11 Powerful AI Email Marketing Hacks for Business Growth

You’ve crafted the perfect email campaign. You know exactly who you’re targeting, what they want, and how to get them to take action. You hit send and crickets. What happened? Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach customers and boost sales, but it can be a fickle beast. If you want to get the most out of your emails, you’ve got to get inside your customer's heads to figure out what they want. This takes time and research and can feel overwhelming. But, with AI email marketing, you can automate this process to create personalized emails that increase engagement and drive sales quickly. This article will cover proven AI marketing strategy for optimizing your email marketing efforts so you can boost performance and achieve measurable business growth.

One valuable tool for achieving your objectives is Rengage’s omnichannel marketing platform. Our platform can help you gain a competitive edge, streamline your marketing efforts, and deliver outstanding results. Our builder utilizes AI to create customizable templates based on your unique needs, giving you a head start on your next email marketing campaign.

What is Al Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy that sends subscribers email promotional messages or content. This allows marketers to nurture relationships, generate leads, and drive sales.

What’s so great about it?

Although email is one of the oldest forms of digital communication, email marketing is one of the most effective strategies. Sure, there are newer methods for communicating with your audience and customers, like social media and live chat. However, with a user base of over 4.4 billion people and a market forecast projected to be worth over $35 billion by 2028, email is still the king of marketing channels.

Email marketing beats out social media, SEO, and affiliate marketing as the most impactful marketing channel. Email marketing has a return on investment (ROI) of between $36 and $42 for every dollar you spend. Email deserves a place in every marketer’s toolbox.

What is Al email marketing?

AI email marketing signifies the fusion of technology and communication. This approach employs Artificial Intelligence to enhance email campaigns through personalization and automation.

AI tailors content for individual recipients by analyzing user data while automating tasks like segmentation and optimization. Generative AI empowers marketers to send highly targeted messages efficiently, elevating engagement and outcomes.

AI in Email Marketing Statistics

AI-driven campaigns can boost open rates by up to 41% in certain industries. Utilizing AI for email personalization led to a 41% increase in revenue and a 13.44% rise in marketers' click-through rate. 63% of marketers employ AI tools for their email marketing efforts.

The average order value for senders using AI was $145.08, compared to $138.00 for those not using AI. Open rates for emails with AI-crafted subject lines increase by 5-10%. Email newsletters created by AI are over 50% more effective than those crafted using traditional email marketing methods. 51% of marketers believe that AI-supported email marketing outperforms traditional methods.

Benefits of AI in email marketing

AI email marketing offers numerous advantages over conventional methods.

Automation

Some email marketing platforms combine AI with powerful marketing automation technology. These tools handle tedious and routine tasks, such as scheduling emails to be sent when each recipient is most likely to open them. This feature frees up your schedule so you can spend less time fiddling with your email and more time working on the creative aspects of marketing.

Idea generation

Marketing takes a lot of creative energy, and even top professionals can run out of ideas. You might spend hours writing and rewriting email subject lines or thinking of a witty call to action. AI speeds up this process by providing suggestions and helping you refine your ideas. According to a 2023 BCG study, 49% of marketing organizations already use generative AI for content creation. The study suggests that this technology can improve productivity by approximately 30%. AI isn’t a replacement for human content creators.

AI doesn’t have the intuition and creativity of experienced marketers, and you’ll find that you’ll have to make some tweaks to get the content options to match your brand voice. AI is a useful tool to kickstart the brainstorming process and help you generate fresh ideas that you can mold into the perfect email marketing campaigns.

Improved Personalization

No one wants to get spammed with generic and impersonal emails that are getting sent to a million other inboxes. It’s not personal enough and could leave subscribers feeling like they aren’t getting the value they signed up to receive. Email artificial intelligence marketing helps you avoid being the one sending out low-value messages. It uses machine learning algorithms to study users and predict what content will engage each individual.

The 2023 BCG study reports that 67% of marketing companies currently use generative AI to increase personalization. The software can analyze consumer data and use its findings to develop personalized subject lines, email content, and more. Suppose your company sells pet supplies, and a new customer orders some of your products for their puppy.

AI email marketing identifies their purchase and allows you to send hyper-personalized:

• Product recommendations
• Coupons
• Newsletters

This content can evolve as the puppy grows and the customer’s needs change.

Increased Productivity

Like most marketers, you probably have a constantly growing to-do list. Creating email with artificial intelligence increases efficiency and accuracy. That way, you can get more done quickly and move on to the next task on your list. Say you want to send an email campaign about your brand’s newest makeup product to female clients aged 19 to 25. With traditional marketing methods, you might spend hours poring over a spreadsheet and manually creating a list of subscribers who fit your target demographic.

You could overlook people during this time-consuming process or add people who aren’t part of my audience. By contrast, AI email marketing allows you to segment an email list based on automatically:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Purchase history
• Other criteria

This intelligent segmentation ensures clients receive only relevant emails. It increases customer loyalty and saves you time, boosting your productivity.

Predictive Analytics

No one can see the future, but AI email marketing lets you make an educated guess. This technology uses sophisticated statistical tools to gain insights into consumers’ behavior, preferences, and needs. You can use these findings to identify future opportunities for growth and engagement.

You can use AI to gather data about clients’ browsing history on your website, past purchases, and social media engagement. Predictive analytics tools assess this historical data and anticipate what each customer will be interested in buying. You can use these tools to create targeted email campaigns with personalized product recommendations and discounts.

Scalability

AI lets you quickly scale your email marketing campaigns up or down to meet demand. Say you have a massive sale on your products, and hundreds of people sign up for your mailing list overnight. You can use AI email marketing tools to quickly send personalized introductory emails and take advantage of the surge in interest.

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11 AI Email Marketing Strategies

1. Content Ideation: Use AI to Generate Email Marketing Ideas

Coming up with ideas for email marketing campaigns can be challenging. Even once you get an idea, creating the content can still be difficult. AI can help you get past these creative roadblocks.

For example, ChatGPT tools can generate many ideas for your email campaigns. You can even tell it about your business or industry, and it will customize different ideas for your brand. Even if you don’t use any AI ideas verbatim, it’s a tool that can always get your creativity flowing. This is only the first example of email marketing with AI.

2. Email Validation: Improve Your Email List Quality with AI

One of the significant challenges of email marketing is curating a quality email list. AI can help. AI can implement itself into this process in a few different ways.

• AI can review your existing email marketing program lists and compare metrics to determine the probability that a single email address (or an entire list) is valuable. By using this, you can skip low-quality emails and save a lot of time and effort.
• AI-based email marketing can help you track responses and interactions to rank the quality of various email addresses. With that information, AI tools can even curate an email list for you.

3. Sending Frequency: Let AI Determine How Often to Send Emails

AI often shines when it gets the chance to do math (a powerful feature of machine learning), and this is one of those times. You can send emails regularly and succeed, but marketing is far more complicated than that. If you send emails too soon, you risk burning out recipients, leading to them not reading your messages.

They might even unsubscribe or block your email address. But, if you send them out too rarely, you miss opportunities. AI can track the value generated by each email you send and analyze the frequency of my efforts to help me build an optimized schedule.

4. Campaign Insights: Analyze Your Email Marketing Campaigns with AI

Insights for AI email campaigns expand on the previous section. Consider email frequency a single insight in a sea of possibilities. Other insights you should consider are which contact methods are most useful, which types of products get the most responses, what email headings work best, and much more. Not only can AI tools track various insights for you, but they can also help you figure out which additional insights are worth investigating.

5. Content Creation: Let AI Write Your Email Copy

Stop and remember that it's not the only generative AI tool companies can use. It's the most well-known, and that’s why it’s discussed often. You can use any AI that you prefer for this application. That said, let’s talk about the application. We already covered how content generators can help you come up with ideas. Once you have ideas, you can feed them into the AI, and it can write your entire email. If you told it about your business to tailor the content, that’s even better. It will keep track of what you tell it and incorporate that into its content. You can also use image generators to get unique graphics and much more.

Content creation AI tools can save you countless hours and provide various benefits. AI content creators often need help to produce human-quality content, which may be plagued with inaccurate information. They can short-cut the creative process, which is invaluable, but you still want to proofread written content and have a designer clean up your graphics.

6. Email List Cleanup: Improve Your Email List with AI

This goes hand-in-hand with email validation, but cleanup involves more than marking invalid email addresses. Email list cleanup can remove low-quality and inactive email accounts from your list.

The AI can check that email addresses exist on server lists and do this very quickly. The AI can analyze the quality of valid emails to help you decide whether they’re worth keeping on the list. This is powerful and insightful, and it can boost the value of your email list.

7. Email Personalization: Use AI to Customize Your Emails

You’ve probably heard that marketing emails should be personalized. The problem is that it takes time. Even if you put everyone's name into their email, the recipient won’t feel the personalization. This is where AI shines.

As long as it has access to the personal information you might use, it can easily incorporate that into the email. If you were using ChatGPT to help write the emails, feed it a little personal information, and you’ll immediately see a difference in content. To call this a time saver is an understatement.

8. Smart Segmentation: Use AI to Segment Your Email Lists Automatically

There's no such thing as a universal marketing email. You already want personalized emails, but even beyond that, good email marketing requires segmentation. You don’t want to send car fresheners to people who don’t have a car or attract the right people to the wrong product.

AI can compare responses, campaign goals, products, and services and automatically segment recipients. It can use math and data analytics to do this in powerful ways without needing you to watch over its shoulder. It’s ensuring that your emails go to the right recipients in the right ways, and it’s not doing this on a hunch. It follows powerful analytics the whole time.

9. Email Automation: Use AI to Automate Your Email Marketing

We’ve already talked about automating email lists, customization, content creation, and more. What if you could automate the design and delivery of entire emails? If a customer orders something online, you can send an automated receipt to their email address.

With AI, you can:

• Expand on this process and send customized
• Personalized
• Automated emails

For various purposes, this broadens the scope of what you can accomplish with marketing emails and continues to lower your operation's costs simultaneously.

10. A/B Testing: Let AI Help You Optimize Your Emails

It’s not always easy to foresee how your audience will respond to your content, even with powerful data analytics tools. AI email marketing lets you perform A/B testing and analyze your results to understand your subscribers’ preferences better. A/B testing involves dividing your email list in half and sending slightly different emails to each audience.

Let’s say you want to know if your subscribers respond better to subject lines that stress timing by creating a sense of urgency or subject lines that affect subscribers' emotions. You can send Group A an email with a peppy headline and Group B an otherwise identical email with a funny headline. AI can help you analyze how recipients respond to your headlines in real time and automatically determine the winner.

11. Deliverability Analysis: Improve Your Email Deliverability with AI

Email deliverability refers to the percentage of emails that successfully reach your recipients’ inboxes. Validity’s 2023 Email Deliverability Benchmark Report states that one of six emails doesn’t land in inboxes. Instead, they get designated as junk mail or blocked by the email service provider.

Artificial intelligence email marketing tools address this issue by performing deliverability analysis. This technology harvests delivery rates, engagement metrics, and other data and compiles it into an email report. You can also leverage AI to extract insights from this information and apply the technology’s recommendations to improve email deliverability.

You Could Use AI To:

• Optimize your content to decrease the likelihood of it getting flagged as junk
• Generate subject headers that won’t trigger spam filters
• Delete invalid email addresses from your list
• Monitor and improve your sender reputation so email providers don’t block your content

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8 Best Practices for Using AI in Email Marketing

1. Lay the Groundwork for Success

Businesses should start with an ethical, strategic, and technological foundation for their AI email marketing efforts. This means implementing transparent data practices, ensuring data privacy compliance, and fostering an internal culture of ethical AI usage.

It also means establishing clear goals and plans for applying new AI advances. The first part of the plan should always include a roadmap for what you wish to accomplish.

2. Leverage Simple AI Features First

Optimize your emails using embedded, no-code AI features when you start with AI email marketing. For example, look for tools that help with send-time optimization, content selection, and subject-line testing.

These features can help you get quick wins and build momentum for your email marketing program. You can create multi-variant emails from there, allowing for diverse content versions catered to specific customer segments.

3. Move Toward Real-Time Personalization

Move into real-time personalization in a new window. Tailor email content to respond to immediate customer behaviors and preferences. Explore the intricacies of building custom AI models tailored to your business needs.

4. Start With Data You Already Have

Start with your email data as a foundation to make the most of your AI email marketing initiatives. Grow your customer profiles using a fuller picture of each customer across marketing, sales, commerce, and service. The customer insights you get from integrating data into a CDP will help you create more personalized emails.

5. Segment Your Audience

Applying what you know about AI capabilities for personalization to segment your audience is another best practice for using AI in email marketing. Audience segmentation can help improve every aspect of your email marketing, from automation to personalization.

6. Get Creative With Your AI Prompts

One of the key benefits of AI is its ability to help you create fresh content. Learn how to creatively prompt AI to generate new copy for your email marketing campaigns to improve engagement and performance.

7. A/B Test Emails With AI

Only test one thing at a time when you do your A/B email testing. It’s crucial to make sure you have a control group. Leading AI email marketing platforms have tools to automate this process so you can test continuously.

8. Analyze, Iterate, and Retarget

Employ a system for:

• Analytics
• Iteration
• Retargeting

This system can connect your email performance to web and app conversions, commerce, and sales data to optimize business impact. This is a key requirement to look for in your AI email marketing software.

Create Personalized Experiences That Drive Loyalty and Growth with Rengage's Omnichannel Marketing Platform

Rengage is a comprehensive solution designed to seamlessly manage and enhance customer journeys. It provides insights and measurable outcomes without the need for coding skills. We focus on accelerating the customer journey from onboarding and activation to conversion and churn, enabling customers to unlock untapped revenue from existing users with ease.

Our platform allows you to:

• Gain valuable insights into your segments
• Run campaigns efficiently using an intuitive journey manager
• Measure the impact of your journeys on user conversion through our innovative journey moments and journey builder features

Book a Free Demo

If you're ready to transform your customer interactions into personalized experiences that drive loyalty and growth, Rengage is your platform. With Rengage, you can take your marketing strategy to the next level and achieve sustainable growth in today's competitive landscape.

Book a free demo today to learn how our omnichannel marketing platform can help you gain a competitive edge, streamline your marketing efforts, and deliver outstanding results.

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