Your Next Email Campaign? Ask the AI (Seriously)
▼ Summary
– AI is now a practical toolkit in email marketing, transitioning from a futuristic concept to a key component in campaign workflows.
– Generative AI is revolutionizing content creation by suggesting subject lines and drafting body copy, enhancing A/B testing and speeding up production.
– AI enhances personalization and automation, optimizing list segmentation, send times, and constructing complex workflows.
– Various vendors use AI for specific tasks, such as predictive AI for identifying contacts, conversational shopping, churn prediction, and channel optimization.
– AI integration in email marketing platforms augments marketers’ efforts, handling repetitive tasks and enabling scalable personalization, making AI capabilities a critical factor in platform selection.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transitioning from a futuristic buzzword to a practical toolkit within email marketing platforms. While machine learning has been working behind the scenes for years, optimizing segmentation and predicting behavior, the advent of powerful generative AI has pushed these capabilities directly into the hands of marketers, fundamentally changing campaign workflows and evaluation criteria for new tools.
AI Moves into the Workflow
The Martech Intelligence Report underscores this shift, highlighting AI integration as a primary driver in the market’s evolution. Vendors aren’t just adding AI; they’re embedding it across the platform to assist with tasks that were once solely manual and often time-consuming.
Consider Content Creation: platforms are now leveraging generative AI to suggest multiple subject lines on the fly. This capability directly supports more robust A/B testing. As data from AlchemyWorks Analysis presented in the report (Figure 2) indicates, testing a greater number of subject lines correlates with improved open, click, and click-to-open rates. The ease with which AI generates these options lowers the barrier to entry for effective testing.
Beyond subject lines, AI is assisting with drafting body copy, generating imagery (like Adobe Firefly integration mentioned for Adobe Journey Optimizer), and tailoring message variations for specific audience segments or individuals based on available data. This speeds up production significantly, allowing teams to focus more on strategy and less on the mechanics of writing multiple versions.
The Marketer’s AI Toolkit
Furthermore, AI continues to enhance personalization and automation. Table 2 in the Martech report provides a snapshot of how various vendors are applying AI/ML. Common applications include providing insights for better list segmentation and personalization, automating send time optimization (delivering messages when individual recipients are most likely to engage), and even assisting in the construction of complex automation workflows.
Specific examples abound:
- Acoustic uses predictive AI for identifying in-market contacts.
- Bloomreach enables conversational shopping experiences.
- Cordial employs it for churn prediction and product recommendations.
- Dotdigital generates product descriptions.
- MessageGears determines next best channel and contact frequency.
- Zeta Global even uses AI for channel and offer optimization.
This integration isn’t about replacing the email marketer. Rather, it’s about augmentation. AI acts as a tireless assistant, handling repetitive tasks, accelerating content development, analyzing vast datasets to surface insights, and enabling a level of personalization at scale that was previously challenging.
As AI capabilities mature and become more seamlessly integrated, their presence and effectiveness are becoming critical factors when selecting or upgrading an email marketing platform. Marketers should be asking potential vendors not just if they use AI, but how it tangibly assists in creating more effective and efficient email campaigns.
