Email marketing is one of the most appealing channels for digital marketers. However, managing email campaigns can be quite demanding. This is where AI email automation comes into play. Leveraging the power of AI tools, marketers make their campaigns efficient, reduce costs, and scale their efforts for a better return on investment.
Read on to explore the various applications of AI in email management, including smart email filtering, automated email replies, and intelligent email list segmentation.
What is AI email automation?
AI email automation refers to using artificial intelligence (AI) and different AI tools to automate and optimize the different aspects of email marketing campaigns, like creating email copies, audience segmentation, email personalization and analyzing campaign performance.
When email marketing, marketers have to deal with huge amounts of data and perform many tasks to result in a successful email campaign. AI allows them to streamline these processes and free up bandwidth to focus on planning such campaigns instead of performing repetitive tasks.
Benefits of AI email automation
AI email automation allows marketers to delegate repetitive tasks to AI tools. This results in marketers being able to produce better results within a shorter period. It also allows them to manage their tasks more efficiently and track the performance of their email campaigns. Let’s take a look at some of the short and long-term effects of AI email automation.
1. Increase conversion rate
Marketers can use AI to analyze user data and customer behavior patterns to deliver content that resonates better with their target audience. This can be anything from product recommendations to offers and announcements that interests the customer based on predictions about preferences, purchase intent, or future actions. Delivering such personalized content to a targeted audience positively affects the conversion rate.
2. Decrease cost of acquisition
AI can automate and optimize tasks like content creation, audience segmentation and scheduling, thereby reducing the time and resources required. This helps businesses to maintain a lean marketing team and lowers the overall cost of acquisition of customers.
3. Analyze large data sets
AI can uncover patterns and trends that humans may miss because of the size of the data collected during audience research. AI tools can analyze metrics like recipient behavior, open and click-through rates to provide valuable insights for making data-driven decisions.
4. Scale marketing campaigns
AI automation can handle various aspects of campaign management, such as list segmentation, scheduling, sending emails, and reporting on campaign performance. This reduces the need for manual intervention, allowing marketers to scale their campaigns to reach a larger audience.
💡 Related guide: 8 Ways to Leverage AI in Email Marketing For Better Campaigns
Applications of AI in email automation
Email marketers have actively started leveraging the power of AI in their email campaigns. While there are no active solutions for completely automating email marketing campaigns, there are many AI tools that perform functions for different aspects of email marketing.
1. Write email copies
Marketers are actively using AI to write email copies that align best with their audience. Using AI tools to write email copy is much faster and allows marketers to create better-personalized copies.
- Subject lines: AI-powered tools can easily generate suggestions for subject lines based on the content of the email, Recipient data and performance insights. For example, Encharge provides a free tool that you can use to generate catchy subject lines for your emails.
- Pre-header texts: AI tools can also generate highly engaging and personalized pre-header texts to complement the subject lines and increase the open rate of emails. Copylime, for instance, can generate pre-header texts for your emails with many options to choose from within a few seconds.
2. Test emails
Email marketers understand the importance of testing their emails before sending them out to their real customers. It helps them gauge the performance of their emails and optimize their emails if required.
A/B testing: AI email automation enables marketers to perform A/B testing. In A/B testing, different versions of the emails are sent to a sample audience and the performance of the emails is then analyzed based on the response of the recipients and engagement. This helps marketers pick the winning variation and understand what elements performed well, allowing them to refine their marketing campaigns. Mailmodo, for instance, is an email service provider that allows for A/B testing of emails.
Subject line testing: AI tools allow marketers to predict the performance of the subject lines using subject line testers. AI relies on historical data, recipient behavior and industry benchmarks to test the subject lines and provide insight on their performance. Using the same data, AI can also generate variations of the subject lines for better open rates. Omnisend, for example, will provide a score for your subject line. Additionally, it provides a breakdown of your subject line under the helpful and negative words used, the length and scannability of the subject line and a preview of the same.
💡 Related guide: 8 Email Subject Line Testers to Elevate Your Open Rates
3. Optimize send time
AI algorithms can analyze recipient behavior, engagement data and open rates to determine the most effective time to send emails to their recipients. These insights can help marketers deliver the right emails to the right audience at the right time, increasing the chances of emails being opened and acted upon. Seventh Sense allows you to do this for your emails.
Source: Emarsys
4. Smart segmentation
While dividing your audience into segments is a good idea and a step towards delivering better-personalized content, it is a highly demanding task for marketers with larger audiences. AI tools allow marketers to do this more effectively and efficiently. Using AI, marketers can easily and quickly segment their audience based on various criteria like demographics, behavior and purchase history and deliver highly targeted and personalized content. Google Analytics allows you to do this very easily.
5. Personalize product recommendations
AI can leverage machine learning and AI algorithms to analyze customers' browsing and purchase history to recommend products and services they are most likely to purchase. By using AI’s power of predictive analytics, marketers can provide their customers with personalized product recommendations. These can be products similar to what the customer has purchased before, a product that goes well with a previously bought product, or even a product that needs to be bought again. Below, you can see how Aftership delivers recommended products below the tracking details of an order.
Source: Aftership
6. Scale email outreach
AI tools allow marketers to scale their email outreach campaigns by automating the various processes and doing them in a much shorter time frame. AI tools allow for managing many email lists and scheduling separately personalized emails for each list. They also enable marketers to quickly produce highly optimized and personalized email copies, subject lines, and pre-header texts, reducing the required time. This helps them reach a larger audience while saving time and resources. Campaigner is an example of a great tool that offers advanced marketing automation tools for managing and scaling your email outreach campaigns.
7. Analyze customer data
AI can analyze customer data better than humans, especially with large data sets. AI tools can analyze customer preferences and behaviors to create customer profiles. Sentiment analysis also helps AI to understand customer sentiment towards emails and adapt future email campaigns accordingly. This data on the audience allows marketers to target the right audience and improve the overall performance of their campaigns. MonkeyLearn is a platform that allows you to do this with ease.
Source: MonkeyLearn
8. Personalize email content
AI enables marketers to generate and deliver personalized email content by leveraging customer data like demographics, gender, age and preferences. AI tools also allow for sending dynamic emails that are highly personalized for individual customers, like product recommendation emails, birthday emails and more. This enhances the relevance of the emails received by the recipients and improves engagement and conversion. Copy.ai allows you to do this very easily, as seen in the image below.
Source: Copy.ai
9. Reporting and analytics
Marketers can find it very difficult to keep track of the performance of the emails sent in different email campaigns, especially if they have more than one campaign running simultaneously. It also becomes difficult to understand the reasons behind the success or failure of a specific email. AI tools allow marketers to track the performance of their email campaigns and offer insights into metrics like engagement rates, conversion rates and open rates.
AI tools can also provide suggestions to improve the performance of such campaigns and present the data in a more visually appealing format to make it easier for marketers to understand. They also allow for better data-driven decision-making and optimize future campaigns. Sprinklr is one such platform that can help you do this.
Source: Sprinklr
💡 Related guide: What is Email Analytics: 15 Metrics & KPIs to Track Performance
10. Clean up email lists
Email marketers are often stuck with email lists that are filled with spam or fake emails. AI tools can analyze such email lists to identify them. They can also identify inactive and invalid email addresses and recommend strategies to clean up the email lists. Marketers save a lot of time by assigning this task to AI, which also ensures better deliverability, higher engagement rates and more accurate performance results. Snov.io is one platform that allows you to upload your email list in bulk for verification.
Source: Snov.io
💡 Related guide: How to Verify & Clean Email List to Maintain Email Hygiene
11. Design email templates
Even high-quality emails with poor formatting or design are rendered ineffective because the recipients cannot view them properly. However, designing visually appealing templates for individual emails can be time-consuming. AI tools can assist marketers in designing visually appealing and mobile-responsive email templates. This ensures optimal rendering of emails across various devices and clients, making the entire process of creating visually appealing emails faster.
12. Generate smart replies
AI-powered email clients can suggest short, contextually relevant replies to incoming messages. These suggestions save time and effort for users by offering quick response options. For example, Lavender.ai assists in composing emails by offering suggestions for sentence completion and grammar correction.
Source: Lavender
13. Filter out spam
AI helps filter out malicious emails, reducing the chances of falling victim to phishing attempts or scams.
➡️ The algorithm can be trained to recognize common spam indicators like suspicious sender addresses, misspellings, excessive use of capital letters, misleading subject lines, and specific keywords.
➡️ AI assigns a spam score to the email based on the likelihood of it being spam. This score can be a numerical value or a probability. The email client or service usually sets a threshold value, and if the spam score exceeds this threshold, the email is marked as spam.
➡️ AI email filtering systems often incorporate user feedback mechanisms. If a legitimate email is mistakenly marked as spam or vice versa, users can manually flag or unflag emails, providing feedback to the AI system.
This feedback helps improve the algorithm's accuracy and enhances the security of your email communication. Levity is a platform that allows you to keep your inbox organized and actionable.
5 AI email automation tools
There are plenty of tools available for email marketers for email automation and the other processes involved in email marketing campaigns. Let’s take a look at some of the best email automation tools you can use in your next email marketing campaign.
1. Mailmodo
Mailmodo is an email marketing platform that allows you to create and send AMP emails. It provides a no-code interface for designing your email using its drag-and-drop email template editor.
If that wasn’t enough, Mailmodo will soon empower marketers with AI-powered capabilities. Here’s a list of their upcoming features:
- Subject line generator and analyzer
- Pre-header generator and analyzer
- Email copy creator
- Image curator based on text prompts
- A/B Testing
- Audience segmentation
Create campaign ideas with
AI Email Campaign Planner
2. Reach
Reach is an AI-powered personalization assistant that helps marketers with their email outreach efforts. It allows marketers to personalize each email based on the lead’s personal or company data. It also allows marketers to review all the relevant data about their leads and review them in one place. It even allows for integration to export personalized icebreakers in bulk.
3. Phrasee
Phrasee is an AI-powered platform that helps marketers boost their email marketing strategy. Phrasee uses AI to generate subject lines, pre-headers, headlines and CTAs optimized for better engagement while retaining the brand voice. It even allows for testing and measuring your content's performance.
4. Mailytica
Mailytica is an AI-powered email marketing platform that allows you to automate repetitive emails. It offers tools like AI email bot, AI email autoresponder and AI email parser. Their AI email bot feature can analyze received emails and automatically generate a reply for the mail received. On the other hand, their AI email autoresponders use natural language processing to understand the email and respond with an appropriate reply. AI also enables the tools to understand the context and forward it to the right team to act upon.
5. GetResponse
GetResponse is an all-in-one email marketing platform that offers various tools to help marketers in their email marketing efforts. Their AI email generator allows for the creation of engaging emails within seconds. It also offers tools for better personalization of email copies, A/B testing of subject lines and easy to use drag-and-drop email creator.
Takeaway
So, we can see how the involvement of AI deeply affects the email marketing sector and the benefits of leveraging AI tools' power for email marketing processes. Email marketers actively use AI tools for smart segmentation, personalization, predictive analytics and generating email copies. With present trends in sight, it is not far-fetched to say that AI will be an integral part of email marketing processes.
