Businesses these days, however small or big, run on data-driven digital marketing. This leads us directly to one of its most popular and effective forms known as ‘email marketing’. And it has seen huge growth over the years.
Research shows a whopping 91% of email users as active users that interact regularly. And the number of these exchanges are expected to increase in the coming years.
So what’s the next big step? Marketers are now in fact starting to utilize the growth by optimizing this channel with artificial intelligence or AI. This begs the question, what exactly is AI-Powered email marketing and how does it aid in sales?
Through this blog, I will look further into the workings of artificial intelligence (AI). How it connects with email marketing and how AI campaigns bring about changes in customer interaction, deliverance, and sales.
Here’s what to know about AI-powered email marketing
The term Artificial Intelligence (AI) covers a lot of technologies that help machines perform specific cognitive tasks. These technologies now have serious influence and impact on marketing careers and performance.
AI technology is much more than just automation. It analyzes large datasets but it doesn’t just crunch numbers. Through advanced techniques and computational firepower, they take out insights from the data which are then used to predict, recommend, and decide.
This very technique is established in AI-powered email marketing as an extra boost for your email strategy. Hence, it yields more favorable results. For instance, take a look at this survey recently conducted by Statista.
It reveals AI-powered campaigns have had a 41.29 percent improvement rate on revenue alone. Much of this success is met by the number of AI-powered tools made available by several brands to:
- Write email subject lines
- Optimize send times
- Clean email lists
- Create automatic email newsletters and more
This marketing automation aids in garnering a higher conversion rate including personalization and data analysis. This makes AI a much-needed element for upgrading email marketing tactics.
How AI email campaigns increase sales
Here are some of the ways AI is improving email marketing and skyrocketing sales:
1. Engaging subscribers
A study conducted by the state of email engagement found that about 62% of retailers believe AI utilization to have a huge impact on subscriber engagement. Particularly, B2B companies can monitor subscriber interactions and engage closely with the use of AI.
It further engages through optimized subject lines. AI tools are used to implement NLG or natural language generation to write improved subject lines more efficiently than humans. This optimization is achieved by learning your brand voice and personality through the data you use. As a result, it directly affects your user experience for the better.
About 47% of users will open an email according to the way the subject sounds. Thankfully, as AI is more efficient in curating customized subject lines, it has higher chances to grab the user’s attention. This then leads to improved click rates and customer conversion.
2. Personalization
Personalizing your emails is a clever way of acknowledging the different behaviors and interests of your subscribers. A survey reveals that personalized email subject lines have 26% more chances to be opened while delivering 6x higher transaction rates.
This is why personalization is crucial in email marketing. AI enables you to send tailor-made content to your subscribers by determining the right time and frequency through historical data inspection.
For example, marketers through the use of AI can suggest and recommend products specific to a customer’s likes and insert them into personal email communication.
Personalized emails can have a massive impact on boosting sales. They even result in open and click rate improvement.
Let’s take, for instance, the brand Cosabella. They used this very tactic of AI-powered email personalization to boost their sales without advertising discounts for their products. Through the AI platform ‘Emarsys’, it enabled them to increase email open rates by 4% and overall email revenue by 60%.
The brand also recorded a sales increase of 40 to 60% in comparison to the previous year. Courtney Connell, the marketing director of Cosabella explains how the new system enabled them to leverage data with great merchandising capabilities.
3. Increase in revenue and decrease in costs
As AI-powered tools help in the increase of open and click-through rates, it influences the revenue from email as well. Hence, better results are produced through email marketing campaigns.
A case study into the travel company Virgin Holidays reveals a huge spike in revenue after adopting the AI tool ‘Phrasee’ to write automated email subject lines. Virgin Holidays knew AI could write more efficiently but doubted the deliverance of the brand’s fun and quirky tone.
The doubts were soon lifted after Virgin Holidays had an increase of 2% open rate. A bump that would be worth millions in new revenue. Saul Lopes, the CX, CRM, and Loyalty Lead of the company praised the tool for generating several million in revenue for the company.
We can see how AI-powered email marketing strategies have a strong influence over revenue. But it doesn’t stop there. Since, AI-powered tools make email marketing campaigns faster, easier, and better, they cut down costs for your company by reducing time spent on marketing initiatives.
4. Remarketing
If you think a customer will purchase on the first visit, you are wrong! Research shows only about 2% of users engage in purchasing the first time around. This is where AI comes into the picture. AI is capable of pinpointing when and whom to pitch an email.
Since customers often leave items in a cart without purchasing, AI tools can notify you and pitch an email directed to the customer about the items. This encourages customers to revisit and finish off the deal.
The advantage with AI is, you can identify unnoticed patterns or details and use it for improved performance. But you need to understand your audience and use the right tools. As such, here are some vendors that provide AI tool services for email marketing:
- Seventh sense
- Rasa.io
- Drift email
- Phrasee
- Builderall
Final remarks
AI is a useful technology and knowing its limits with the right usage will lead your marketing strategies in the right direction. Overall, AI-backed marketing carries a lot of potential to enhance not only email marketing but other online strategies as well.
Ultimately, AI does set a promising path for future growth. But given its fast influence in a growing capitalist economy, do you think AI is used excessively by marketers? There are a lot of discussions going around on this. Let us know what your opinion is!
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