Email marketing has been a pioneer in digital marketing and continues to be the most effective online marketing practice to date. It helps you communicate with clients in a personal setting while still being economical and easy to handle.
With the emergence of automation and Artificial Intelligence, email marketing is seeing yet another powerful change in its landscape. AI is going above and beyond simply setting sending emails on a timer, it’s changing the way you manage your inbox.
In this article, we take a deeper look at how AI is revolutionizing email marketing by injecting automation into every aspect.
eMailing: When Artificial Intelligence Gets Involved
Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools in digital marketing, with every dollar spent on it returning an ROI of $42. Modern businesses rely on it for its simplicity of use and the significant returns it brings.
Whereas Artificial Intelligence has emerged as one of the most prominent modern-day concepts of digitization that has been transforming the way we operate. It involves computer systems stimulating human intelligence boost business operations with efficiency.
More than 91% of leading businesses are actively investing in AI. One such meeting point of the power of AI with the digital marketing efforts of a business has been email marketing. It helps bring more automation to emailing while staying true to its strength: personalization.
We decode how artificial intelligence is redefining email marketing and how your business can make the most of it.
1. How AI powers Email Automation?
While email marketing is a powerful digital marketing practice, it comes with certain limitations — your need to manage your mailing lists and inbox on your own. The automation options built into the system offer limited services.
You can schedule emails and automate the flow, but that’s about it. Neither do they learn and adapt to be better. This is where AI steps in to improve your email management. It helps you categorize email responses from your clients by scanning their content.
AI email responses use machine learning to categorize incoming emails and respond with the most suitable response. It deploys text classification to identify the language being used in the email to help you construct an appropriate response.
The text classification tool works on the sample data you feed it to discover patterns in the email content to recognize the intent of the sender. You’ll have to train the tool and plug it into your input and output devices to start automating your emails.
2. Advantages Of AI For Email Automation
There is a plethora of benefits AI brings to email automation. It can write everything from subject lines to a copy of the email. Not only does it automate the send times of your email, but it optimizes them to be sent at the most opportune moments based on historic data.
Moreover, it helps you manage your email lists and inbox. You’ll be able to send truly personalized email responses as well as newsletters to your prospects with the help of AI-powered automation tools.
Here are some of the key ways AI improves your email automation:
A.) Personalization
One of the most prominent features of email marketing that makes it a success with customers is its ability to be a personalized form of communication while still being large-scale. AI takes it a notch further by individualizing your responses.
Firstly, it helps you create personalized emails to send to your mailing based on their interest. Craft everything from subject lines to engaging copies with AI and send them at the most opportune times to receive a response.
Then, AI will help you manage your inbox by categorizing the responses you receive on your email campaign. You can add customized labels, say ‘interested’, ‘hot lead’, and ‘not interested’, and the tool will automatically classify the incoming responses into categories.
This helps you send personalized responses to the emails you receive in your inbox. You’ll be able to create separate responses for the ‘interested’, ‘hot lead’, and ‘not interested’ responses you receive as replies.
B.) Reduces Response Time
Automation helps reduce the response time between emails, speeding up the conversation and keeping the customer engaged. You can set an email automated reply for certain responses or set a customer support professional for more complicated responses.
Your AI tool will use a text classifier to decode the incoming message to classify it then and there in the order of priority. If it’s a service request, it’ll be slotted into one of the following categories: urgent, routine, requires more assistance, etc.
This will help the server send the request to the respective department right away without wasting any time. That, in turn, helps get the service to the customer in a reduced time. It helps you leave a good impression on the customer and earn their trust.
C.) Increases Revenue
AI arms you with uber personalization and quick response time to help you convert leads into customers. With automated inbox management, you’ll be able to respond to each customer in a personalized manner with a unique solution.
You’ll be able to give them an offer that fits their unique needs based on their response. This helps you convert leads and increase your revenue. You don’t have to do anything outside the realm of email marketing, simply power it to covert more.
It will help you in segregating the mildly interested leads from the hot leads, helping you know which ones to prioritize. You can follow up with the mildly interested customers with content that interests them in your products while the hot leads can be directly approached with an offer.
D.) Tracks Customer Information
Another aspect of email management powered by AI is the ability to collect and organize data from the incoming emails of clients. You can collect, process, organize, and track customer data to get a deeper understanding of their behavior and interests.
Collect transactional and behavioral data and send it to your organization tools such as Google sheets (Google Sheets) or your in-house CRM. Make sure that the tool you use offers integration with third-party platforms for the seamless transfer of information from one platform to another.
Having key customer information helps you interact with them in a more personalized manner and offer them products and combinations that are most suited to them. AI provides you with the means to make the most of customer information to speed up conversions.
E.) Customer Satisfaction
By collecting relevant data about your customer, you’ll get a better idea about their likes, dislikes, and the stage of the customer life cycle they are with you. This in turn helps you serve them in more targeted ways and earn their loyalty.
Improving customer satisfaction is a foolproof way to retain a customer and make them choose you over and over. Moreover, you can advertise your efficient satisfaction achievements in your marketing efforts to attract new ones.
F.) Structure Your Email Campaigns Better
AI-powered tools help you scale and structure your email campaigns better to target the right audience at the right time. With cybersecurity being a pressing concern, you don’t want to get sent straight to the spam folder of your customer or worse, blocked from their inbox.
The AI tool will help you time your emails in a way that is triggered by the action of the customer, avoiding spamming and making your email campaign more scaled and targeted. For example, abandoned cart emails.
Instead of sending continuous reminders about an abandoned cart, time your emails to the customer’s action and set a specific frequency to get a response out of them.
3. How To Implement AI Automation
The effectiveness of the implementation of AI automation in email marketing depends on the quality of the database you build. You’ll have to provide your AI tool with ample training data that are essentially labeled email automation examples.
The AI will learn and analyze the data you provide to examine the real emails that come through with client interaction. It’s important to feed your tool a decent and varied content in the sample you provide as it will become the foundation of your client interaction analyses.
Make sure to regularly update your database so that it’s up to date with current trends of speech and colloquial lingo that is usually used by your target audience. If you fail to find a sample of choice, you can also input some custom email samples yourself.
Speed And Scale Your Email Marketing To Covert Leads With AI
Email marketing is an incredible tool to have in your digital marketing arsenal as it’s both personalized and automated to engage customers in the best way possible.
Artificial Intelligence helps make email marketing even better by bringing unprecedented automation to your inbox. It helps you decode customer responses with utmost precision and speed to help serve them more efficiently.
Respond to them quickly and approach them with the most personalized offer to convert them and earn their loyalty.
Let us know in the comments what you think is the most important contribution of AI in improving email marketing and how can businesses capitalize on them.
