Email marketing is still the tool with the highest bang-for-your-buck when it comes to promoting your business and services online. Approximately 80 percent of retailers report that email outreach was their most effective means of online customer acquisition and retention. In the US, over 90 percent of consumers check their email daily, prompting purchase rates three times higher than social media promotions and increasing overall spending on products by 17 percent.
While it might seem simple to run an email campaign, it’s important to put a strategy in place. Ensuring that you are targeting the right recipients, that they’re opening your emails and responding to your calls to action, and, of course, spending, takes skill and talent. Using email verification software is just one important step of this process: ensuring that your email list is clean will help to boost ROI and keep your metrics accurate.
To support your efforts, artificial intelligence (AI) tools can provide additional advantages that will help edge out the competition.
How AI Helps Email Strategy
AI programs are capable of analyzing large amounts of data more efficiently and accurately than people can. WIth the high volume of incoming data, they can spot trends and patterns that might otherwise be missed by human eyes. This additional data that can offer insights on how to improve and target your email campaign creation.
Subject Lines Are Your First Impression
Numerous studies show that optimized subject lines are the key to enticing users to open your emails. A third of recipients report that the subject line prompts them to open a message, while almost 70 percent will flag messages as spam based on it alone. Getting the subject line right is a critical first step to optimizing your keywords.
AIs can analyze your subject lines and use them as a metric for determining successful keywords. By comparing your email open rates based on the keywords used in the subject line, the AI can help determine what works, what doesn’t, and what could be done better.
Companies like Phrasee and Persado already offer AI platforms that can suggest ideas for subject lines and even content. Size isn’t a barrier, either. Even if your list is small, the companies have databases of millions of account for comparative reference.
AI Can Learn Recipient Habits and Optimize Timing
As connected users, email recipients have virtual habits, just as they do in the real world. They might check in on their personal interests in the morning before work or during particular breaks, surf at night in bed, or shop during their lunch hour.
People predispose themselves to positive responses at whatever time they choose to read and respond to their emails. In other words, users are picking their own schedule for response and are more likely to show interest at the time they prefer to focus on a task.
AI platforms can do the heavy lifting in analyzing when recipients read your emails. They can also review what types of emails get better responses at different times of day. Armed with this knowledge, you can not only optimize your email content, but also hone in on the time of day that will get you better responses.
Personalization Can Get a Boost from AI
Highly personalized content is the new frontier in marketing of all kinds. Email open and response rates have grown significantly as personalization has improved and become more focused.
Personalization works on many levels. Including a recipient’s name in a subject line, for instance, might boost open rates, though some analysts contend it doesn’t. However, personalization is more than simply knowing how to properly address your subscribers.
Understanding client interests, wants, and needs is where the real clicks start happening. Knowing your subscriber’s demographic information such as location, purchasing history, and positive or negative responses to previous information can help you tailor your content precisely to their needs.
The variety of data that can have an impact is so vast, it just isn’t feasible for a person to discover these insights on their own. AI platforms, on the other hand, are specifically designed to automate these tasks, taking the routine labor out of the more interesting marketing planning.
Exploring AI Options Now Will Benefit You Tomorrow
A number of products have entered the AI marketspace in the last few years. Email campaign planners would do well to research and learn how AIs work and the benefits they can provide now, rather than wait.
In the next year, over half of marketers plan on implementing AI tools into their strategies. Waiting until that happens could cost you clients and market share. Why let your competitors get ahead of you?