Over the last few years, email marketers worldwide have begun to place a significant emphasis on personalizing their campaigns. Their motives couldn’t be any clearer.
If the dwindling attention span of humans wasn’t a pressing enough concern for communication professionals, now they also have to contend with a dizzying number of competitors as well. In such a scenario, one can only rise above the crowd by fostering an extremely individualized dialogue with their customers.
The potency of email as a digital marketing channel is well-documented. Introducing personalization into the equation enables businesses to dial up their efficacy by a significant margin.
Especially now, with AI in the picture, the possibilities that marketers have at their disposal of effecting innovations to personalization, in specific, and email marketing, in general, are virtually limitless.
And that’s precisely what we are going to address in this blog. Read on to find out about the various ways in which AI can help digital marketers realize truly exciting and impactful email campaigns!
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Content Ideation and Creation
For your email marketing campaign to become the talk of the town, it must have a gripping idea at its core. However, as seasoned email marketers will tell you, this very idea can prove to be incredibly elusive.
With so many different kinds of ideas being put to execution all around us, coming up with one that cracks that ideal balance of originality and creativity can appear rather overwhelming. Having some help on this front would be pretty ideal, you’d agree?
Well, AI has got you covered. Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT can, upon accepting the faintest wisp of an idea from your end, provide you with several narratives revolving around the same. That, in turn, can help provide your creative gears with the fodder they require to get whirring!
Be it subject lines, preview texts, or your email body – AI tools have got you covered on all fronts. That said, in order to obtain an output that truly lives up to your expectations, you first need to feed in a prompt that is detailed and touches upon important factors such as the length of the piece, the tone of the draft, the keywords it must include, and the like.
A crucial caveat that comes with using generative AI is that you need to tread with caution when it comes to the output. Despite their impressive capabilities, these tools are still in early developmental stages, meaning the drafts they generate aren’t always accurate and coherent.
More importantly, AI content lacks the spontaneity, originality, and emotional pull that only a human mind is capable of and, therefore, tends to sound increasingly one-tone and tedious.
The wise course of action, then, is to always subject AI-generated content to a round of human scrutiny- run the drafts past the experienced content professional in your team before you proceed to use them in your campaigns.
Personalization
Long gone are the days when simply personalizing the first name of your audience in your email campaigns would have fetched you glowing results. The modern-day audience is numbed to such tactics and expects a lot better from the brands it is entering into business with.
In 2024, if you want to have a realistic shot at getting across to your audience, you must closely monitor every single interaction they register with you and respond accordingly.
In effect, your email copy needs to be a response to your audience’s behavior, past purchases, and on-site activity, among other things. Now, when you have a large contact list, implementing personalization at scale becomes a challenge; not anymore, thanks to AI tools!
Particularly during the holiday season, when email production requirements go through the roof, you can leverage AI’s capabilities to ensure that you don’t skip a beat with respect to personalization while also staying on top of the heavy workload.
Another personalization maneuver that goes a long way toward grabbing the audience’s attention is recommendations. Product recommendations served up to customers that are in sync with their profile activities never fail to work their charm.
Of course, a section on personalization can’t possibly be wrapped up without mentioning the technique that is at the heart of every personalized email campaign- segmentation. As important as it is, going about segmentation manually is a highly consuming affair (small businesses can at least think of making an attempt, but for bigger enterprises, it is downright unimaginable).
To achieve the best results, then, one should consider automating this task with AI. Taking into account the actions and behavior of your audience, AI tools can sort them into several segments; subsequently, you can prepare targeted content for each of them.
List Management
Your copy and design could be peerless, but if your email list hygiene isn’t up to the mark, you’ll struggle to secure the results you desire. As your business rolls over the pages of the calendar, you’ll find your list amassing some dormant and invalid contacts.
It’s vital that you are proactive about weeding them out. One needn’t reiterate the sheer time and effort that goes into preparing AI-powered email campaigns; at the end of it all, you wouldn’t certainly want your carefully curated emails to land in inboxes where they will go completely overlooked.
Besides, delivering emails to such addresses will hamper your deliverability as well. It goes without saying then, that email list management needs to be among your topmost priorities.
Cleaning up email lists, much like segmentation, though indisputably critical, is quite exacting when attempted manually. Here, too, then one stands to benefit by deploying AI tools- they will scan your database and automatically eliminate out-of-date contacts.
That’s not all, they will also update contact numbers, job titles, and other important information wherever necessary.
Wrapping It Up
If AI isn’t already integrated into your email marketing machinery, it’s high time you made it happen. AI’s sophisticated capabilities, when coupled with email’s glimmering merits, will help you take your business to new heights of success.
And not just email, AI can help introduce vitality and innovation to other aspects of your digital marketing efforts as well.
