Are AI Email Marketing Tools Taking Over?

The marketing realm has been in a state of limbo ever since AI tools like ChatGPT began making waves in the industry.

In 2023, designing email campaigns is unimaginable without some level of digital intervention. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, 61.4% of businesses claim to use AI for marketing.

Various game-changing AI email marketing software out there can now automate parts of the customer journey. Advanced tools can even build upon user behavior to simplify consumer funnels.

Integrating AI with email marketing can not only drive conversions but also open businesses to a plethora of unique benefits. As artificial intelligence gains considerable popularity, the need for choosing the right marketing tool grows.

But before we dive into the best one for your business, it's important to understand how AI works to enhance the performance of email campaigns.

The role of AI in email marketing

AI analyses vast collections of data to derive results based on predictions.

In the context of email marketing, it encompasses several technologies such as natural language processing, machine learning, and more. For instance, AI can recommend best practices, suitable products, and desired functionalities which take personalization one step further to enhance the quality of a digital campaign.

Also Read: Seamless AI pricing - Good deal?

You already know that creating strong connections with your target audience is essential. Businesses deploy various methods to build their list of paying customers.

With AI email marketing tools, you can save time, boost engagement, track performance, run tests, get actionable insights, and more.

In essence, AI lessens the burden of marketers by nurturing daily email marketing funnels. If you aren't already making the most of AI-powered email automation, here are a few reasons why it's time to change that.

Reasons to use AI for email marketing optimization

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Optimize the sending schedule

The time when your audience receives a business email is crucial to conversion. On their own, email marketers must use the trial and error method to find the best sending schedule. Along the way, a lot of mistakes are made, and money is wasted.

Instead, AI does a better job. Since advanced AI tools analyze user behavior and engagement history, they can pinpoint the time maximum recipients will open your message.

For instance, your company sells wellness boxes to working women in their early 30s to later 40s. As data builds, AI might study the specifics of your customer personas and reveal that this particular audience mostly checks their emails between 8 to 10 pm, after they've come home, and are ready to retire for the night.

The image above shows how email sending times are optimized by a popular email marketing tool.

Get customized recommendations

When you visit a website and browse specific product catalogs, this activity is recorded. A little while later, when you aren't even window-shopping anymore, you start seeing ads featuring similar products.

With AI email marketing, businesses can send customized product recommendations to their newsletter subscribers or general email list. By integrating artificial intelligence tools with your website, you can keep track of customer behavior and build upon it.

This comes in handy because the tools deployed, then, automatically adjust personalization.

When properly executed, targeted recommendations in email can drive revenue. A study conducted by Invespro reveals that 49% of customers report making a product purchase in response to bespoke recommendations even when they initially had zero plans to buy.

Create smart copy

Composing persuasive emails is an art mastered by successful email marketers. However, when you're targeting thousands of customers through personalized messages, getting an extra set of hands is always better. But who says these hands have to be human?

AI-powered writing software helps significantly. Using a machine learning tool for email content is a great way to get the first draft out. It can generate full-fledged email copy that writers can rephrase and restructure before sending.

Additionally, you can use it to summarise lengthy blogs into short-form content, proofread mistakes, create catchy CTAs, and even turn articles into newsletter content.

As of 2023, 12% of businesses rely on artificial intelligence for their content creation needs. Although this figure might not seem much, it's important to note that cheap AI content tools have only recently become available to the public.

It is safe to predict that a few years down the line, this statistic will multiply.

Optimize sending frequency

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How can one tell if they're going overboard with their email marketing campaigns?

Identifying risky sending patterns is integral to the success of an email campaign. AI keeps a close eye on your email sending frequency and analyses all the messages you're sending, how often you're sending them, and who you're sending them to.

Don't forget, internet service providers flag email domains that do too much too fast. As a result, your reputation suffers and email deliverability takes a hit.

Advanced tools optimize the frequency of your email marketing campaigns depending on the requirements of each internet service provider. This retains inbox delivery limits at a maximum so your company can achieve ideal levels of subscriber engagement.

Generate the best email subject lines

The right kind of subject lines are known to attract recipients. In fact, emails with personalized subject lines have a 22% higher chance of being opened.

With email marketing AI tools, you can see which subject lines will do better than others and customize them to meet campaign benchmarks and exceed business goals.

This is where natural language models come into play. Under the umbrella of machine learning, natural language processing seeks to understand human text in order to replicate it.

Natural language generation then takes it one step further to build upon the analysis of said data and recreate text that is strategically phrased to perform better.

Segment prospects

Targeting the wrong customer is a grave sin in the world of email marketing. If your business keeps sending messages to people who aren't even interested, engagement rates will perpetually remain low, and your bottom line will expand slower than a sloth. To top it off, poor segmentation will hurt your brand's identity.

At the same time, segmenting customers isn't the easiest thing to do. Even expert marketers require a decent amount of time to draw relevant customer personas.

The good thing about AI-driven email marketing is that it doesn't just base decisions on assumptions.

Rather, machines dig deep into purchase history, browsing patterns, and other real-time metrics to create highly filtered lists of your target audience. As a result, you're able to send tailor-made messages to recipients who are likely to engage and convert.

This also ties in with the importance of personalized emails. When your business has a solid grip on its ideal client, email marketing campaigns can be tweaked to address specific concerns.

Automatically personalize content

Personalization is key whether you're talking to existing subscribers or welcoming new ones. Ask yourself this: how many times have you archived an email because it seemed totally irrelevant? Most people would say that they've lost count.

On the other hand, leads welcome emails that resonate with their interests. Imagine opening your inbox to see an email highlighting a product you saw through social media ads, clicked on, and really liked but later forgot about.

All else held constant, any recipient in this case will be quick to visit the site and reconsider adding it to cart.

Such an email is no coincidence, it is backed by a powerful AI tool designed to identify what truly qualifies as relevant content for your customer. Couple this with a well-reputed AI email writer and create personalized emails designed for impressive marketing performance.

Reduce spam reports

Just as AI protects the recipient from receiving spam, it helps email marketers identify red flags that might jeopardize deliverability. ML draws from a reference database of email content that has previously failed to bypass spam.

In simple words, you're able to avoid common pitfalls that anger ISPs and ESPs. Over time, as your email domain consistently lands in the primary inbox, it gains traction.

For instance, certain words are classified as spam triggers within a subject line. This happens when marketers write emails that come off as clickbait so recipients end up sending them to the spam folder. Or worse, when businesses are found cluelessly leveraging invalid email addresses.

Other possible issues could be with the content. Perhaps you're going over the acceptable number of attachments and not allowing subscribers to opt out? Thanks to AI, all such potential issues will be highlighted before you hit that send button.

Top email marketing automation tools to try in 2023

Optimail

Primarily focused on personalized emails and data-driven campaign delivery, Optimail is an emerging email marketing software with various automation capabilities. The platform offers analytics features, AI-backed inbox placement suggestions, tracking capabilities, and more.

It has been hailed as a great tool for predictive modeling. Optimail continually monitors customer behavior and gets to know your customers in detail. Its hyper-targeting functionality enables precise AI recommendations so email marketers can create relevant funnels that drive conversions.

To top it off, the software automatically adjusts personalization levels within an email depending on your audience's appetite.

Seventh Sense

This AI powered system accelerates your marketing campaign's performance by boosting customer engagement. Companies using HubSpot admire Seventh Sense for its sophisticated interface and email delivery optimization features.

For smaller companies and established giants alike, the email marketing tool offers various impressive functionalities. For starters, email frequency optimization ensures a balanced schedule to improve deliverability and engagement. This is coupled with peak time insights to encourage perfectly scheduled emails that will rake in a higher click through rate.

Mail Modo

If you're not a fan of complex coding and need reliable software that offers easy customisation of emails, Mail Modo is a pretty decent choice.

It enables seamless integration of widgets within emails for greater levels of interaction. As opposed to traditional emails, those generated through Mail Modo let recipients act on certain CTAs without manually going to other websites. Thus, higher convenience for prospects means better conversion rates.

Not just that, users can automate sending schedules with the help of in-built customer journey analysis. Once launched, marketers can view the performance of their campaigns inside a visual builder.

Mail Modo is also known for its integration capabilities that come in handy for businesses using external CRM tools. Other features include advanced audience segmentation, dynamic email templates, custom field implementation, and more.

Campaign Monitor

Best known for predicting optimal sending times, email marketing tool, Campaign Monitor offers plenty of useful features for businesses. For one, its predictive analytics is one of the best ones out there. The platform is mostly deployed for providing viable suggestions based on activity and website interactions.

Campaign Monitor also automates email campaigns and rigoursly personalises content to match the behaviour of your recipient list. Users can also segment their audience through a wide variety of filters, and thus, scale the sales funnel. Other features include A/B testing to compare different email marketing campaigns and analytics to identify lags in their performance.

ActiveCampaign

Create lead generation and retention campaigns based on past open rates as well as audience preferences. ActiveCampaign is another marketing automation platform that allows business professionals to focus on more important tasks while it takes care of other domains. The software can be used to segment email lists and personalise copy according to select metrics.

Its conditional content feature allows your sales teams to customise how image and text blocks are displayed throughout an email according to the recipient's website integrations. Plus, if you're looking to improve the quality of your email marketing campaigns, ActiveCampaigns in-built analytics will provide just the right insights. This tool has been designed to deliver detailed performance reports based on real-time information.

SendinBlue

Send In Blue offers numerous advanced features to optimize your email campaigns. It allows senders to deploy transactional emails such as password resets and account confirmation. The platform enables automated delvieries set off by specified triggers.

In that, pre-curated messages are automatically sent in reponse to a certain action performed by the audience. These emails include dynamic text blocks within a standardised format that can be customised depending not the recipient's information.

Sendinblue's mobile-friendly editor is enriched with a long list of pre-built templates to match different brand personas. These extend complete control to professional marketers who can edit the HTML code to alter the colour scheme, grading, structure and overall design.

Moreover, regular emails can be personalized according to engagement history, customer behaviour and preferences. And the results of different campaigns can later be studied to assess real-time performance.

MailChimp

MailChimp offers a diverse array of functionalities to help business owners craft professional emails with ease. The software has customisable email templates, automated delivery, advanced segmentation and a lot more in its arsenal.

In combination with automated trigger campaigns, users can send highly targeted emails based on a customer's purchase history, past engagement scores, and location. The software also provides in-depth analytics to track how open and click through rates translate to conversions.

To identify best performing campaigns, users can also conduct A/B testing and check which type of campaign drives the most revenue. Not to mention, MailChimp seamlessly integrates with third party systems including social media and e-commerce platforms like Shopify.

HubSpot

HubSpot is one of the most powerful tools for email marketing. It combines intuitive email campaign creation with customizable templates and content personalization. Not only can users personalize messages according to individual customer personas but also leverage AI segmentation to divide email lists based on the specific needs of different groups.

Under its wing, end-to-end email automation is also offered whereby trigger emails can be scheduled without the need for constant manual intervention. So when the right messages reach the right people, conversions go up. This is topped off with streamlined CRM integrations that make it easy to manage lead data all under one roof.

HubSpot users also benefit from advanced A/B testing, AI reporting, and most importantly, lead scoring. An exclusive feature that assigns priority to different leads depending on their likeliness to convert and increase revenue.

Pribox

Pribox's email marketing solution is a combination of all the tools needed to optimize campaigns and additional features that make the whole email marketing process easier - such as email verification and our AI email writing assistant.

You can A/B test your emails, optimize for sending time, and design your emails as you wish. The best part is that you can get all of this for one year completely FREE by signing up now.

Bottom Line

Marketing automation is a hot topic and for good reason. AI technology is redefining the traditional way of navigating email communications which is why businesses are flocking to it for their digital campaigns.

However, email marketing isn't the only thing companies should be concerned about. If anything, the choice between conventional email marketing and the modern-age alternative should come much later.

First and foremost, you must carefully plan how to reach as many customers as possible - in a way that doesn't set off alarm bells.

As ISPs crack down on spammy email domains, new businesses should take extra precaution. So, if your emails always end up in the recipients' spam folder, it's probably because you're sending bulk messages the wrong way.

Also, follow the best email marketing practices to give your business a bigger boost. Keep it simple, figure out what the customer wants, and optimise your campaigns through data-backed experimentation.

All in all, remember to use the right email outreach tools. Sift through the internet's most recommended cold email platforms, compare features, and make an informed decision according to the needs of your business.