Artificial Intelligence and Email Marketing

There’s been a big jump in awareness of the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to help with marketing, with software helping content creators write blogs.  and other AI programmes being used by email marketers to make campaigns more targeted and more effective. The big question we often are asked is: should we be using AI in our email marketing, or should we stick to humans?

The answer is most of us are already using AI in some form: Grammarly, a popular tool which started out as an advanced spelling and grammar checker has become increasingly smarter, now offering complete paragraph rewrites for conciseness as well. Jasper and similar programmes are being intensively marketed to help content creators write blogs and articles. Of course, ChatGPT is the big one at the moment – more on that in our next blog. Still, whether that’s to optimise send times, personalise emails for each prospect, or whether we’re using it to clean up email lists AI is becoming as much a part of the marketing landscape as roast dinners are part of a Sunday!  The real point of using AI in content creation is to drive more engagement with your audience.

First of all – what do we mean by AI? It’s an umbrella term covering various disciplines, including machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision. These technologies are designed to help computers complete tasks humans can do and do them just as well, or in some cases, even better.

For example, AI is used to help robots identify damage and defects in railway lines. Self-parking / self-driving cars operate using the same technology. Alexa and Siri are AI-powered. When Netflix learns your preferred viewing habits and serves recommendations, this is powered by AI. The algorithms analyse vast amounts of data and predict programmes, movies, music, etc., that your previous viewing or listening history suggests you’ll enjoy. The more information available for analysis, the better their predictions become; they actually learn. These technologies are all designed to make our lives easier, and our experiences with these platforms become more personalised to our tastes.

The same applies to email marketing: using AI-powered tools helps personalise the experience for your customer, making the message all the more relevant to them. If it’s more personalised, there’s a greater likelihood they’ll engage. So, AI helps to increase revenue by sending marketing messages that your customer will be more likely to open, read, and buy! AI will also reduce your cost-per-campaign by improving your campaigns and increasing your success rate. And AI is particularly useful for companies and organisations with massive databases because it saves marketers’ time!

Getting the subject line right is critical to enticing your customer to open that email. AI tools can write email subject lines better than most humans and personalise the copy within an email, tailored to the audience, the audience segment, or even the individual, depending on how you use it and how you teach it. Some tools are designed to restructure your email campaigns by analysing old campaigns, cleaning up your email list, and optimising send times. Some tools will send automated ‘smart’ newsletters tailored to specific individuals – a stunning level of personalisation previously unachievable – and certainly far too time-consuming for a person to do!

So, AI in email marketing is here to stay – it’s simply too valuable not to use to drive campaign success even higher!