How to Use AI in Email Marketing
By incorporating predictive and generative content through AI tools, you can leverage email marketing a lot in the marketing world and skyrocket your business's revenue.
Robbie Fitzwater
With advancements in AI technology, businesses have recently started using AI tools for content creation purposes, varying from written to graphic content. And most of these businesses are incorporating this content into their marketing to drive good revenue.
In this unprecedented marketing era, you also need to work smart and unique in order to have an advantage over other businesses.
- How Is AI Used In Email Marketing?
- How Can AI Boost Email Marketing Campaigns and Automations?
- Predictive Sending
- Product Recommendations
- Lead Scoring for B2B
- List Hygiene
- Dynamic Content
- Testing and Optimization
- Where And How to Start?
- AI for Written Content
- Chat GPT Demonstration
- AI For Image Creation Tools
- Repurposing Content
- For Content On Your Site
- Customer Service
- Must-Have AI email marketing tools
- Cons of AI in Email Marketing
- Pro-tips for Using AI in Email Marketing
- Takeaways
Therefore, in this article, we will walk you through some helpful insights about incorporating data from various AI tools into your marketing, specifically email marketing, so that you can do better than your competitors.
How Is AI Used In Email Marketing?
In marketing, AI is a tool that helps understand patterns and create connections in the data sets and information that are too large to comprehend for human minds. This is the kind of data processing and detection of patterns that, normally human mind wouldn’t be able to do.
In the past, we’ve had many predictive tools only, but now we are living in the times where we have more AI e-marketing tools at our disposal too. These are the generative tools that help us drive more success through our marketing and assist in ideally improving and optimizing everything we’re going to do.
These new tools provide opportunities to optimize and drive more revenue and create better personalization. It adds more impact to our marketing and more efficiency to the marketers throughout the process.
These predictive tools are Chat GPT, GPT Three, GPT Four, DALL-E, and some image-generating software.
The combination of both the predictive and the generative tools are the ones that will let your marketing thrive. By using these tools, you’re going to see much more innovation in your email marketing. We will try and unpack some insights into these tools and how you, as marketers, can utilize them. Take advantage of them and leverage your email marketing to the best.
How Can AI Boost Email Marketing Campaigns and Automations?
To look at things from a high level, you need to understand how AI in email communication can improve your email marketing campaigns and automations.
Predictive Sending
Many of these predictive tools will be built into the email service providers you’ll be using. You need to make sure they are native to the platform so you can start taking advantage of them early.
They help you predict many of the things early on and answer any of your questions regarding the business, for example:
- What will be the predicted repurchase rate?
- What will be the replenishment rate for different products in different categories?
- What is the expected lifetime value?
- Which times will be the most optimal smart sending times?
- What is the gender-specific sending going to look like?
- What will be the number of upcoming purchases you can expect?
- What will the churn probability of an individual user be?
With these predictive AI tools, you can predict many other things, then incorporate these data points into your automations and flows through logic or triggers.
These tools will allow you to understand how your email communication will look. It will make the context of the content you’re sending extremely relatable, making the customer experience very impact and valuable.
Knowing the replenishment rate or expected lifetime value of a customer is beneficial. This knowledge lets you tailor content to meet their expectations. If you identify customers who will place repeat orders, you will communicate with them in the way that you expect them to keep coming back.
So this process is all about pulling your historical data out and using it to predict what will happen in the future, which makes many of these native tools valuable.
Product Recommendations
Product recommendations are one of the most valuable ways to use these tools. If your email service provider can look at the purchases that have been made by an individual before and then recommend specific products that are related to or similar to those products that are a great way to use these tools.
So you’re recommending to your customers based on what they’ve purchased in the past or what services they may need and adding value to their experience.
Lead Scoring for B2B
This is also an easy area to start incorporating your insights early. Hence, your sales team is effective in the way they reach out to every individual with individual prospects.
List Hygiene
AI email marketing tools also assist in maintaining list hygiene by making sure that people who are likely to churn, in other words, people who are active with your brand, are on the list. The members who are not active or are not valuable to your services are excluded from the list.
Dynamic Content
In dynamic content, you send specific content to recipients, given their previous behaviors, making each content different and valuable.
Testing and Optimization
There are many ways to test and optimize your process, through popover forms or content emails. And the predictive nature of these AI tools helps ensure you’re using the right things and making data-informed decisions. This lets helps in optimizing the goals you have.
That’s generally how these tools have been used up to this point to a large extent. But now AI is opening the door for more generative tools, which may give us a few unique ways to drive direct revenue immediately.
These tools greatly enhance efficiency in the marketing process. They enhance performance and unlock opportunities that haven’t been opened in the past. It enables you to start creating content and building creativity at a large scale, which is fascinating.
So now let’s discuss how to use these generative tools early to get the most out of your email marketing.
Where And How to Start?
AI for Written Content
AI can be used for written content in emails.
If you use AI tools like Chat GPT or other AI language models, you’ll find them intriguing. These tools require a prompt or topic to generate content. Witnessing the content that emerges from these prompts is fascinating.
We’ve previously succeeded in using it for subject lines and preview text. So you can also test and experiment with these, going through a few iterations here and there and doing what works best for your brand. We will dive into that, too, and see everything in more detail.
Chat GPT Demonstration
This will demonstrate how you can get some really good email subject lines through Chat GPT.
You first have to type in a prompt for it to generate results. For instance, if you’re a coffee business introducing a new espresso and looking for attractive subject lines to get more open rates for your promotional emails, you can get that on Chat GPT. You write something like “10 calls to action to try something new,” and it is going to give you 10 various subject lines under 25 characters long.
The more specific we are with our prompts, the more precise the result will be.
This lets you get some good insights into things quickly and lets you describe and brainstorm complex information quickly. It is the kind of stuff you would need more time to be able to do.
Next, if you modify things slightly in the previous prompt, as shown in the insert below, it will give you something different that would be more precise and accurate to what you’re looking for. It may take some time to generate results, but what it generates is almost the work of magic!
We can also use this to build body copy for an email or even go one layer up and use this as a tool to generate content that we can use in an email. Like searching for content on “10 books every runner needs to read and why,” it will immediately start generating a list of books for runners.
You can see in the insert above how it collects different data points and ideas, uses many insights and turns them into something you require in your brand’s voice and tone.
If you were to do this manually, researching the books on this theme, it would take hours or days to do all of what this tool does in a few seconds. This helps expedite the process generally and helps you get what you require faster.
Similarly, if we changed this prompt a little, too, it would change the results from the previous prompt.
The books responding to this prompt are completely different just because of one little change. This shows how precise this tool is with its work and response. You can even have a subject matter expert validate these responses, and you will find them accurate and reasonable.
You can see how much precision this tool has and how valuable the responses are. Surely, you can use it for primary research; however, there is some limitation to the use of this tool. It can give you all the information you need on a subject matter, but it cannot contextualize that data according to your business.
It would be best if you incorporated your expertise and insights into it by adjusting and changing the content to give it a unique and valuable perspective. You have to synthesize the data generated according to your brand’s requirements, which is the one thing this tool cannot do. It cannot perform that high-level thinking as a human can because it cannot predict what will happen next in the business.
So one thing this tool gives you is the power to expedite the process. And when that happens, you can give more time to incorporating your insights instead of paying most of the attention to trying to collect the data in primary research.
You can think of this tool as a calculator that doesn’t replace the need to do the math. However, it can expedite the process and help you do the right and accurate calculations.
For every content, whether headlined, body copy, subject matters, CTAs, or even button text, you can give a specific range you want your content to be in. As in our example, we specified the range to 25 characters or less.
That’s how we go about these AI tools to expedite our process of creating content for written marketing, but we can also use these tools in other ways too.
AI For Image Creation Tools
We can also create amazing images through AI images creation tools like Canva, Mid-Journey, or DALL-E. These tools help you create great visual content that you can incorporate into your emails to make them look more attractive and fun.
One thing I love about tools like Canva is that you give it any prompt, describe it well in a written text, and turn your imagination into reality. Each image generated is different from the others. This allows you to choose the one nearest to what you imagined in your head.
If your budget doesn’t accommodate a large creative team, these tools can help build creative content. They allow for quick generation of some really good results. These can help you design images for blog posts or articles, header images in emails, etc.
For example, we can use the same prompt we used for Chat GPT about 10 of the running books and make a prompt as shown in the image below.
Try staying realistic with your prompts to get more accurate images. However, you can always do much imaginative stuff with these tools. In this image, all the books piled on the table are not about running. But it still tries to give what you’re looking for.
So you can see how working with these image creation tools is a broader idea than written content tools. You can use this tool to leverage your emails in different ways by adding fascinating ideas to your content in a quick manner.
Repurposing Content
We can also use AI tools for repurposing content. For example, AI transcription tools like Otter AI can turn any video into a blog post with the help of transcription.
We do this with our videos too. This blog you’re reading has been turned from a video into a blog post using transcription.
You can also get it to generate tweetable moments or taglines from a blog post for the call to action. So these tools extract some of the major points of the transcription and create tweets or taglines that give a high-level view of a subject matter and guarantee an action from the audience.
For Content On Your Site
As we mentioned before, these tools can always be used as a resource for primary research, for creating outlines for blog posts or a podcast, creating lists of items and everything that you’d have to go look around or on your own
Some businesses are now also using tools like Gong, an AI tool that helps you pull all your sales calls, aggregate the key problem areas that people run into, and turn those into FAQs.
As you can see, there are so many different ways and angles of using this to create unique content.
Customer Service
This can also be used in customer service, where it automatically generates responses to questions via SMS, predictive answering of questions in the chat function, and so much more.
So this is not incorporated only in your email marketing but also fits into our broader marketing picture where email marketing is a subset. Using these tools provides a holistic view of your business. This perspective can be a fascinating space for leveraging these resources.
Must-Have AI email marketing tools
- Chat GPT
- GPT Three
- GPT Four (will be released soon)
- Mid-Journey
- DALL-E
- Otter AI
- Octane.AI (a survey tool that gives predictive insights into what products will be valuable for individuals)
Cons of AI in Email Marketing
Despite all the amazing things these tools can do, there are still some limitations to the because, after all, it is a machine only.
One thing to consider here is that it will give out what it gets, meaning the response it will generate will depend on the kind of prompt you write. If you’re giving it a funny prompt, it will give you funny results. If you’re adding seriousness and precision to it, it will give you precise and serious prompts.
So the ball is in your court when dealing with this because these tools’ predictions and insights can only go so far.
If you want these to thrive, use them mostly for the foundational layer and then add your expertise to make the experience more human for the audience. And that’s where some real magic can be guaranteed because we know that people connect with people, not with computers.
Be sure to add that personalized expertise to the primary research you got from these resources because only you can add those kinds of insights that you’ve been working on for years. This can be a game changer because you’re mainly trying to add more value to machine-generated data to make it unique for your audience.
Pro-tips for Using AI in Email Marketing
A few tips can help you get the most out of these AI tools.
- Try to run your prompts a few different times to get different results. As you saw earlier, we modified our prompts a few times in some inserts, giving us different lists or results every time. When you do this, you may get some valuable insights that can help you create something unique.
For instance, after trying different modifiers for creating an attractive headline, you take one of the most valuable headlines and command it to give you 10 headlines similar to it. These headlines could be built off the same concept or the same idea.
- Try to get strategic with these prompts by narrowing your focus. So again, run the prompts a few times and see what you specifically want your content to look like. Get specific with your prompts. For example, XYZ thing written for a toddler, XYZ tips for an advanced runner versus a new runner.
This specification in your prompt is more likely to give you the response and insight you want or give you a different and more valuable angle and direction to your content. But in the end, it has to be valuable for the people you’re dealing with as a business.
Takeaways
So in this article, we discussed the two categories of content, predictive and generative content, and how they work simultaneously in your AI email communication after this is a long road down the email marketing.
For example, predictive content can generate more generative content. When you have predictive content like the next expected purchase date, you can drive a good amount through generative content. For instance, these predictive insights can help you build a generative personalized email.
Next, we will see how our predictive data points can generate automation based on what they expect people to do. And once you start getting those recommendations, things can get even more challenging and heavier for marketers.
But if you work smartly, you can easily cross that bridge and get to the other side. These tools can be fun to use once you get the hang of them. These tools keep you proactive rather than reactive. You can leverage them to your advantage in various ways.
As enlisted earlier in this article, you have many options available in these tools. You can use any of those depending on the requirements of your brand and can incorporate the insights from these into your email marketing to get the most out of your marketing on the whole.
Hopefully, this article was helpful and cleared all your confusion regarding the AI tool and its link with email marketing. If you have any further questions feel free to ask in the comments below!
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