The customers of this digital era come across promotional offers from various brands every now and then. This has led to an increase in their demands, in terms of relevancy and usefulness. They expect a personalised and meaningful approach across online as well as offline markets.
In the case of email marketing, it is vital to create and send tailored messages to your audience. To send highly relevant and targeted emails, you need to collect and analyse correct information of your subscribers. Based on the information gathered, each component of your email, ranging from the subject line, images, email copy, offers, product recommendations and CTA, etc. can be personalised.
Marketers are coming up with new and effective ways to personalise email campaigns. One of the most advanced and efficient ways of doing it is using Artificial Intelligence technology. Email marketers often spend major efforts in dividing their subscriber lists into segments and scheduling emails that are relevant to each segment. AI reduces the efforts of the marketing teams and helps them to reach their customers at the right time with the right information, based on the data.
How can AI be applied to email marketing campaigns?
AI and machine learning algorithms capture the data points describing the subscribers’ behavior and preferences such as previous purchases, past sessions on the website, previously read content, and type of emails the user has engaged with in the past, and dynamically apply the right content for each user. AI-triggered emails work wonders in skyrocketing open rates and engagement.
In this article, we take you through the various ways in which AI can be applied to personalise email campaigns.
Smart segmentation
While the basic segmentation based on the location and demographics can be done manually by the marketers, there are certain specific insights such as the analysis of purchase patterns and behavioral aspects of the customers, that can be too time-consuming and tedious to determine. AI and ML help marketers to categorise lists based on specific behavioral segments and based on their engagement on various mediums such as social media, website, in-store and email. It then creates adaptive and dynamic content for each, based on their evolving needs. AI-powered segmentation allows marketers and brands to create seamless value-driven experiences at various stages of the customer journey.
Personalised subject lines
Natural language generation, a subset of AI can convert structured data into written language. It can be used by email marketers to produce narratives for email subject lines. AI can analyse the data and create optimal subject lines for your emails.
The brand Phrasee uses AI technology to write effective email subject lines that are guaranteed to perform well. As per one of their reports, the best subject line generated by their tool was:
“Canada mid-season sale on orders over $20 plus free delivery”
With such high-performing subject lines personalised for each individual, marketers can be rest assured about their email open rates, and ultimately better ROI.
Product recommendations
It is an era of hyper-personalisation and subscribers expect receiving product recommendations in their inbox. Marketers can leverage this trend to send the most relevant product recommendations to their subscribers using AI and machine-learning algorithms. It delivers personalised shopping recommendations to each recipient based on their interests, user journey, purchase history, and behavior. Sending recommendations that the users are most likely to purchase will help in boosting conversions.
Check out this product recommendation email from the brand Lyst.
Want to design such effective emails? Choose from a range of Salesforce templates, Mailchimp templates and Pardot email templates to get started.
Smart triggers
Email marketers often spend a lot of time in setting up triggered email campaigns. Triggered emails are messages sent to the users in response to particular actions taken by them through your website or emails. Examples of triggered emails are welcome emails, cart abandonment emails, back in stock emails, re-engagement emails, etc. AI makes the job of marketers easy by letting them run smart automated campaigns. With AI automation tools, you can identify the users who are most interested in hearing about certain products or offers and send personalised trigger emails to engage them better.
Here’s an example of a personalised back in stock email from the brand Uniqlo. Take a look!
Email testing
Multivariate or A/B testing is a crucial step of email marketing to know if your emails will be well received by your subscribers. To ensure all your marketing emails perform well and derive the expected results, it is necessary to test your emails for multiple variables such as the design elements, copy, subject line, CTA, etc. It is not possible to manually test each and every variation of your email with utmost precision. This is where AI-based testing tools come to the marketers’ rescue. They have inbuilt email flows and templates that can run multiple tests within seconds, test various versions of your emails, and automatically choose the best version. Emails tested using AI-tools save a lot of time and resources of the marketing teams, and help them deliver winning emails to their customers.
Wrapping up
Email personalisation has proven to be a boon for email marketers, and AI improves the relevance and quality of personalisation in emails. Sending the most optimal email at the most optimal time has resulted in improved customer experiences and conversions.
So are you ready to use AI for your email marketing?
| Author bio Kevin George is the head of marketing at Email Uplers, that specialises in crafting Professional Email Templates, PSD to Email conversion, and HTML email templates production. Kevin loves gadgets, bikes & jazz, and he breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on email marketing blog. |
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