7 Effective Tips to Boost Sales Using AI in Email Marketing
Email marketing has been a cornerstone of many campaigns for a long time – and it’s no surprise why. Emails target your customers directly, and you can schedule them to land at the right time to have the best impact. They’re also a low-cost method of keeping in touch with your customers.
As technology changes, even the most reliable methods of marketing need to adapt to stay effective. Spam filters and the sheer number of emails people get daily have made email marketing much harder in recent years. Luckily, artificial intelligence is developing rapidly and can significantly boost your email marketing.
Why Should You Use AI in Email Marketing?
AI in email marketing involves leveraging a variety of AI tools to improve the effectiveness of marketing emails. You might be thinking of having a handy AI powered virtual assistant at your side, but it’s much more likely that solutions like data analysis and text generation become part of your everyday workflow.
A recent report states that 90% of marketers who use AI for email marketing say it’s effective for content creation.
Email marketing statistics show that AI can save marketers time. It can improve the quality of content, help personalize it, and spark new ideas. Moreover, it plays an important role in managing email campaigns. This is because it allows marketers to automate and optimize the entire email marketing process, from segmenting leads to sending targeted messages, ultimately improving the effectiveness of email campaign management.
As the above graph shows, AI can save marketers time, improve the quality of content, help personalize content, and help spark ideas for content. Moreover, it plays a crucial role in managing email campaigns, allowing marketers to automate, and optimize the entire email marketing process, from segmenting leads to sending targeted messages, ultimately improving the effectiveness of email campaign management.
7 Tips for Using AI in Email Marketing
As with any new technology, there can be a bit of a learning curve. Here are our top tips for boosting sales with AI in your email marketing:
1. Personalization of Email Copy
Receiving personal emails helps customers connect with your brand on a deeper level and make them feel valued. In fact, personalized emails have been shown to increase click rates by 139%, which is a huge reason to make it part of your strategy. Additionally, ensuring AI security in your email marketing strategy can protect customer data, enhancing trust and reliability.
AI can also analyze customer data to determine which customers are more likely to respond to what content. By using a large range of data, you can train AI to recognize patterns such as web browser behavior, demographic information, and what category of person responded to emails in the past.
This allows leads to be segmented, which means you can target groups more specifically. You can even use AI to automatically create customer profiles and segment data to improve speed and efficiency.
People who have previously bought remote desktop manager software, for example, may be interested in updates or add-ons to the product – but they wouldn’t want to see new offers on something they already own. Automated, personalized emails can ensure they only see the best offers based on their history with your business
We can even go beyond this. AI-powered dynamic emails allow marketers to plug the ‘gaps’ in a pre-written template. For instance, a restaurant can display appropriate offers based on the time the email is opened, or a B2B travel firm can only show flights that have space to book seats on.
2. Creation of More Compelling Subject Lines
Subject lines should be short and sweet. They are the first thing a recipient sees when they open their inbox and can mean the difference between an email being opened or sent straight to the bin. In other words, it’s your one opportunity to leap out of the screen and grab the reader’s attention.
A skilled copywriter usually uses trial and error or A/B testing to get the subject line right but this is difficult on a large scale. This is where AI can help. By using machine learning algorithms, AI can analyse the results of A/B testing at scale, and you can use the results to produce more compelling subject lines by comparing open rates.
You might notice helpful patterns in this analysis – for instance, imagine you’re selling an online communication tool. Your current subject lines might include VoIP meaning all your recipients must have an understanding of the term for the email to be effective. If you notice a lower click-through rate on these emails, you might need to explain any technical terms in order to increase engagement.
3. Timing and Frequency
Creating the perfect, personalized email is one thing, but hitting your customers at the right time makes sure they’ll pay attention. AI can analyze previous open and click-through rates to identify patterns of engagement and determine the best times to send emails to each of your segmented audiences.
Timing is important but so is the frequency you send them. Bombarding your subscribers with emails might get some click-throughs, but there’s a high chance they’ll be through your ‘unsubscribe’ link. Emails should be well crafted, engaging, compelling, and sent sparingly with purpose. AI can show you when a recipient is most likely to engage and analyze how often you should be sending them to be effective, without becoming annoying.
4. Automated Email Triggers
Email triggers are a great way to re-engage customers (or potential customers), and automating them improves efficiency and consistency. A good example of an automated email trigger is an ‘abandoned basket’ email, where you remind people who left things in their virtual basket that they still have time to make their purchase.
Email triggers can also be used as part of a campaign to re-engage dormant subscribers. This could be by way of a ‘come back soon’ offer or other promotion to hook them back in. By analyzing the success of previous emails, AI can help you time these to perfection.
5. Mass A/B Email Testing
A/B testing involves sending a different version of an email to different subsets of people to see which performs best in a more efficient way than ever before. For instance, if you’re a multinational business with different domains and have made a .qa domain purchase, you could A/B test subsets that come via different domains to see if there is a difference in how best to target customers from different regions.
This is a good strategy not for just emails to warm leads, but emails to cold leads as well. For these, you can use cold email software to automate sending the messages and then A/B test to see what is most effective.
6. Customer Journey Optimization
Each customer will be at a different stage of their journey with your brand. Understanding the customer and the stage they’re at is a powerful tool because you can provide the right experience for them at each stage.
Bringing individual customers through their journey at different times requires planning. You’ll need a welcome email and a series of other emails designed to spark interest at each stage of their journey. AI can send personalized emails to people at the right stage of their journey by using algorithms to predict behavior and suggest relevant promotions and offers.
Remember, not every email needs to be selling something directly. For instance, if you’re selling a subscription-based communication tool, an email with tips for implementing contact center AI solutions could be good for existing subscribers – and be informative without being pushy.
7. Automated Content
Email content needs to stand out and engage from the get-go. Unfortunately, writing high-quality content can take a week or two to go through the process of writing, editing and reviewing. Many marketers are finding that AI can determine what your customers want to see and can write engaging content quickly.
To illustrate the broader applicability of AI in various industries, it’s worth mentioning that real estate professionals can also benefit significantly from these advancements. Leveraging AI can be a game-changer for them, and tools like ChatGPT for real estate can enhance their email marketing strategies further.
However, keep in mind that AI-generated content shouldn’t be used to replace professional copywriters. 35.7% of marketers use AI to generate ideas whilst 33.7% use it to generate an outline only. People tend to be able to spot text that feels artificial, and having a copywriter build on an AI-generated template gives you the best of both worlds: a quick turn-around and authentic, engaging content.
Final Thoughts
Marketing moves with available technology, and it’s evident that AI has a place in email marketing. It can increase the effectiveness of your campaigns, let you glean insights you may otherwise miss, and helps support your staff. So what are you waiting for?
