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As a small business owner., you’ll know just how important it is to get your marketing activities right when it comes to boosting brand awareness and attracting more customers.
Now, while there’s a seemingly infinite raft of marketing tools and channels available at your fingertips, email still stands tall as a medium that, well…gets results.
Yes, email marketing is alive and well. And, with a little innovation—as well as a little help from the right artificial intelligence (AI) tools—you’ll gain an all-important edge on the competition.
Here, I’m going to explore the importance of AI in email marketing and tell you how can use them to help better accelerate your business growth.
Ready? Let’s dive in.
Why email marketing with AI is important
95% of industry leaders state that generative AI is effective when it comes to their email marketing efforts.
By getting to grips with the right AI strategy, you can boost your output while making targeted tweaks to your campaigns of content — the kind that results in real engagement.
Let’s take a look at the two key areas where AI plays an important role in email marketing.
Increase productivity while maintaining quality
With an ever-expanding pile of promotional plates to juggle, creating email marketing campaigns and content that, well…work can seem like an uphill struggle.
The good news is, AI tools play a vital role in boosting productivity levels without compromising on quality across all key marketing channels—AI is no exception.
Working with the right AI tools, it’s possible to automate a host of vital email marketing tasks while keeping your brand tone, style, and standards consistent. As such, working in harmony with AI offers a viable means of maintaining email marketing output while enjoying a healthy return on investment (ROI).
Keep it creative time and time again
Another reason that AI plays such a significant role in email marketing is its continually evolving creative potential.
While AI is no substitute for the human aspect of creative innovation, working alongside generative AI tools or platforms is opening new doors for marketers and business owners alike.
By having a clear-cut brand vision and knowing what you want from your email marketing campaigns, it’s possible to complement your content with the help of AI tools with carefully crafted commands or requests for images, video, audio, and copy. While these processes take finesse, AI tools are becoming interwoven into the fabric of content creation—email marketing campaigns are no exception.
Related: How to effectively prompt for AI art and generative AI image creation
How AI tools and platforms can improve email marketing
Now that you’re up to speed with the role that AI plays in email marketing — let’s dig a little deeper into how working with the right strategy and tools can improve your efforts.
Better personalization
First of all, working with AI platforms can help you personalize your content to reach out to your recipients in a way that really speaks to them.
In this day and age, without personalizing your email content, it’s unlikely you’ll see many results (if any). On the flip side, personalized email content can boost click-through rates by up to 41%. That’s pretty impressive.
Rather than having to wade through piles of email subject lines and bits of body content to add each recipient’s name and hand-pick content or product recommendations tailored to their interests or browsing behaviors—you can get AI tools to do it for you.
By feeding your AI tool or platform the right data and setting the right commands, you can personalize your email marketing content to offer personal value to your customers or subscribers on a large scale. That way, you can boost your email marketing output while increasing your sales. It’s a win-win.
Swift and effective segmentation
Segment, what? Expanding on my previous email marketing point—working with the right AI tools will help you categorize (segment) your customers according to age, demographic, interests or preferred products, so you can target them with head-turning email content.
Again, rather than sifting through piles of subscriber data and arranging people into specific groups, you can use tools or platforms with smart AI algorithms that can segment customers into groups by uncovering specific patterns or buying trends.
Armed with AI technology, not only will you be able to place your subscribers into useful categories with ease (and dazzle them with email marketing content that offers them heaps of personal value)—but you’ll also be able to target the right people with the right products at the right times. Hello, sales.
Related: Risks of AI and practicing responsible use
Testing, improvement, and evolution
In addition to creating cool, catchy, and inspiring content for your marketing emails, knowing what’s working and what’s not is essential to your ongoing success.
AI tools powered by autonomous technology and machine learning (ML) capabilities can collect and serve up data based on engagement rates, clicks, and even how people scan or read your content.
In addition to uncovering insights or trends you’d otherwise miss, email marketing tools equipped with AI can also help you split-test your emails, allowing you to see which design elements, CTA buttons, and sections of content spark the most interest.
Rather than manually setting up tests or wading through stale lists of data, the best AI tools will present your data in a digestible visual format that will empower you to keep improving your efforts for the best possible ROI.
For your inspiration
Here are some bonus AI email marketing tips to help you on your journey…
- Use AI tools to generate subject line suggestions to boost your open rates
- Work with AI automation tools to keep cleaning up and arranging your email marketing subscriber lists
- Leverage your AI tools or platforms to analyze and understand your whole customer lifestyle for insights on how to make your email marketing content and campaigns as strong a link as possible
The future of email marketing
Now you’re all revved up and ready to start your AI-powered email marketing journey, here are some of my best guesses into the possible trends that will shape the future of email marketing for brands and business owners alike:
- An increasing amount of niche content and editorial-style emails
- More video-heavy email marketing content
- An increasing number of funny GIFs embedded into email marketing content
- Gamification, quizzes, and challenged-based content to become the norm
- A sharp rise in FOMO-inspired email subject lines to spark urgency
- The further development of AI and ML-powered email marketing campaigns
Email marketing and AI: final thoughts
AI has firmly established itself as a vital part of the modern email marketing puzzle. In fact, 57% of leading businesses use AI tools to improve their email marketing activities.
Harnessed the right way, AI is nothing to fear—especially when it comes to email marketing.
We wish you the best of luck and to level up every aspect of your promotional strategy, try our innovative and intuitive digital marketing suite for ambitious small to medium-sized business
Disclaimer: Opinions belong to the author alone and do not necessarily represent the views of GoDaddy. All trademark rights belong to their respective owners. Third-party trademarks are used here for demonstrative and educational purposes only; use does not represent affiliation or endorsement.