Email marketing is more than just figuring out what your consumers need; it’s also identifying how to deliver your product effectively. You can do everything right, but if the tone of your email is off, would-be customers will click away without a second thought.
“The advent of AI in automated [email] marketing workflows has increased the throughput [while] decreasing the cost of lead generation,” said Jeffrey Goldsmith, Vice President of Marketing at Chooch AI. “[It] nurtures programs both in B2B and B2C campaigns.”
According to a study by Litmus, 75 percent of email marketers don’t feel as if they have a solid communication plan. The question then becomes, how does one go about becoming part of the successful 25 percent? Campaigns that work successfully answer three core questions:
1. What is our message, and how are we going to deliver it?
2. How can we empathically support our consumers through this process?
3. When consumers have questions or concerns, what systems do we have in place to answer them?
The logical solution would be to write out several different messages, one tailored to each of your target demographics. But that would be incredibly time-consuming, not to mention expensive to outsource.
Artificial Intelligence is an emerging tool in email marketing that’s quickly becoming invaluable. It can be programmed to tailor each email specifically to its targeted client. Some of its most useful tools include, but aren’t limited to:
• Customizable message frequency and delivery timing (especially useful when your targeted audience does not live in the same time zone)
• Automated imagery for each specific sub-section of targeted consumers
• Variable tone and voice tested for demographic-specific conversions and response rates
While these features may appear complicated and confusing, they function to serve you and make the email marketing process easier for business owners while also providing higher ROIs.
Spending time to get to know AI and all of its uses for your specific business and industry will set you miles ahead of the competition. It’s essential to get a grip on it right away to avoid playing catch up once everyone else starts doing it. Salesforce has made the process of utilizing AI for email marketing much more accessible.
Consumer conversion and open rates
Consumers’ inboxes are flooded continuously with sales offers and other promotional clutter -making it harder than ever for your business to get visibility. Salesforce’s Einstein Send Time Optimization (STO) leverages AI to deliver email messages when your customers are most likely to open and read them.
Utilizing STO technology significantly raises the chances of potential consumers clicking, opening, and reading your emails. When used in conjunction with AI-specific email marketing functions, STO can be the final missing piece to your marketing plan.
The software also helps you keep track of your send volumes and engagement rates for any selected timeframe through its in-build Einstein Engagement Frequency dashboard. This user-friendly interface provides you a plethora of useful, actionable data points.
Once you’ve separated your over-engaged subscribers from those that are under-engaged, you can adjust your overall campaign accordingly. Then, you and your AI systems can create varying strategies within your primary, overarching campaign.
Sending a personalized, highly-targeted email to potential customers (rather than spamming them with more of what they don’t want) is one of the best ways to turn a “no” into a “yes”, and drive your conversion rates up.
Always pick the right content and imagery through AI technology
Knowing the benefits of AI and its uses in email marketing is void without implementation. The first step towards a successful implementation is creating a diverse asset pool. A good asset pool should include content and imagery specific to your target audience, including all relevant sub-demographics.
By combining your asset pool with machine learning, you can systematically ensure that the right image and content display to the corresponding audience. Every potential purchaser receives a highly individual, fully personalized experience that sets you miles ahead of your competition.
Einstein’s Content Selection tools help make your email campaigns far more efficient by removing the need for multiple variations on the same campaign. There is no need to individually select images when you want to release another drop. Instigating a conversational spark in potential consumers makes them far more likely to actively engage with what they’re reading.
Setting the tone and language for each of your target audiences
Above all else, AI serves the consumer and helps marketers improve their user experience. By extrapolating data from every click and response, you get highly individualized suggestions for campaign improvements.
But the analysis doesn’t stop there. It goes above and beyond by telling you whether each response is positive, negative, or neutral. Through this, you can double down on tactics that are working and eliminate the underperformers (which could be working against you).
Tonal insights and the implementation of suggested improvements are what drive email open and conversion rates. By leveraging AI technologies, you can identify what words, phrases, and textual tones resonate best with your consumers on a widespread, scalable level.
Consumers are your greatest asset, a source of invaluable data. They’re all that matter. Machine learning and AI will allow you to dive deeper into their brains, showing you exactly what they want and respond to hard, actionable data.
Moving forward with AI
Using AI might seem like more trouble than it’s worth, but it can save you time in the long run. Setting up takes time as well (though you can outsource), but it automates most of the maintenance work while keeping your campaign fresh and relatable to consumers.
AI will help drive up your sales in the short-term, and it will leave your consumers feeling better about their interactions with you and your business. By automating your email marketing campaigns, you’ll have a much easier time scaling indefinitely.