CATEGORY: email-marketing

AI in email marketing

While AI brings the potential of endless and sometimes game-changing possibilities to email marketing, it also comes with some risks and should be carefully considered. It certainly has the potential to enhance key areas of your email marketing campaigns, such as content writing, image creation, streamline campaign creation, performance analysis and streamlining process. However, you would be wise to choose when and where it is appropriate to use it and when to continue to depend on human input.

Content Writing

Writing blogs and emails was an area tackled early on by AI, as early as Chat GPT 3, AI could write impressive copy for marketing emails. The same applied to blogs and landing pages as the language style is similar. AI tools can quickly summarise content and present it back to you in an email format, the language of the email can be changed by asking the chatbot to be “more persuasive” or “more professional”.

Like image generation, AI isn’t the all-round solution for content writing, text written by AI often sounds robotic, as the language models follow a specific structure to write content. Using AI can however speed up and be very effective at the research stage, and then help you write a first draft while you review and edit the content to be relevant, appropriate and customised to your requirement. This helps copyrighters to save time on research to first draft while maintaining authentic and relevant copy.

AI can also help by suggesting effective subject lines based on your content, that you can then test with split testing to choose the best and most relevant to your audience.

Currently, marketers use targeting strategies in campaigns such as dynamic content, based on a set of rules, subscribers receive content relevant to them in their emails. With the power of AI, this can be enhanced to ensure that users receive content tailored and unique to them based on their interests and engagement with previous campaigns.

One of the key challenges with using AI, is to maintain the strictest data protection and respect for your subscriber’s privacy while aiming to deliver personalised engaging content.

Image Generation

Remember when finding the perfect image for your email felt like searching for a needle in a haystack? Well image generation AI’s such as DALLE-3 and Mid Journey are making this process significantly simpler. Traditional email marketing often relies on stock images or graphics created by other designers and available online. This process of searching for the perfect image is time-consuming and the images you end up selecting are available on a public library for everyone to use which makes them less unique. We have all seen the same old image used thousands of times, which takes away its effectiveness. One of the advantages for using AI to generate images is in the ability to create highly customised and unique images to fit your purpose.

AI image generation opened a wide world of stock image creativity, but remember, it’s not a one size fits all. For a truly unique touch empowered by your brand’s guidelines; a human designer’s knowledge, experience and insight is, and probably will be irreplaceable for some time to come.

Email developer on standby

AI can make basic email coding more accessible to those with limited coding skills. Until now marketers relied on ‘drag & drop’ builders or email HTML experts to design their emails. With some AI help it is possible to code emails from scratch or enhance the design, with tools such as Smart Editor. Errors that may crop up can also be analysed using AI tools and easily corrected.

In the future we may see AI not only assisting in creating emails but also in testing and applying optimisation in real-time, although currently, coding an email even with AI is not a simple task and it can be time consuming.

The current consensus is that the best results result from combining human and AI; read Human + AI as outlined by Dan Slee.

Analytics

AI’s analytical capabilities are nothing short of revolutionary. By analysing email campaign data, AI can uncover patterns and insights that might take humans much longer to see, if at all. As the capabilities of predictive models grows, marketers will become more sophisticated, instead of reacting to trends spotted by the models you will be able to anticipate the trends in advance and based on your own data.

Data is only as good as its interpretation. AI can provide the numbers and trends, but applying the insights effectively often requires human judgement and strategic thinking.

For example: Let's say you load click statistics from different email campaigns into an AI engine and asked it to analyse the best performing Call to Action (CTA), given that you provided it enough data to result in a reliable response, you would quickly be able to see which CTAs were the most efficient and successful, and which could be improved. Take a look at our blog detailing the power of data story telling.

 

Rise of the machines

We are all exposed to the media talking about AI and its potential to revolutionise the world as we know it. AI is undoubtably a fantastic tool to help, enhance and support marketers in improving the effectiveness of their campaigns as well as reduce the time it takes to put together an effective campaign, however, it is also clear that it cannot replace the human experience and insights that are so essential to ensure adhering to security, privacy and producing effective strategy and implementation.

Back in 2022, we spoke to Jordie van Rijn, at Email Monday for his thoughts on the unstoppable force that is AI.

“AI is like a friendly colleague that can assist in a lot of ways. (some areas still better than others). That is evolving the role of an email specialist is becoming a hybrid of marketer, creator, editor and ‘master of AI prompt craft.”

2 years down the line ChatGPT now one of many tools in the Global AI race. In such a short space of time we have seen huge progress and innovation in the AI space.

What will this landscape look like years from now?