Email Marketing has been a marketer’s go-to tool to engage potential and existing customers, one-on-one. But did you know that customers no longer look forward to your emails?
Shooting emails to your customer inboxes, outright annoys them unless they have actually opted to hear from you.
Does this mean an end for the Email Marketing era? Absolutely No.
What it does mean is we marketers, cannot assume the best and do what we have been doing so far. Automation coupled with AI-driven customer-centric content need to be tuned and pruned to appeal to your potential customers.
Artificial intelligence is the science of making machines smart, to enhance human activities. AI powers everything from Amazon recommendations to self-driving cars. And forward-thinking marketers are using it to better create, optimize, and send emails.
Rise Of Intelligence-driven Automation
Machine learning or AI can be used to automate and optimize many aspects of your email marketing program, such as content, send times and frequency. In turn, you can be confident that you’re moving the needle to maximize engagement and conversions.
For example, AI could ideally predict the content and offer that are most likely to drive an individual customer to convert, along with the best time of day and the frequency that is most likely to keep them engaged. Ever observed the product recommendation emails that Amazon sends? It’s the same thing we are talking about!
AI or Machine Learning offers deep insights into your customer’s behavioral pattern. Right from customer segmentation to creating an in-depth buyer persona, using the right tools backed by AI makes mapping their buyer journeys easier.
You can use a service like ConvertFlow to implement progressive profiling so that you can dynamically display different fields on forms so you’re always collecting new information. This is the best of both worlds because you’re able to keep the initial opt-in form super low friction and then hone in on their interests over time.
Tailored content
How would you know what content works best for any particular email? Just sending out a template of message to all our contact list won’t cut it.
Now, thanks to platforms offered by companies such as Phrasee and Persado, email marketers can let AI determine which subject lines, body copy and calls-to-action recipients are most likely to respond to.
Google has already incorporated it into your Gmail inbox. Gmail now recommends responses for you by processing and “understanding” your emails with AI.
Consider the implications of an AI tool like Phrasee for B2B marketers. In the past, a marketer would use a combination of data and gut instinct to craft email subject lines. In the process, the marketer may miss certain insights from the data. Or, they might allow their gut to override their brain. They could also misread what is causing performance gains or drops. A tool like Phrasee instead handles the optimization side of email subject lines. It relies on data, not instinct, to recommend what works. It’s not perfect, but it’s generally more right than humans.
Finding the best time to send an email
Just getting your content in place is not enough. Timing the email well to boost reads and open rates is something that AI helps you with. Just because you check your email early in the morning, doesn’t mean that your customer also follows suit.
AI could automate the ideal send time and day for each subscriber based on his or her engagement history. It can take the analytics modeling and turn it up in real time — which would be very tough for humans to replicate because, there simply isn’t enough time. Machine learning technology can understand preferences for large lists of subscribers quickly to determine the time and day to send emails that will maximize engagement and conversions.
The same idea applies to the frequency and cadence of the emails you send to each subscriber. While one subscriber might engage more if you increase the frequency of your check-ins, others might feel overwhelmed and unsubscribe.
Conclusion
Customer relationships are no longer built on isolated interactions but on a human-centric approach. But offering a personalised experience involves a lot of intelligence and informed decision making. Incorporating AI into your email marketing toolkit not only helps in humanising your content, sharpening timings of emails but also predict user behaviour and the subsequent action that you should take.
Juvlon assists you through email and SMS campaigns to realize your marketing goals. For further queries get in touch with our team.