Discover how to leverage AI effectively in email marketing without relying solely on ChatGPT. Explore send time optimization, segmentation, and product recommendations for better results.
We are often asked whether we are using ChatGPT in email marketing campaigns. (This question becomes more frequent as major ESPs rush to release their version.) Despite genAI’s proliferation, we find the answer easy: we don’t use it for content, aside from maybe using it to generate ideas or as a rudimentary starting point.
For final content generation, your team’s creative minds are far more refined and empathetic to the audience’s needs. That said, there are three distinct ways we do recommend leveraging AI in your email marketing—and they shouldn’t be new to you:
- Send time optimization
- Personalization/segmentation
- Product feed recommendations
Let’s look at each in detail and the steps needed to do them well.
Also Read: Forget the ESP! 4 Email Marketing Initiatives That Drive Real Growth
Send time optimization
Send time optimization is a relatively under-used technique that helps email marketers dial in the right week, day, and time to send messages. These can be set in a couple of ways:
- Identifying the right send time for each subscriber
- Adjusting the overall time for a message based on performance data
The other piece of send time optimization isn’t just when to send an email; it’s whether to send an email. Einstein, Salesforce’s AI product, has particularly good audience saturation algorithms that identify the subscribers in danger of being over-communicated and those who could use more communication.
A great example of already available (and likely underutilized) email AI functionality is the power to build complex decision trees that automatically optimize the send time for each consumer. Email marketers can use AI to find the moment and intervals to maximize user engagement.
Also Read: The Email Marketing Renaissance: Beyond the Blast, Building Relationships
Audience segmentation
Audience segmentation can take many forms: demographics, geographics, psychographics, family status, affinities, existing vs. prospective customers, etc. The more discrete your segments, the more you can tailor your messaging.
For instance, a CPG cheese brand might send nacho recipes to 20-something football fans and grilled cheese sandwich recipes to parents of young kids. Given the right data (which we’ll get to in a minute), just about any ESP makes it easy for you to build dynamic audience segments.
The best friend of great audience segments: a strategic welcome journey that brings rich data for deeper personalization early in the subscriber relationship.
Also Read: New Bulk Email Sender Rules: How to Stay Out of the Spam Folder
Product feed recommendations
Whether your brand is CPG or ecommerce, there are ways to personalize emails to make them especially relevant to each user. Examples include:
- Product recommendations (based on purchase, browsing, and abandonment histories)
- Refill reminders
- Tips and tricks for product use
- Recipes customized to user affinities
- Local sales or partner discounts on CPG products
- Etc.
We initially said these weren’t new, but this one isn’t. Amazon was the first to use this technology over twenty years ago.
Another intriguing way to experiment with AI is to explore your ESP’s available product-feed recommendations capabilities to measure the engagement and conversion benefits of automating email components.
Also Read: AI Cold Emails: Hit or Miss?
Preparing your email program for AI
To get good results from the above initiatives, you’ll need to get your house in order on two fronts: data clean-up and email templates.
The first step always involves data: make sure it’s clean and filtered and that you’re collecting the information you need to enable advanced segmentation.
Second, you must revamp your email templates to feature live text and dynamic elements, such as rewards points earned or membership status. Image-based emails have no custom fields, which limits personalization options immediately. We love to use content block templates in email design to streamline building dynamic, hyper-personalized emails.
These prep steps have the bonus of being beneficial without leveraging the AI functions mentioned above. You might as well start your prep now, even if you’re slow-playing AI.
Maximizing AI-driven features in your email program
Even though we recommend ChatGPT for limited use in email campaigns today, the steps you take to develop your AI muscles and campaign architecture will help set you up to use it when it is more viable.
Working through the use cases above will pay immediate campaign dividends and build a foundation for incorporating more AI technology in the future. You’ll know more about your audience and have richer data at your fingertips through today’s personalization initiatives, which will only help you leverage AI options to come.
