts.
     
    For example, you can use SmartWriter or Rasa.io to automate your entire research and copywriting process and send unique personalized emails to your recipients.
     
    Or you can choose tools that predict your audiences’ preferences and needs, so you can send them emails that they actually want to open and read. Additionally, you can use A/B testing to compare different versions of a single email to see what works best for your audience or potential customers.
     
  2. Boost open rates with compelling subject lines: AI technology allows users to generate new subject line ideas or test and optimize existing ones.
     
    Tools like Phrasee, SubjectLine, and CoSchedule Headline Analyzer use natural language processing and machine learning to create subject lines that are catchy and effective.
     
    And subject line optimization tools like Touchstone and AWeber, can analyze subject line performance data and suggest subject lines that are more likely to suit your audience and increase open rates.
     
  3. Segment your lists for better results: If you’re looking to stay relevant, and increase email opens, clicks, and conversion, smart list segmentation should be your top priority.
     
    AI tools analyze your email data, identify patterns, trends, and correlations, and allow you to group your audience based on their interests, behaviors, and preferences.
     
  4. Leverage automation: Email marketing can be time-consuming and complex to manage. How can you achieve better results in less time?
     
    Thanks to AI email you can set up AI-driven automated workflows, such as drip campaigns or behavior-triggered emails sent when a subscriber takes a specific action on your website or exhibits certain behaviors.
     
    Some of the most common marketing automation email campaign types are:
     
    • Welcome email campaign
    • Cart abandonment campaign
    • Post-purchase campaign
    • Retargeting campaign
    • Standard promotion campaign
     
  5. Clean up your email list: Ensuring you maintain a clean and organized inbox is one of the key factors that determine the success of your email marketing strategy.
     
    Tools like Clean Email provide intuitive mailbox cleanup recommendations based on your email activity, the sender's reputation, and actions taken by other users of the app, helping you deal with a cluttered and overwhelming email inbox.
     
  6. Seize more sales with product recommendations: With today’s consumers expecting their online shopping experience to be tailored to their needs and wants, it’s no surprise that 54% of retailers claim that product recommendations act as the key driver of the AOV (average order value).
     
    AI tools use machine learning algorithms to analyze customer data and identify patterns and trends, such as user preferences, buying behavior, or browsing history — providing a hyper-personalized shopping experience and suggesting highly relevant products. The “Recommended for you” section on Amazon is an example of AI at work, which, according to an article by McKinsey, generates 35% of Amazon.com’s revenue.
     
  7. Understand customer lifecycle: If you want to streamline your sales process, you should trust AI. AI allows you to understand and map the customer journey to create a lasting relationship with your customer, achieve your goals, and generate revenue. How?
     
    By identifying and preventing customer churn, predicting potential lapsed customers with high-enough predicted lifetime value, and helping you create campaigns that enhance and grow loyalty and revenue — at every step of the customer lifecycle.

AI tools for email marketing

Looking to step up your email marketing game with the help of AI?

Here are a few email marketing tools to get you started:

  • ChatGPT
    ChatGPT is a language model developed by OpenAI, designed to generate human-like text responses to natural language input. It assists marketers with various tasks like composing emails, essays, and blogs.
  • Jasper
    Jasper is an AI writing tool that helps you easily create content. It can generate text, translate languages, write various types of creative content, and provide you with informed answers to your questions.
  • Instantly
    Instantly is a tool that gives you complete control over the cold email process. With the ability to send a massive amount of monthly emails, it helps you send more successful cold emails with less effort and scale your outreach campaigns through smart AI.
  • Phrasee
    Phrasee uses NLG to analyze brand guidelines and past messages to generate compelling content. With this AI tool, you can create effective email subject lines and CTAs that will boost conversion rates.
  • Grammarly
    Grammarly provides a powerful AI writing assistant and plagiarism checker. It’s also a grammar-checking, proofreading, spell checking, tool, all its features aiming to improve your writing.
  • LeadGnome
    LeadGnome is an email mining software designed specifically for marketing and sales teams. It mines and manages B2B email replies to improve database health, generate sales leads, enhance existing leads, and provide actionable intelligence that fuels sales acceleration.
  • Seventh Sense
    Seventh Sense is a tool built to help you cut through the noise of cluttered inboxes to increase deliverability, engagement and conversion. This AI tool sends emails automatically to your recipients based on their optimal engagement time, ensuring that customers will receive emails at their preferred frequency.

Make the most of email marketing today

Artificial intelligence is here to stay. A key benefit for brands is that AI-based email marketing helps you achieve better results faster and easier with a wide variety of powerful tools.

From personalizing email newsletters to sending extremely relevant e-commerce product recommendations and more, the marketer of today can maximize the effectiveness of email marketing simply by investing in AI and its countless possibilities.

Learn more about AI in the Sitecore Knowledge Center.