“Predicting the future isn’t magic, it’s artificial intelligence.” – Dave Waters
Email marketing continues to be an undisputed part of digital marketing, enabling marketers to establish direct and effective business communication with their targeted audience. That is not all; by 2023, the number of email users is expected to reach 4.3 billion, which indicates that email marketing cannot be ignored if brands want to expand their market reach and generate more revenue.
Moreover, latest technologies like Artificial intelligence (AI) and its subsets like machine learning, predictive analytics, etc. are adding to the excellence of email marketing. With the integration of AI and machine learning into email programs, marketers can now create customized campaigns based on real-time data-driven insights derived from in-depth analysis of customer behavior, preferences, needs, and purchase history. Thanks to machine learning that makes it possible for email marketers to initiate campaigns based on accurate predictions and recommendations.
The marketer’s instinct no longer drives email marketing. With machine learning and AI in use, email marketing is more powerful than what it was a few years back.
Have you integrated machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) into your email program? If not, here are the five ways to get started:
Table of Contents
1. Perform Multi-armed Bandit Testing
Marketers frequently run A/B testing to see which version of their email campaigns work best with their potential customers. However, in this kind of test, the testing process is longer which means by the time the results are out, it may no longer stay relevant for use. This is where machine learning can be a savior, helping you to overcome the challenges of A/B testing.
With the advent of AI technologies, now marketers can perform multi-armed bandit testing that allows multitasking. From continuous tests to implementation and optimization of results, all can be performed at the same time and this is all possible because of AI. Using this method of testing your email campaign performance, you can test everything, from images, content to the time taken to send emails.Therefore, with AI tests, you can quickly identify email trends, make predictions and ensure that only the best-performing campaign variant reaches your prospects.
To conduct multi-armed bandit testing, all you need to do is set up campaign, create email variations and define your goals. Then the software you are using to run the test will automatically start testing during the entire campaign duration and if needed adjust strategies as per test findings. Automizy and Optimail are some of the software that performs this kind of test.
2. Planning Engaging Content
It is commonly seen that email marketers manually test the email content, images used, and the right combination of a subject line to find out what works and what doesn’t work for a specific group of audience. Based on the input, they try to come up with engaging email content and format that might attract customer’s attention and keep them hooked to the brand. However, most of the time, such manual efforts are filled with human errors. This is where AI and machine learning has a bigger role to play.
AI technology makes content recommendations based on the analysis of buyer persona, which helps marketers to create email content that is relevant and capable of deriving the best campaign results. It enables email marketers to develop compelling and tailor-made subject lines that draw subscriber’s attention and encourages them to open the email. Hence if you want your email campaign to generate more responses, then don’t forget to incorporate machine learning and AI into your content strategy.
3. Segment Email Subscribers
A segmented email list of subscribers is crucial to ensure the success of your campaigns. Even statistics reveal that a segmented email campaign can help increase revenue by 760% in comparison to the non-segmented ones. But segmenting a list from enormous pools of data is a tedious job for marketers. To address these challenges, email marketers need to integrate machine learning solutions into their email list segmentation platform so that AI does the job of insightful segmentation with expertise.
Artificial Intelligence can help you segment your list of subscribers based on their purchasing patterns and demographics like age, gender, and more. To enable dynamic segmentation of an email list, AI-driven tools generate data-driven insights extracted from information collected from CRM systems and website forms.
With accurate and precise segmentation, you can better personalize email campaigns and ensure relevant campaigns reaches the right audience.
4. Determine Email Copy
Companies like Persado and Touchstone are using machine learning, natural language generation, and natural language processing to create subject lines and other copy of their email campaigns. Machine learning and AI can help you analyze all your past marketing copy and help identify strategies that work for your brand. In this way, machine-generated language enables email marketers like you to create an email copy that resonates with your brand voice, which in a way, turns out to be even better than what a human-generated marketing language would sound like.
People who are into email marketing very well understand the importance of a subject line in determining the open rate of an email campaign. This is when they make use of AI to test different variations of the subject line to see what works for their audience. For instance, Persado’s message machine uses natural language to create email copy that efficiently reflects their brand message and, at the same time, sound appealing to the targeted audience.
5. Personalize Emails
As per statistics, personalized emails help generate 6x higher revenue, and that is why it has become an important aspect of all marketing strategies, including email marketing. To better personalize their email campaigns, from content to subject lines, images, and topics, marketers are opting for marketing automation technologies and software. Most of these technologies use AI to help email marketers to create personalized campaigns that cater to individual customer needs and preferences. Even the email frequency and timing can be customized using artificial intelligence and machine learning-driven tools.
Using data-driven insights, predictive analytics, and algorithms, AI enables you to create personalized content for each subscriber.
Like we discussed earlier, AI is everywhere. To transform your email marketing strategies into a successful lead and revenue-generating campaign, making the most of AI and its related technologies is a must. With the right integration of machine learning and NLP into your email program, your campaigns are bound to perform better.
