The intelligence of email marketing

In the last two years, the world broke the 5 Billion mark regarding how many email accounts exist around the globe. Additionally, business emails have reached over 100 billion sent on a daily basis. As personalization is becoming more critical for email marketers, machine learning is being applied to segmentation, marketing timing, and even copywriting.

In this post, we will address two topics. What are these machine learning enhanced email marketing tools and the features or capabilities behind them. And, how is artificial intelligence being used to enhance the effectiveness of email marketing.

One of the top questions these days is, “Why is email still so important?” Simple, Because people still use email and especially at work. With the competition of new communication channels available today (like Slack, project management software, skype, teams, etc.), email should not rest on its laurels if it wants to remain dominant in the coming years.

As marketers, we strive to make sure our messages are resonating with the right audience. We need to make sure we release the communication at the right time and learn from our market’s behavior in order to serve them better. Based on these factors, there are capabilities we must keep into consideration with the future of email.

Increasing Engagement via Opens, Click-throughs. Our previous standard procedure included manually testing combinations of email titles, subject lines, and body copy to determine which emails would perform the best. Today, new AI technology (like Phrasee) quickly generates its content and can predict which content will bring in the best results regarding conversions and revenues. This new ability cuts out A/B testing and allows marketers to create more combinations of messaging elements.

Calibrating Email Timing. Although this is not a new topic for the marketing industry, it is an essential factor growing with intelligence. If we send too many emails, we risk the chance of our audience unsubscribing. If we send too few emails, we risk the chance of our competition catching their attention. AI technology can determine time zones, personal patterns, and habits of the recipients. Thus allowing the emails to be received at the right time of day and with the right cadence.

Personalizing with Promotion. If we look at a person’s history or even their spending habits, AI can conclude which promo works best for that customer and what other products to recommend. AI can also track cart abandonment and then trigger an email to remind them about that product or even recommend a similar product. This improves the probability of the customer making a purchase. Additionally, AI can leverage your database of customer profiles and then group or segment email recipients and select the campaign’s best audience. Personalization is optimized by determining the best timing, channel, and message based on the audience’s behavior from their interaction with websites, emails, and mobile apps.

As new marketing platforms get introduced, they will combine traditional marketing methodologies with algorithms designed by mathematicians, computer/data scientists, and engineers. And with the future of marketing becoming more reliant on AI, we can expect to see improved accuracy in targeting our audiences.

 

References:

Kaput, Mike. “AI for Email Marketing: What you need to know”, Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute, 14 April 2020, https://www.marketingaiinstitute.com/blog/ai-for-email-marketing

De Jesus, Ayn. “Machine Learning in Email Marketing – Comparing 5 Current Applications”, emerj: The AI Research and Advisory Company, 19 May 2019, https://emerj.com/ai-application-comparisons/machine-learning-email-marketing-comparison/