Email remains one of the most highly valued channels that brands use to engage an audience and drive ROI, but in today’s complex retail environment, email often falls short of its goals.

Audiences expect fully personalized customer experiences, including when, what, where, and how they receive content from brands. Yesterday’s email marketing campaigns only go so far in meeting today’s heady customer expectations.

As a result, brands have been turning to artificial intelligence to gain  insights into their audience, and get reliable content recommendations and behavioral predictions based on powerful data.

See how three brands have been using artificial intelligence to craft personalized email journeys for their subscribers and achieve their email marketing goals.

Decrease unsubscribes and drive engagement.

FareCompare is an online travel website that provides customers with information about value-oriented airlines and hotels.

Before company leaders turned to artificial intelligence to better understand and talk to their audience, the brand was suffering a high unsubscribe rate. Using Einstein Engagement Scoring, FareCompare was able to identify and segment its email audience based on how likely individuals were to unsubscribe from marketing campaigns.

Using this knowledge, FareCompare was able to increase engagement among its active audience, and target likely unsubscribers with special re-engagement campaigns.

Artificial intelligence helped FareCompare achieve the following:

• A 13% increase in revenue and an 11% increase in click-through rate

• A 49% decrease in bounce rate and a 66% decrease in list departures

• A 33% return on investment

Be more efficient with marketing budgets.

ShopAtHome is an online service that delivers offers and coupons from a variety of vendors and retailers.

The brand’s approach to its email marketing efforts is to target only its most engaged customers. Historically, the ShopAtHome team approximated this audience segment manually by identifying customers who had opened an email in the previous two weeks.

Using artificial intelligence to target subscribers who were “likely to click or open an email,” ShopAtHome refined its audience segmentation and earned even better engagement. Since implementing Salesforce Einstein, ShopAtHome has:

• Used Einstein Engagement Scoring to score 2.8 million subscribers

• Increased open rate by 23% and click-through rate by 30% using Einstein Engagement Scoring

• Increased its ability to be more efficient with email marketing budgets

“My excellent openers really are a snapshot of my best people. I feel more confident sending to them. And it works,” says Logan Lloyd, Online Marketing Manager of ShopAtHome.

Create 1-to-1 customer journeys.

In the nonprofit world, it’s a must to make sure your audience is engaged — any communication that’s not personalized runs the risk of being ignored. To make it easier for its audience to find and engage with philanthropic opportunities that matter, DonorsChoose.org built a website and emails that create a personalized experience for every potential donor.

For DonorsChoose.org, sending generic emails to donors wasn’t working. So, based on each donor’s history of past contributions along with their preferences, DonorsChoose.org can send personalized emails to each and every subscriber.

“By sending targeted, one-to-one communications through Marketing Cloud, we’ve increased our donor conversion rate by 300%,” says Kate Bisbee, CMO.

The fact is, targeted and personalized communications beat broad messages every time.

Download our field guide, “AI for CRM: A Field Guide to Everything You Need to Know,” to learn how artificial intelligence can help you enhance sales, service, marketing, and IT.