Using AI in Email Marketing

How to use AI in email marketing

How do you use AI in email marketing? That’s a big question, and because there's so much AI technology out there, the answer can be complex. AI can crunch numbers, write email subject lines, inform your email marketing strategy, and much more.

There’s a lot to cover, but we can hit the most common uses below. So, let's look at AI email marketing tools and what they can do

Content ideation

Sometimes, the most challenging part of email marketing is coming up with general ideas. Once you know what to talk about, making content becomes easier. If you've ever stared at a blank screen or page trying to start a project, you already understand this.

AI writing tools can completely solve this problem easily. ChatGPT has made a lot of waves, and it’s pretty well known, so let’s use it as an example (this particular AI technology will come up again).

As a natural language generation tool, you can type prompts into ChatGPT, and it will give you full-fledged ideas. You can tell it about your business, and it will customize different ideas for your brand.

Even if you don’t end up using any of the AI ideas verbatim, it’s a tool that can always get your creativity flowing. This is only the first example of email marketing with AI.

Email validation

One of the significant challenges of email marketing is curating a quality email list. AI can help.

There are a few different ways for AI to implement itself into this process.

First, AI can review your existing email marketing program lists and compare metrics to determine the probability that a single email address (or an entire list) is valuable. By using this, you can skip low-quality emails and save a lot of time and effort.

Second, AI-based email marketing can help you track responses and interactions to rank the quality of various email addresses. With that information, AI tools can even curate an email list for you.

Sending frequency

AI often shines when it gets the chance to do math (a powerful feature of machine learning), and this is one of those times. It might seem like you can send emails on a regular schedule and succeed, but marketing is far more complicated than that.

If you send emails too soon, you risk burning out recipients, leading to them not reading your messages. They might even unsubscribe or block your email address.

But, if you send them out too rarely, you miss opportunities.

AI can track the value generated by each email you send and analyze the frequency of your efforts to help you build an optimized schedule.

Campaign insights

Insights for AI email campaigns expand on the previous section. You could consider email frequency to be a single insight in a sea of possibilities.

Other insights you should consider are which contact methods are most useful, which types of products get the most responses, what kinds of email headings work best, and much more.

Not only can AI tools track various insights for you, but they can also help you figure out which additional insights are worth investigating.

Content creation

Oh, look! It’s time to talk about ChatGPT again.

Before we do, let’s stop and remember that it's not the only generative AI tool companies can use. However, it's the most well-known, and that’s why it’s discussed often. You can use any AI that you prefer for this application.

That said, let’s talk about the application. 

We already covered how content generators can help you come up with ideas. Once you have ideas, you can feed them into the AI, and it can write your entire email. If you told it about your business to tailor the content, that’s even better. It will keep track of what you tell it and incorporate that into the content that it creates.

You can also use image generators to get unique graphics and much more. Content creation AI tools can save you countless hours and provide various benefits.

But here's a word of caution: AI content creators often fail to produce human-quality content, which may be plagued with inaccurate information. They can short-cut the creative process, which is invaluable, but you still want to proofread written content and have a designer clean up your graphics.

Email list cleanup

This goes hand-in-hand with email validation, but cleanup involves more than just marking invalid email addresses.

Email list cleanup can remove low-quality and inactive email accounts from your list. The AI can check that email addresses exist on server lists, and it can do this very quickly.

Additionally, the AI can analyze the quality of valid emails to help you decide if they’re worth keeping on the list or not. This is powerful and insightful, and it can boost the value of your email list.

Email personalization

You’ve probably heard that marketing emails should be personalized. The problem is that it takes time. Even if you put everyone's name into their email, the recipient won’t feel the personalization.

This is where AI shines. As long as it has access to the personal information you might use, it can easily incorporate that into the email. If you were using ChatGPT to help write the emails, feed it a little personal information, and you’ll immediately see a difference in content.

To call this a time saver is an understatement.

Smart segmentation

There's no such thing as a universal marketing email. You already want personalized emails, but even beyond that, good email marketing requires segmentation. You don’t want to send car fresheners to people who don’t have a car or attract the right people to the wrong product. 

AI can compare responses, campaign goals, products, and services and automatically break recipients into segments.

More than that, it can use math and data analytics to do this in powerful ways without needing you to watch over its shoulder. It’s ensuring that your emails go to the right recipients in the right ways, and it’s not doing this on a hunch. It follows powerful analytics the whole time.

Email automation

We’ve already talked about automating email lists, customization, content creation, and more. What if you could automate the design and delivery of entire emails?

For instance, if a customer orders something online, you can send an automated receipt to their email address. With AI, you can expand on this process and send customized, personalized, automated emails for various purposes.

This broadens the scope of what you can accomplish with marketing emails, and it continues to lower the costs of your operation at the same time.

What are the advantages of using AI in email marketing

The purpose of AI and email marketing is to save time. It allows your team to do more without overworking them. 

Consider the ChatGPT example one more time. If it’s helping with idea creation and content creation, a single person on the marketing team can handle a more extensive range of emails without additional stress.

As they say, time is money, and if you can make your labor more productive or reduce how much you spend on labor, that’s already a win.

Yet, there’s more to this. Because AI can integrate with data and analytics tools, it can inform email marketing strategies and ideas, leading to more successful campaigns. You can also increase revenue by effectively leveraging your AI email marketing tools.

Is AI technology a replacement for email marketing teams?

You’ve just read a ton about how AI is powerful and can automate everything. But, just like ChatGPT still needs you to proofread it, any email marketing software needs human intervention.

As powerful as artificial intelligence technology is, it needs people to operate. An automated workflow still requires human resources to succeed.

An AI tool can help your people explore new ideas, improve their outreach, work more efficiently, and discover insights through analytics, but it's just a tool. Tractors made farming more efficient, but they didn’t replace the farmer. Marketing automation is the same.

Leverage the power of AI in future email campaigns

AI tools specifically designed for email marketing are beneficial regardless of your industry or business size. AI technology can speed up the creation of marketing emails and allow you to produce effective campaigns. However, it's also important to consider the limitations of AI.

If you want to enhance your email marketing, use Mailchimp. With a suite of tools at your fingertips, you can build emails and optimize your campaigns with AI for better outcomes.