The world of digital marketing has seen the rise of several marketing channels, but email marketing still remains a crucial marketing tool for SMBs for its cost-effective methodology and direct approach.
A report by eMarketer shows that over 80% of marketers consider email as the most effective way to gain prospective customers and keep current ones. However, email campaign success depends directly on the chosen approach. The key is to craft content that people are more likely to respond to or actually want them in their inbox.
That is why most marketers have been striving to personalize their emails so that their content can speak to each consumer separately. This isn’t new to seasoned retailers who have been utilizing marketing automation platforms to leverage segmentation or personas or create customer journeys.
And with the advent of AI and machine learning, email marketing has never been easier. More complex tasks like email verification, targeting, and scheduling, as well as statistics, have become much more straightforward.
Even though AI and machine learning (ML) are relatively new technologies, its impact on email campaigns is already apparent. Let us go through some of the ways AI and ML have been reshaping email marketing:
Prudent Personalization:
The best email marketing campaigns focus on creating emails that seem less machine-generated and more human. AI and machine learning technology help you analyze customer behavior and examine their interests to produce data-driven insights. This enables you to send tailored emails to each user.
According to eConsultancy, 74 percent of marketers believe targeted personalization has helped in increasing their overall consumer engagement rates. Another study by Adestra suggests that 82% of retailers experienced a growth in their open rates via email personalization, whereas, 75 % believe that it generates maximum click-through rates.
AI can help include more personalization in your email strategy. In other words, it suggests what type of email will resonate most to your targeted customers at a personalized level. The simplest way to gather this information is by asking the subscribers to set their preferences once they get their welcome email or while signing up.
Smart Segmentation:
Customizing the email experience of your subscribers means understanding that each one of them has different behaviors and interests. Therefore, it is essential to group them individually and send separate emails to each consumer.
When you categorize your subscribers based on specific criteria, such as behavior, geographies, demographics, and psychographics, this is known as segmentation. Email list segmentation enables you to garner more opens, conversions, and CTRs and also improve customer engagement. AI and machine learning help in speeding up this process by making it easy to identify hidden details, behavior and purchase patterns of your subscribers more accurately and effectively segments them into lists, thereby saving both your time and resources.
Body Copy and Subject Lines Optimization:
The body copy and subject line of an email play a vital role in deciding whether a campaign will be successful or not. Body lines need to be bold and strong to persuade targeted customers to open your email. Similarly, a clearly defined CTA (call-to-action) and an enticing body copy are just as essential to drive specific actions.
AI utilizes data-driven insights in order to evaluate which body copy, CTAs, and subject lines will likely engage most with users and drive positive results. It is capable of customizing subject lines that are 95 percent more effective than the ones written by humans. Using AI, marketers can create several subject lines within seconds, which would have generally taken hours.
Also, machine learning determines what resonates most with your audience, based on your email campaign history to develop optimized body copy and subject lines by adopting natural language technology.
Send Time Optimization:
With thousands of emails crowding your subscribers’ inboxes every day, it is of prime importance to figure out the most suitable time to send emails as it plays a pivotal role in deciding whether that message will be read or not. In email marketing, timing is crucial, and so even if you send emails to the right subscriber but not at the correct time, then you may lose them forever.
To achieve this, you will have to find out precisely when your subscribers open their inbox. However, it’s an extremely time-consuming and tedious task as you will have to examine their past behavior.
Fortunately, AI and machine learning makes it easy to generate insights, analyze consumer behavior, and create an effective email automation system using this specific data. AI algorithms help you determine the most suitable time to send content to each individual subscriber, ensuring no email is ever unnoticed.
Product Recommendation:
Sending personalized product and service recommendations to consumers have been shown to increase customer loyalty and improve conversion and engagement rates. According to a study by Mckinsey, 74 percent of what people watch on Netflix, and 35 percent of purchases made on Amazon is based on product recommendations.
Such highly personalized marketing tactics can be made possible by utilizing AI algorithms. AI helps marketers analyze their consumer’s browsing behavior, purchase pattern, and online activity to send personalized product or service recommendations to their subscribers in real-time, improve engagements, boost conversions, thereby increasing sales.
Customer Lifecycle Marketing:
As the email marketing industry is quite competitive, marketers must come up with effective campaigns that can help them fetch maximum ROI. And to do so, they have to examine customer insights and email highly contextual contents throughout the consumer lifecycle.
AI and machine learning help you generate and study insights about your subscribers by leveraging data derived from their interests and behaviors. It allows you to determine the average time consumers take to make their purchase.
Understanding this data will enable you to create effective email campaigns that inform and engage with the customers more efficiently.
Conclusion
Email marketing campaigns have always been complicated and time-consuming. It requires manual adjustments and examination of large consumers’ data. But with the advent of AI and machine learning, dealing with all the complicated marketing tasks has become much more straightforward. It allows you to achieve results that would otherwise be impossible without Artificial Intelligence.
Simply put, incorporating AI and machine learning in your email marketing strategy will not just save time and resources but also help you create campaigns that are much more effective and relevant than ever before.
