Email marketing has seen a huge spike in terms of its effectiveness and popularity and marketers, now, need to know how to optimize this avenue with artificial intelligence (AI). Let’s give you some key insight on AI-based email marketing to increase ROI.
Email marketing has grown by leaps and bounds to become the major player it is today. This is as opposed to barely even a decade ago when it was still at a nascent stage. And this effective form of marketing has changed and still continues to transform. The sheer volume of customer data and subscribers makes it impossible to succeed without a little tech magic.
AI has emerged as man’s new best friend and is helping us automate and do more than ever before. To say the least, Big Data can help you analyze, collect, and segment data, while machine learning enables you to identify patterns and trends, leading to better, informed decisions.
While email marketing goals vary, the challenges faced by marketers in this evolving space have been under scrutiny. Meanwhile, several email marketing surveys have led us to identify some of the most common challenges and obstacles. Let’s find out what they are.
Email Marketing Survey Outlines Challenges to Marketers
A recent survey from GetResponse and Ascend shows that 63% of B2B marketers have moderately raised their budget for email marketing this year because of healthy campaign results, while just 18% reduced their budget for email marketing because of declining performance.
When the participants of the survey were asked about the primary goal for an email marketing strategy, 25% of respondents said it was to increase engagements, while 20% said it was to increase lead generation, and 18% said it was to improve conversions and 19% said it was to improve brand awareness.
Overall, marketers agree that the most common challenges for a successful email marketing strategy are:
- Increasing conversions
- Increasing engagement
- Increasing lead generation
Personalization and engagement almost go hand in and that’s another key area with much room for improvement.
Now that we have identified the challenges, let’s begin to solve the puzzle, first by asking yourself the following questions:
- Do you have an automated welcome email? Is it bringing you substantial open and click-through rates?
Welcome emails are known to get four times the opens and five times the click-through as compared to any other emailers. Use this opportunity to send out your best content and capture key customer data and behavioral information that you can use for personalization.
- Is your subscriber list engaged? Is subscribing to your site easy and seamless? Are you asking for too much information without providing any incentive or sweepstakes?
Evaluating your subscription list and your subscription process will help you have a more engaged and responsive audience.
- Is your subscriber list optimally segmented? Are you sending relevant emails to the right target?
Relevant emails drive revenue, while segmentation ensures that you are sending the right message to the right recipients that are interested in your emails, thereby facilitating conversions. Tailored and personalized messages can also promise increased opens and therefore, more revenue.
Inbox browsers can be a little demanding and expect a bit more these days. Marketers must employ sophisticated means of connecting with their potential customers. Meanwhile, email marketers are moving towards accessible email designs, interactivity, and hyper-personalization to create highly targeted emails.
On the other hand, one of the most advanced methods emerging now is artificial intelligence. The irony with AI: marketers do a little bit more by integrating AI into their email marketing strategies; and then they go on to do even less, thanks to artificial intelligence. AI does automated work, and more, on behalf of the marketer.
Interested to know some more reasons to leverage AI? The performance and practice of email marketing keep on changing year after year. An ever-evolving technological landscape always changes. Although, one thing never changes: email marketing strategies must make money. And AI could very easily help with that all-desirable goal, thanks to how it helps with analyzing the metrics.
What is artificial intelligence?
The supercomputer from the classic movie 2001-HAL: A Space Odyssey paints a pop culture picture of sci-fi artificial intelligence. When HAL understands how to think for itself, the computer then
presents a grave challenge to humans. Although, Real-life AI programs are not so dramatic. And benevolent AI programs are a lot more helpful as well. Just like HAL, they do kind of figure out how to think for themselves.
AI represents programs that are capable of adapting and learning. They prove themselves to be more efficient than non-AI programs that lack learning capability. And anyone accessing an AI program depends on the software to expand on the performance to give equally increased results.
It is quite clear that AI is emerging as a game-changing technology in the current world. And while we haven’t yet reached the future that’s played out in the movies for decades- with sentient robots anticipating our every need and completely automated cars- AI is already having an impact on many aspects of lives.
And for the marketers, AI represents a unique opportunity to leverage technology- instead of manpower- to effectively harness the full power of data. While we are still in the early stages of leveraging AI in the email marketing space, the possibilities are astounding. In fact, a recent study by ReturnPath and The Relevancy Group found that 97% of marketers are confident that AI can improve the customer experience. What’s more, the early adopters of AI are getting remarkable success: the same study also found that email senders who use AI are getting 41% more revenue than the non-AI email senders.
Some of the highest promising applications of AI in email marketing relate to the insights that are uncovered at the individual subscriber level that can be then used to optimize a company’s email marketing program. This type of work would easily take countless man-hours using a traditional method of data analysis, but with AI doing all the heavy lifting; marketers now have access to even more accurate data-based insight in much less time. Following are just some of the many ways that marketers can start to incorporate AI-powered insights into their email marketing program.
Subscriber engagement
Now, most marketers monitor high-level subscriber engagement leveraging traditional metrics like complaint rate, open rate. While these metrics are useful in assessing overall engagement among the company’s email subscribers, they don’t tell the full story as they give no clues as to how individual subscribers feel about the company’s email marketing program. And without these important insights into subscriber-level engagement, marketers are more likely to miss critical signals of email disinterest, fatigue, and frustration- and hence risk losing subscribers to spam compliant and unsubscribe.
According to The State of Email Engagement, 62% of marketers believe that AI is positioned to have a significant impact on subscriber engagement. Leveraging AI, marketers now can closely monitor subscriber interaction throughout the entire customer lifecycle and achieve better insight into the engagement of each individual subscriber. Meanwhile, AI can also give important insight into which offers and campaigns resonate with each subscriber, Identify the most valuable and loyal contacts on a given email list, and then predict when the subscribers are starting to lose interest in a company’s email marketing program.
Personalization
Majority of the email marketers maintains a subscriber list that numbers in thousands and even millions. And while the marketers aim to deliver a personal experience to their every subscriber, the fact is that it’s just not possible to create a custom email for each of the subscriber using traditional methods. As a result, marketers rely on segmentation to create groups of similar subscribers, in the hopes that the campaigns targeting these groups of their subscribers will resonate better with the majority of subscribers.
Personalization is another critical aspect where many marketers (59%) believe that AI can have a major impact. Ai enables marketers with the power to create individually-personalized email campaigns based on each subscriber’s unique preferences and behaviors. And beyond simple tactics like customized greetings, the marketers can easily target each email’s content and offers to the individual subscriber, finally leading to better relationships with subscribers and increased ROI.
Timing and send frequency
At what time should we send this email? And how often should we be emailing to our subscribers? These are the two most important questions for any email marketer. And with so many variables at play, it’s almost impossible to know the correct answer for these two questions about the subscribers. On the other hand, it is also very important to get the correct timing. This is why sending your emails at the wrong time may result in your emails getting buried in your subscriber’s inbox. And when you send too many emails, you risk overwhelming your subscribers. Or when you send very few emails, your subscribers may forget you exist.
Marketers can now figure out the mystery of email frequency and send time by analyzing the historical data about every individual subscriber. This analysis can help you a lot in identifying the best time for each subscriber to receive and engage with an email, by establishing when they are most likely to be active in their inbox and engage with an email they received. AI-fueled analysis of historical data can also be applied to email send frequency, in order to establish the optimal cadence for each of your subscribers.
Email deliverability
Reaching the inbox is a tedious challenge that’s shared by the marketers around the world. And maintaining good email deliverability requires marketers to closely monitor things like subscriber engagement, sender reputation, list hygiene, and many more. Marketers also need to identify when email deliverability occurs- which might not always be obvious. And when email deliverability occurs, it can take a great deal of effort and time to accurately identify its root cause, find the correct solution, and then implement the steps required to quickly resolve them.
Ai-fueled solutions have the capability to identify email deliverability issues, suggest effective solutions, and then take steps to implement the solution- even before any negative impact occurs on a company’s email infrastructure. And by using machine learning and predictive analysis, now marketers can cut-down the time spent on solving problems and focus more on the critical task of creating long-lasting relationships with their subscribers.
Artificial intelligence comes with sincere feelings
2001’s HAL’s droning, monotone, emotionless voice emphasized the computer’s cold lack of humanity. Very sad to say, marketing emails usually come off with similar dry content. Emails of that kind don’t engage subscribers. Who would go beyond the first paragraph- or even just the first couple of sentences- when an email reads too dry?
And when sending out generic emails in bulk to thousands of subscribers, the final result is a “one size fits all email”, which obviously doesn’t fit anyone. The AI programs may not develop a level of empathy for the humans, but they sure do help in figuring out the behavior patterns of subscribers.
Does a certain segment of subscribers respond well to cheery, bright, and even funny emails? Are other subscribers more likely to react to serious calls to action? The overall collective of subscribers commonly breaks down into different subgroups. Each subgroup reacts in its own unique way towards marketing emails. That’s fine! You must craft the email that works best for a particular group of subscribers. AI helps this cause by analyzing the response rates which, as a result, allows a careful eye to examine personal preferences. With better insights into the personal preferences of the subscribers, decisions can be easily made about how to personalize future email marketing campaigns.
All kinds of different data could contribute to devising a home run email marketing campaign. Just consider if the AI technology revealed that a segment continually checked emails between the hours of 02:00 AM and 04:00 AM. And tailoring the emails to “night owls” may deliver a potentially lucrative and different response. Although a creative human must craft the interesting email targeting these night dwellers, AI makes it possible to actually know about their existence as well as how many of them are there.
AI acts as the bearer of bad news, which is good
The life of marketing would be wonderful if AI technologies regularly revealed incredible click-through rates (CTR) and consistently opened emails. But, that not how life works as the reality sets in with all email marketing campaigns. And an overwhelming percentage of people just won’t respond to emails. People get so many marketing and promotional emails, they just zone them out. But, don’t let their behavior defeat you in your goals to achieve success. Metrics and percentage can always be improved at least incrementally. Even a small increase is better than flatlined figures.
Why the figures are so low? If the AI technologies reveal metrics showing a number of emails were never opened during the month of March, did the problem occurred during a specific week or the entire month of March. And if you narrow down the problems to just one week, you can easily examine the email went out. While doing so, you may be able to focus on the problem. And perhaps the subject line wasn’t compelling enough. Maybe the subject line wasn’t properly timed for the week. That is, you heralded a bit too early and people were still in a winter mindset.
High rates of unsubscribe are even worse than low open rates. At one point, someone found the content to be compelling enough to want to see it again. And maybe some would be customers that fell out of favor with your product or service. People unsubscribe, it happens. They may not have been serious, to begin with. However, you don’t want to lose to people who opted in out of true interest. When someone unsubscribe, they become quite difficult to draw back into the subscriber category. And when people start unsubscribing in huge numbers than a smart fix is past due.
Then, you do need a better idea about the actual problem to come up with a decent fix. And once again, the AI comes in to save the day. Or at least AI can give insight into what’s currently wrong. Informing the captain and crew that the ship is drifting aimlessly into treacherous waters isn’t the best news. Would it be better to stay on the same course and happily assume nothing is wrong?
Artificial intelligence lends a helping hand
Big data is quite a big deal. Analyzing a huge amount of data enables for improving important email marketing metrics. Truth to be told, analyzing small quantities of data helps as well. We as a human being suffer limitations regarding what we do. And learning AI programs for support and help could overcome those limitations. Meanwhile, ensuring an email marketing campaign never misses out on its true potential.
On the other hand, email marketing is in for a complete overhaul. And with AI, email marketing isn’t limited to triggers that are rule-based but has evolved into a means of more in-the-moment personalization. AI has filled in the gap that was missing between online shopping and traditional shopping with 1:1 personalization. Following are some of the ways AI has changed email marketing;
Best time to send to increase open rates
We, humans, have a very short attention span. And you have about three seconds to seize the shopper’s attention. So, you can’t risk this change by sending the right message to the right person but at the wrong time. Sending a blanket email to all your subscriber at the same time is just like throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping that the spaghetti will stick on the wall. Leveraging AI-fueled machine learning algorithms, savvy retailers are sending the messages when the subscribers are more likely to open them based on each subscriber’s past behaviors. Example, you may get an email in the morning when you check your emails, but I might get the same message in the evening, based on my past behaviors. And even a small personalization like this will impact the success rate of your email marketing campaign by improving your email opens and increasing conversions.
Customer insights for lifecycle marketing
AI and predictive analytics have transformed the way marketers generate insights about customers. So, by leveraging behavioral, transactional, and intent data, predictive analytics enables marketers to send highly contextual emails throughout the customer lifecycle. And with key metrics like time to first purchase, customer lifetime value (CLTV), the time between purchases, and so on, marketers now can create more powerful email campaigns to engage their customers effectively in real time. Example, for cart abandoners, predictive analytics can help you craft a highly personalized recovery email with a cost-effective discount offers required to motivate the cart abandoner to complete their purchase, thus driving a much better ROI.
Segmentation for hyper-personalization
Email marketing has come a very long way from sending blast and batch emails. And sending segmented email campaign is no longer the “it” thing- it’s the standard. Now, marketers know that there’s no personalization without segmentation. Segmented email campaigns have been proven to get more email opens, CTRs, and conversions, apart from driving subscriber engagement. But, with so much available customer data, the success of your segments depends on their underlying
conditioned and rules. While you can go as granular as you want with segment rules, the key here is to identify the hidden secret in your data.
Machine learning has made it much easier to segment, with algorithms that can automatically identify the most prominent segments in your data that also hold the most promise. Example, if your company sells apparel to all age groups, machine learning may identify the age group that’s providing you with the most conversion. And even a basic segmentation like this can easily help you to improve your conversion rate overnight.
Recency, frequency, monetary (RFM) segmentation is another example of the machine learning segmentation models. Machine learning segments aren’t just meaningful, but it will also save you resources and time that you can further apply to your email marketing campaigns. Example, you can create a personalized email campaign for your high-value and loyal customers identified through RFM.
AI is the single most change to email marketing that will drive ROI like never before. The methods discussed above in this article are a testament to how AI can make email marketing even more powerful.
Examples of AI in emails
- Amazon uses the principle of AI and helps in sending automated emails that are very relevant with most engaging recommendations for products.
Those emails consider recent searches, last purchase, and other behavioral traits of the subscriber.
Here’s an example;
Many e-commerce companies have started to implement this strategy to improve their conversion rate and generate more sales and revenue.
- Netflix uses systems that the data established by the watch list of users and the trending shows. And with the help of recommendation engine, the algorithms craft tailored recommendations for every user. This helps a lot in keeping the users active on their platform and reduces the churn while improving the email marketing metrics.
Here’s an example;
Wrapping up
AI is a technology that has made it possible to provide hyper-personalized experience within the inbox of the subscribers. It has an eye for patterns and details that human usually fail to identify. And if you want to craft a more persuasive email campaign that can get better metrics, AI is your way forward.
