Sending the right message to the right people at the right time- that’s what every single email marketer out there aspires to achieve. And that’s precisely what email automation enables them to do. Empowering businesses to save vital time and resources by helping them to get rid of repetitive, manual tasks, email automation, in ways more than one, ushers in increased engagement, greater customer loyalty, and stronger consumer relationships for them.
Now, what if we told you that there’s a way to amplify the efficiency of this already potent machinery? Yes, really. How? Two words- Artificial Intelligence. AI email automation, wherein one fuses AI tools with email automation, pretty much represents the next gen of email campaign development, execution, and management. The scope and merits of AI email automation are many; in this article, we will attempt to paint a comprehensive picture of the same. Excited to see what’s in store? Let’s go!
Why Opt for AI-powered Email Automation?
As the number of contacts in your email list grows, attending manually to every aspect of your email campaign can become quite overwhelming. This is where AI email automation comes to your rescue. In the course of streamlining these operations, AI-based email automation helps boost your productivity, ultimately opening the gates for improved results.
Helps Boost Conversions
When you are dealing with large data sets, AI proves to be downright invaluable. By introducing AI to email automation, you can carry out a thorough analysis of your customers’ interactions and behavioral patterns. This, in turn, lets you gain a deeper understanding of the diverse buyer personas interacting with you, subsequently putting you in a definitive position to craft personalized communications for them. From sending custom product recommendations to enlightening how-to guides pertaining to their recent purchases, such gestures can go a long way towards winning the faith of your customers and skyrocketing your ROI.
Improves Decision Making
Globally, nearly 347.3 billion emails are sent per day. This insane volume, of course, translates to overcrowded inboxes and, by extension, widespread email fatigue. By now, we understand that personalization is the way to break through the clutter and establish a thriving dialogue with the customers. But on what basis should this framework of targeted messaging be formulated? Long years of familiarity with their buyers may tempt businesses to rely on guesswork, speculations, and assumptions to inform their strategies. However, you must learn to betray that impulse.
Customer behavior is an ever-evolving entity, and no degree of affinity can help you hit the nail right on its head when it comes to anticipating future interactions and expectations of your buyers. Accurate forecasting can only be done with the help of data and data alone. With AI email automation, you unearth actionable insights that are supported by indisputable data; implementing them, thus, gives you surefire results.
Decreases Costs
Template creation, segmentation, and campaign scheduling- AI can lend a solid helping hand toward all these facets, sparing you from the need to hire additional resources. Money saved on this front can then be utilized to shore up your campaigns holistically; with AI email automation, you are guaranteed to get the most bang for your buck.
Lets You Scale Up Effortlessly
As much as businesses welcome an ever-expanding customer base, it gets them slightly nervy as well. Why? Because that calls for them to expand their existing infrastructure, “scale up”, as we refer to it more commonly, in order to accommodate the increased volume of requirements. With AI by your side, scaling up becomes absolutely hassle-free, allowing you to cater to larger audiences without furrowing your forehead.
Use Cases of AI-fueled Email Automation
There are multiple applications of AI email automation. Below, we take a detailed look at them.
Email Copywriting
Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copy.ai, Bard, and their ilk are all the rage these days. From whipping up lines of poetry to composing college application letters, these tools have managed to capture the imagination of the people, unlike any other disruptive technology in the recent past. That the tool has now come to be adopted by email marketers for email copywriting should, thus, come as a surprise to none.
Subject lines, preheader texts, body copy, CTAs- generative AI tools are adept at yielding all these. Their ability to supply multiple options/drafts for a particular brief can serve to give you an excellent headstart with respect to your copywriting endeavors. What’s more, they can also help you churn personalized content at scale! However, given their nascentness, it is prudent to only treat them as an assistant at present. Though they are capable of producing impressive volumes of content in an instant, this content is not free from inaccuracies, redundancies, and bias. Therefore, these drafts must be subjected to rigorous editing and fact-checking to make them usable and compelling. Besides, the content generated by these tools lacks the spontaneity and originality that only a human mind is capable of. So, to make the most of them, human intervention is necessary.
Inbox Management
All email marketers curate and deliver campaigns with the intention of eliciting a response from their subscribers. And to deliver a superlative customer experience, it is extremely vital to craft a satisfactory revert to every such response that comes your way. While this is, of course, not lost on the marketers, what most of them fail to consider is just how immensely time-consuming this exercise can be if attended to manually.
AI-powered email automation lets you divide all your service requests into various categories. Subsequently, each query is then accurately directed to the relevant personnel/department responsible for addressing it. As a result, you are able to substantially reduce your revert time, earning precious brownie points from your subscribers.
Send Time Optimization
Equally important as the curation of the copy, code, and design of your email templates is the time at which they are delivered to your subscribers. All the hard yards you put into designing a campaign risk sublimation into naught if you aren’t mindful of your email timing. And email timing, as any email veteran worth their salt will tell you, is an incredibly tough nut to crack, owing primarily to just how subjective it can be. Even if two businesses are in the same domain, peddling the same goods, one can’t assume that both of their customer bases check their inboxes at the same time.
With AI, though, cracking this code becomes extremely convenient. They meticulously observe your subscriber’s engagement patterns, helping you determine the most ideal time slot to deliver your campaigns. During high-traffic periods such as the holiday season, where competition among brands to mark their presence in their audience’s inboxes reaches an all-time high, AI email automation can help you secure pole position.
Reporting
After executing a campaign, it is vital to track its performance continuously so that you don’t miss out on any optimization opportunities. But, no business launches one campaign at a time; they run several. Surely, then, you can imagine how uphill of a task it can be to exercise a vigilant eye on them all? Thankfully, you have AI to help you out. AI tools will evaluate your campaign performance on critical metrics such as clickthrough rate (CTR), conversion rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, and list growth rate, enabling you to draw up a robust campaign report from these findings (moreover, they also visualize the data in attractive formats to foster better comprehension). The best part is that their functionality isn’t simply confined to assessment; they are perfectly capable of suggesting effective remedial measures, too. Ticking all the right boxes has never been easier!
Testing
With subscribers accessing emails from diverse devices and environments, it is extremely crucial to test your campaigns before testing them out to make certain they render as desired. Then, there’s the necessity to curate your template as per the interests and preferences of your target audience? But how do you determine that? With the help of A/B/n testing, of course!
Through AI email automation, email marketers will be able to send multiple versions of their email templates to a sample audience. Subsequently, their response is analyzed to select the best-performing variant. For best results, it is advisable to test only one email element at a time.
Wrapping It Up
Introducing AI to email automation is a complete game changer and, if leveraged smartly, can help your business climb several notches above your competitors. We hope the insights shared above have helped you gain an all-round understanding of AI email automation and allowed you to envision the myriad ways in which it can benefit your business.