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In this era of hyper-personalization, your email subscribers likely only pay heed to emails that speak to them directly (and ignore the rest ). That’s why the key to great email marketing today is sending tailor-made content to the right people at the right time.
This level of personalization in email marketing has increased significantly as technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Business Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Cognitive Computing now play a major role in advancing it forward. These technologies make it possible to send emails that have a greater chance of engaging subscribers and prospective customers than ever before.
According to a survey by BrightEdge, marketers today consider personalization (29 percent) and Artificial Intelligence (26 percent) to be the next big trends in marketing: “Artificial Intelligence (AI) gives you the ability to match information about your product with the information your prospective buyers need at the moment and in a format they are most likely to consume most effectively.”
AI enabled systems let you optimize all parts of the email marketing process to ensure the greatest amount of personalization possible. Here are six ways AI can be used to drive email personalization.
The most successful email marketing campaigns focus on creating emails that seem more human and less machine-generated. AI helps you study and analyze the behaviors and interests of your customers to generate data-driven insights that make it possible to create tailored emails for each individual subscriber. In other words, it tells you what content will resonate most at a granular, subscriber-to-subscriber basis . The easiest way to collect this data is by asking subscribers to set preferences while signing up or once they receive their welcome email.
Personalizing the email experience means understanding that your subscribers all have different interests and behaviors. More often than not, you’ll quickly start to notice some consistent trends – based on demographics, geographic location, psychographics, purchase behaviors, and so on – that will allow you to group subscribers into a handful of key segments. AI and machine learning can help speed up this process by easily identifying purchase patterns and specific subscriber behaviors – generated through web forms, CRM systems, and other customer data inputs – to dynamically segment your subscribers into lists much faster than ever before.
The subject line and body copy of your emails play a critical role in determining the success of your campaigns. Strong and bold subject lines instantly need to persuade subscribers to open an email. Enticing body copy and a clearly defined call-to-action (CTA) that drives a specific action are equally as important. AI uses data-driven insights to determine which subject lines, CTA’s, and body copy will like engage users most and drive the best results. Additionally, machine learning and cognitive computing learn what resonates best with your subscribers – based on your email marketing campaign history – to create optimized subject lines and body copy using natural language technology. This essentially takes out the guesswork for creating the perfect email.
Email send time has a lot to do with whether an email eventually gets read or not. And considering how cluttered subscribers’ inboxes are these days, you must send emails at a time when they are most likely to grab a subscriber’s attention. To do this, you need to know precisely when subscribers open their inbox. This can be an extremely tedious and time-consuming task. AI and predictive analysis make this easy by helping to automate more effective send times based on specific insights from past email interactions and behaviors. AI algorithms can determine the best time to send emails to each subscriber, ensuring no email ever goes by unnoticed.
Sending tailor-made product and service recommendation emails to your subscribers has been shown to boost customer loyalty and improve engagement and conversion. AI can automatically track purchase and browsing behavior, interest levels, and online activity to create personalized product recommendations in the body of emails in real-time. This saves marketers the time from having to hand-pick products for their subscribers or a drop in engagement as a result of promoting the wrong products or offers.
AI-enabled systems make it possible to set up triggered automation (“drip”) campaigns – informed directly by subscriber insights –based on the lifecycle stage subscribers are in with your brand. By understanding past purchases, interests, and browsing behaviors, AI lets you set up automated campaigns that drive lead nurturing. It also can help you determine which content and images will be most effective in welcome emails, cart recovery emails, order update emails, and retention emails to drive the greatest amount of engagement and conversion possible.
As you can see, AI-enabled email marketing systems can help create a more personalized experience for your subscribers that generates real growth and results. Incorporating AI into your email marketing program will not only save a lot of time and effort but will also make your campaigns more effective and relevant than ever before.
