Here are the key aspects of email list cleaning:

• Removing Invalid Addresses: This includes email addresses with syntax errors (e.g., missing “@” or “.”), non-existent domains, or email addresses that have been mistyped.

• Eliminating Disposable and Temporary Emails: Disposable email addresses are the ones with temporary or one-time-use email services. These emails should be removed from your list as they are unlikely to result in meaningful engagement.

• Identifying Role-Based Addresses: Email addresses associated with roles like “info@,” “support@,” or “admin@” are often monitored by multiple people and may not be appropriate targets for your campaigns.

• Dealing with Inactive Subscribers: Subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails in a long time need to be removed or targeted with re-engagement campaigns to confirm their interest.

• Remove Duplicates: Duplicate email addresses in your list should be removed to avoid sending duplicate emails to the same recipient.

• Assessing Risk: Some email list cleaning tools use algorithms to assign risk scores to email addresses. High-risk addresses may include those associated with spam traps.

• Segmentation: After cleaning, you can segment your list into different categories based on factors like engagement history, location, or other relevant criteria.
• Regular Maintenance: Email list cleaning is not a one-time task; it should be performed regularly to keep your list accurate and up-to-date. Depending on your email volume, this could be done monthly, quarterly, or as needed.

• Compliance: Ensure that your email list cleaning practices align with relevant email marketing regulations, such as GDPR or CAN-SPAM.  Send emails to only those who have voluntarily signed up and have expressed their interest in receving your communications.

Why is email list cleaning important?

Email list cleaning offers several significant benefits for your email marketing campaigns and overall sender reputation. Here are some of the key advantages:

• Improved Deliverability: Cleaning your email list helps in removing invalid and outdated email addresses, reducing the likelihood of hard bounces. This improves your sender reputation and helps your emails reach the inbox rather than being flagged as spam.

• Higher Open Rates: A clean list contains engaged and active subscribers who are more likely to open and engage with your emails. This leads to higher open rates and potentially higher conversion rates.

• Reduced Bounce Rates:  A bounced email occurs because a receiver’s inbox is full, there’s an error in their address, or at times just a technical error. Either way, you want to keep your percentage of these down to keep your deliverability up. Removing invalid and non-existent email addresses reduces bounce rates, which is crucial for maintaining a positive sender reputation. 

• Cost Savings: . By removing inactive and unresponsive subscribers, you can reduce email marketing costs. The number of subscribers on your list is what determines the cost of the service you need to purchase. Naturally, more number of contacts translate to increased costs. So, you ought to exercise due diligence and weed out invalid contacts from your list; ensure all your marketing bucks are spent on people who are real and actively engaged with your emails.

• Lower Spam Complaints: Sending emails to unengaged or disinterested subscribers can result in spam complaints, which can harm your sender reputation. A clean list minimizes the risk of recipients marking your emails as spam.

• Compliance with Regulations: Cleaning your list ensures that you’re complying with email marketing regulations like GDPR and CAN-SPAM, which require you to obtain explicit consent from recipients.

• Better ROI: Ultimately, email list cleaning can fetch you a higher ROI for your email marketing efforts. You’ll be reaching a more receptive audience, which can translate into increased sales and conversions.

How can AI help with email list cleaning?

Cleaning your email list is crucial to maintain a high deliverability rate, engagement, and compliance with email marketing regulations. Here’s how AI can help:

• Removing Duplicate Email Addresses: Provide AI with your email list, and it can help you identify and remove duplicate email addresses, ensuring that you’re not sending the same email to the same recipient multiple times.
  
• Verifying Email Addresses: AI can help you verify the validity of email addresses on your list. This involves checking the format of each email address and pinging the email servers to determine if they are active and deliverable.
  
• Detecting Incorrect Email Addresses: AI can help you spot email addresses with improper formats or a higher likelihood of bouncing. Eliminating these invalid email addresses will enhance your email deliverability.
  
• Unsubscribed and Opt-Out Addresses: If you provide AI with information about individuals who have unsubscribed or opted out from your emails, AI can help you identify and remove them from your list to comply with regulations and maintain a positive sender reputation.
  
• Spam Traps and High-Risk Addresses: By cross-referencing your list with known spam traps and high-risk email addresses, AI can help you avoid sending emails to addresses that could negatively impact your deliverability.
  
• Segmentation: AI can assist you in segmenting your list based on factors such as engagement history, purchase behavior, or demographics.
  
• Compliance Check: AI can guide you through the process of ensuring your email marketing practices comply with relevant regulations, such as GDPR or CAN-SPAM, to avoid legal issues.
  
• Personalization Suggestions: AI can provide suggestions on how to personalize your emails to increase engagement, such as using the recipient’s name or recommending products based on their past behavior.

What tools can be used to clean lists through AI?

Here are some AI tools that can assist in email marketing list cleaning:

• ZeroBounce
  ZeroBounce is an all-inclusive solution for email verification and list cleaning, specifically crafted to assist businesses in upholding a clean and good quality email list. Its array of features and services is geared towards enhancing email deliverability, boosting open rates, and overall success in email marketing endeavors. 
  • ZeroBounce’s central functionality lies in its email verification service. Harnessing AI and real-time verification, it meticulously assesses the authenticity and accuracy of every email address within your list. It excels in recognizing and removing invalid , disposable, temporary , and role-based email addresses.
  • ZeroBounce offers the capability to augment your subscriber data, enriching your email list with details like names, genders, and locations. This enriching process empowers you to craft personalized and tailored email marketing campaigns.
  • Beyond its primary role of verifying individual email addresses, ZeroBounce provides an array of list cleaning services. These services encompass the removal of duplicate email addresses, identification of spam traps, and the detection of abusive email entries.
  • ZeroBounce offers a versatile API solution that enables seamless integration of their email validation and list cleaning services directly into your web forms, applications, or email marketing platforms, facilitating real-time verification processes.
  • ZeroBounce’s data enrichment services help you to acquire additional insights about your subscribers. It has the capability to furnish details like social media profiles, job titles, and company names, facilitating improved segmentation and personalized communication strategies.
  • ZeroBounce also offers IP address validation to check the validity of the sender’s IP address.

How It Operates:

1. Upload Your List: Begin by submitting your email list to ZeroBounce’s platform. You have the flexibility to upload lists in multiple formats, such as CSV and Excel.

2. Verification and Cleaning: ZeroBounce employs advanced AI algorithms to meticulously assess your list. It scrutinizes each email address for validity, accuracy, and other elements impacting email deliverability.

3. Results and Reporting: Following the verification process, ZeroBounce provides you with an exhaustive report detailing the results. You can see how many email addresses were verified, how many were removed, and other insights.

4. Download Cleaned List: After the cleansing process, you can easily download your refined email list in your preferred format, ready for seamless integration into your chosen email marketing platform.

• Clearout
  Clearout is an email verification and list cleaning tool designed to help businesses maintain a clean and high-quality email list. It offers a range of features and services aimed at improving email deliverability, open rates, and overall email marketing success. Here are some details about Clearout:
  • Email Verification: It employs advanced algorithms to verify email addresses, checking for invalid, disposable, temporary, and role-based addresses. It also validates the format and syntax of each email.
  • Real-time Verification: Clearout offers real-time verification, allowing you to validate email addresses as they are collected through web forms or integrated into your applications and systems via API.
  • Duplicate Removal: Clearout helps identify and remove duplicate email addresses from your list, ensuring that you are not sending multiple emails to the same recipient.
  • Risk Assessment: The tool assigns a risk score to each email address, helping you identify high-risk addresses that may lead to delivery issues. High-risk addresses, such as catch-all domains, can be flagged for review or removal.
  • Data Privacy and Compliance: Clearout is committed to data privacy and compliance with regulations like GDPR. It ensures that your data is handled securely and in accordance with relevant laws.

How It Works:

1. Upload Your List: Start by uploading your email list to the Clearout platform. You can upload lists in various formats, including CSV and Excel.

2. Verification and Cleaning: Clearout’s algorithms process your list, checking each email address for validity, syntax, and other factors affecting deliverability.

3. Results and Reporting: After verification, Clearout provides you with a comprehensive report on the results, allowing you to understand the status of your email list.

4. Download Cleaned List: Once the cleaning process is complete, you can download your cleaned email list in your preferred format, ready for use in your email marketing campaigns.

Other Email List Cleaning Tools

• DeBounce: DeBounce offers bulk email verification services to clean and validate your email list. It provides real-time API integration and detailed reporting on verification results.
• Hunter: While primarily known for email address finding, Hunter also provides an email verifier using which you can examine the legitimacy of the email addresses occupying your list.
• Snov.io: Snov.io provides email list cleaning and verification services to identify and remove invalid or risky email addresses. It also offers list health monitoring.
• EmailListVerify: EmailListVerify uses AI algorithms to validate and clean your email list by checking for invalid, disposable, and temporary email addresses. It offers real-time verification as well.
• BriteVerify: BriteVerify, now part of Validity, offers real-time email verification services that can be integrated into your registration or signup forms to ensure only valid email addresses are collected.
• NeverBounce: NeverBounce is another tool that offers real-time email verification services to help you maintain a clean email list and reduce bounce rates.
• Verifalia: Verifalia is an email list cleaning and verification service that provides real-time verification and batch processing options. It checks for syntax errors, disposable emails, and more.

Steps of List cleaning through AI:

Cleaning your email list using AI involves several steps to ensure that your list is free from invalid, outdated, and risky email addresses. 

• Data Collection: Gather your email list data, including email addresses, names, and any other relevant information.
• Choose an AI Tool: Select an AI-powered email list cleaning tool or service that suits your needs and budget. Some of the tools mentioned above can help with this process.
• Upload Your List: Import your email list into the chosen AI tool’s platform. Ensure that your list is in a compatible format (usually CSV or Excel).
• Email Verification: The AI tool will use its algorithms to verify each email address on your list. This process includes checking for:
  • Syntax errors (e.g., missing “@” or “.” in the email address).
  • Domain validity (ensuring the domain exists and is active).
  • Disposable email addresses.
  • Temporary or one-time-use email addresses.
  • Role-based email addresses (e.g., “support@example.com”).
• Deduplication: The tool may automatically identify and remove duplicate email addresses from your list.
• Risk Assessment: Some AI tools assign a risk score to each email address based on its quality and deliverability. Addresses with high-risk scores (e.g., catch-all domains) may be flagged for further review or removal.
• Segmentation: Use the AI tool’s segmentation capabilities to categorize your list based on factors like engagement history, location, or other relevant criteria. This segmentation can help you tailor your email campaigns more effectively.
• Reporting: Review the AI tool’s reports and results to understand how many email addresses were validated, how many were removed, and to check for additional insights.
• Export Cleaned List: Once the cleaning process is complete, export the cleaned email list from the AI tool. Ensure that you save it in a format compatible with your email marketing platform.
• Update Your Email Marketing Platform: If you’re using an email marketing platform (e.g., Mailchimp, SendinBlue), update your email list within the platform to reflect the changes made during cleaning.
• Regular Maintenance: Schedule regular maintenance to keep your list clean and up-to-date. Depending on your email volume, this could be done monthly or quarterly.
• Compliance and Permissions: Ensure that you comply with relevant email marketing regulations (e.g., GDPR, CAN-SPAM). Moreover, make sure your emails are only delivered to those contacts who have explicitly consented to the same.

Conclusion

Email marketing list cleaning through AI is an indispensable practice for businesses seeking to maximize the effectiveness of their email campaigns. With the power of artificial intelligence, organizations can effortlessly identify and eliminate invalid, outdated, and risky email addresses from their lists, leading to a multitude of benefits.

As the digital world continues to evolve, harnessing the capabilities of AI for email marketing list cleaning remains a smart investment, propelling businesses toward higher ROI, enhanced customer relationships, and sustained growth in the competitive realm of email marketing.

The post Using AI for List Cleaning: All You Need to Know! appeared first on Email Uplers.

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. 

The post AI Email Automation- The Key to Optimizing Your Email Operations Like Never Before! appeared first on Email Uplers.

Generative AI is a subset of artificial intelligence, a broad field of computer science that focuses on creating intelligent robots that can carry out tasks that traditionally require human intelligence. While there are many different approaches to AI, it is an interdisciplinary discipline, and recent developments in machine learning and deep learning, in particular, are causing a paradigm change in almost every area of the tech industry. 

It should be mentioned that the technology is not entirely new. Chatbots first used generative AI in the 1960s. However, generative AI could not produce convincingly authentic photos, videos, or sounds of actual people until the invention of generative adversarial networks, or GANs, in 2014. GANs are a sort of machine learning algorithm.

Generative AI from time to time:

Early iterations of generative AI required data submission via an API or some other laborious technique. Writing applications in languages like Python required developers to get familiar with specialized tools.

Now, leaders in generative AI are creating improved user interfaces that enable you to express a request in straightforward words. Following a first reaction, you can further tailor the outcomes by letting us know the tone, fashion, and other characteristics you want the content to portray.

Some Generative AIs:

• Google’s Bard
• Microsoft’s Bing
• Open AI’s ChatGPT
• Apple’s AppleGPT (Yet to come)

Can Generative AI help you with Email Coding?

Generative AI systems can be used to generate email codes. However, the user’s expertise and the instructions they enter continue to impact that code’s accuracy and trustworthiness significantly. AI cannot read designs (PSD, Figma, In Design, Illustrator, PDF, etc.); it can only assist with instructions. 

Various ways AI is being used in Email Marketing:

• Optimizing subject lines and more
• Sending emails at the right time
• Writing relevant content for segmentation
• Perfecting email personalization
• Automating e-commerce emails 
• Replying to customer emails

How much time would an email developer save?

Reliability and accuracy are the questions: You’ll spend more time conducting quality assurance and fixing code than you would if you just did it yourself from scratch.  However, we can still see the use of AI in very specific areas, such as generating alt text for images in emails.

AI email development tools could help shorten the time spent on tedious, repetitive coding tasks. However, implementing a “component-driven email design system” is a more practical strategy for increasing productivity. In the future, educating AI on your design system could be a practical solution that reduces duplication of effort, fosters consistency, and enables non-coders to make email requests.

Component-driven email design system

Components: Components are reusable blocks of code that support particular use cases and allow you to switch between various styles for various brands quickly. The main distinction between components and code snippets or partials for email development is that if you modify a component, the changes are immediately reflected in all emails containing that component.

Email components could include:

• Headers
• Footers
• Buttons
• Rows
• Columns (for different layouts)
• Image placeholders

Tools for a component-driven email design system:

• Figma
• MJML
• Maizzle

Will AI in email be used for good or for bad?

There is no question that email AI has the potential to be both beneficial and harmful. The real question is how you and your business plan to use it. Avoid letting speed and cupidity impair your judgment. Consider how AI can improve email as you proceed slowly.

Are we developing machines/bots that will replace us at work?

Artificial intelligence is still very much in its infancy as it pertains to our daily lives. It will most likely become faster, smarter, and more sophisticated. 

Other email marketing skills have not become obsolete due to existing technology. A brand may use a drag-and-drop email editor, but if they truly want to deliver a distinctive campaign, they will require better coding skills than ChatGPT.

Experience with coding and the capacity to think creatively and experimentally will always be highly valued. It’s still too early to say whether AI will ever replace programmers. It’s best to consider AI as merely another tool to assist you in your work for the time being.

How Generative AI Systems are Changing Email Marketing?

1. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT create new content using substantial datasets and intricate algorithms. Generic artificial intelligence (GAI) could be applied to email marketing to generate subject line suggestions, write email copy, and even attempt to code emails.

2. Images, audio, and video are also produced using generative AI. And the technology can do it at incredible speeds.

3. You can ask it questions, and it will respond with original answers and not just paraphrases of other cited sources you can click through to read. It produces ‘original’ solutions. 

4. It understands ten languages, remembers your conversations, and picks up new information when you give feedback.

Benefits of generative AI:

1. One of AI’s biggest and most cited advantages is its 24/7 availability.
2. Reducing the effort of responding to emails.
3. AI not only works continuously, it scales almost infinitely.
4. Improved accuracy and reduced rate of error
5. Summarizing complex information into a coherent narrative.
6. Performs mundane and repetitive tasks.

Limitations of generative AI:

1. It does not always identify the source of content.
2. It can be challenging to assess the bias of original sources.
3. Skill loss in humans.
4. Quality and reliability issues.
5. Results can gloss over bias and prejudice.

Conclusion 

Generative AI can be a game-changer for email marketing, but it also requires responsibility and caution from email marketers. We hope this blog has given you some insights into generative AI and its impact on email marketing. We at Email Uplers offer end-to-end email marketing solutions for your brand at minimum TAT and hassle-free delivery. Do drop by to say hi! 

The post Generative AI & Email Marketing ~ Unveiling A Powerful Combination of Better Returns appeared first on Email Uplers.

I prefer Telegram, but WhatsApp works too. Having a conversation over email is sooooo 2010-esque.

The moral of the story? Email is underrated. Of course, that’s generally speaking. But why? Notwithstanding the building celebrity of AI email marketing, why is email viewed in such a light? 

Chad S. White, Head of Research at Oracle Marketing Consulting, and the celebrated author of five books on email marketing, holds the tech giants responsible for the general underestimation of email:

“…lots of very wealthy companies like to position their service or tool as email-killers—most famously, Facebook and Slack, but plenty of others, too. They say email is old, outdated, and hasn’t evolved to meet the needs of today’s consumers, especially the youngest ones. And there’s really no one to defend email, because it’s an open platform…”

White contends that the very wealthy companies are wrong. Indeed, email is the single most productive marketing channel in terms of revenue generation alone. Today, with AI thrown in the mix, email is, and should be, any informed marketer’s first pick. 

In this guide, we take an exhaustive look at AI email marketing, eyeing as we do its many facets relative to copy, design, workflows, and analytics. Let’s roll! 

• Understanding AI In Email Marketing
• How To Use AI In Email Marketing?
• AI For Copy: Email Body, Subject Line
• AI For Design: Templates And Coding
• AI For List Segmentation
• AI For Deliverability Testing
• AI For Hyper Personalization
• AI For Send Time Optimization
• AI For Email Analytics
• The Future Of Email Marketing With AI
• Wrapping Up!

Understanding AI In Email Marketing

Artificial intelligence simulates natural/human intelligence. One of the fundamental characteristics of human intelligence is pattern recognition. Our minds are designed to convert random inputs to ordered, coherent outputs. That’s how we make sense of the world around us, by formulating plausible narratives.

That’s exactly what AI, generally considered, does as well. 

An AI system assimilates trained data, analyzes the data to identify patterns, and uses those patterns to make decisions. That’s what ‘intelligence’ is primarily about – converting sound to music, so to speak, by identifying patterns within an entropic swirl of information. 

How does that work out in the context of email marketing? 

Let’s take one aspect of email marketing: email list segmentation. As we know, segmentation is the process of breaking up a list of subscribers according to their behavior, interests, and motivations. 

Manual segmentation is time-consuming as it may take months to comb through large, complex data sets, squinting for meaningful, actionable patterns. It is also highly error-prone. Equally, as your email list grows, you would need to design a separate model every time to handle the increase. 

To manage all this, you may need to hire a skilled data scientist, thereby incurring additional costs (freelance data scientists may charge up to $2000 per project), without necessarily being anywhere close to increased productivity and accuracy. 

Enter AI-based email marketing, which streamlines the segmentation process thus:

• Pattern recognition: Pattern recognition consists in clustering data points according to information derived from past representations. AI uses machine learning (ML) to identify patterns in customer data, and creates highly targeted, hyper personalized segments.
  
• Data management: Data is always changing. The emails you want to send out should be tailored to variations, such as change in subscriber email address, engagement patterns, shopping habits, etc. ML models handle and incorporate evolving data, continually validating and updating it to minimize errors, and to flush out obsolete customer intel.
  
• Automation: With the help of email marketing automation services, you can easily create email workflows, and set up automated triggers to reach out to the right segment with the right message at the right time. Marketers no longer need to hire expensive data analysts to help them deal with data.

That’s one small instance of how AI in email marketing helps marketers make efficient, accurate data-driven decisions. Let’s take a detailed look at a few more. 

How To Use AI In Email Marketing?

AI For Copy: Email Body, Subject Line

Generative AI tools such as Copy.ai, ChatGPT, Writesonic, etc. are some of the most popular copywriting tools at the moment. With varying degrees of sophistication, all these tools generate text according to user prompts. 

This is known as prompt engineering, or AI whispering. The more specific the prompt, the more granular the response. 

Here’s an example of a welcome email on Copy.ai. 

Needless to say, this is a brilliant output. However, there are limitations. For one thing, the copy is too long and dense. It’s also repetitive in parts. It lacks differentiation since it is not trained on new data, Get-Set-Grub being outside the database.   

The point of using the tool is that it gives a strong head start to the writing process. The right framework has been generated, and the copy can be tweaked to satisfaction. As far as differentiation is concerned, it’s usually more of a manual endeavor that is dependent on a keen, instinctive understanding of your brand. 

But you can, if you want to, add your brand voice on Copy.ai. The tool articulates the brand voice on the basis of a 50-500-word article, blog post, or mission statement of a brand. You can save the brand voice, and ask Copy.ai in any future prompt to generate a brand voice-optimized text. 

We fed the tool a 50-word mission statement of an email design service, and here’s how Copy.ai analyzed the brand voice. Next, you save the analysis, and integrate it into your future prompts. 

Let’s consider another copywriting tool, Writesonic. We provided the same input, and here’s what the tool came up with. 

The similarities are obvious. But, compared to Copy.ai’s response, this is shorter and simpler. The paragraphs are no longer than three lines, so there’s ample white space to provide visual relief to the user. Note also the sparse use of emoticons. Of course, the copy must be edited and made more human, personalized, and distinctive. 

Like the email body, you can also generate instant AI email subject lines. Consider the following list of Labor Day subject lines generated by ChatGPT 3.5 according to this instruction: “Compose 10 subject lines for a Labor Day email. Style: informal, funny. Keep your subject lines short, and to the point.”

Points To Remember:

• Be highly specific: Make sure your prompts are specific, elaborate, and contextually-relevant. The more specific your prompt, the better the response. (Refer again to the prompt that generated these AI email subject lines.)
  
• Converse, don’t command: Maintain a conversational tone, instead of feeding concise commands. Also, avoid using jargon, slang, and convoluted sentences.
  
• Don’t give up: Even after feeding highly specific instructions, the AI tool may not generate a satisfactory response. In that case, continue chatting with the tool, and try to coax more information out of it. You will notice that as the context develops, the responses become more granular, and relevant.
  
• Always fact-check: Remember that AI does not always generate factual responses. ChatGPT 3.5, for instance, does not have an updated database. In general too, don’t rely on AI for stats, figures, and graphs.
  
• Always edit: Don’t rest on AI-generated responses. Keep tweaking each response, and make it as distinctive and human as possible. 

AI For Design: Templates And Coding

AI-powered email marketing platforms like Sarbacane, MidJourney, Colormind, Postcards, etc. can generate beautiful email templates in no time. 

You don’t need coding skills to design your templates. The tools come equipped with a variety of pre-designed, customizable, and device-optimized templates for all kinds of emails. Take a look at the following Grandparent’ Day email template generated by Sarbacane. 

This email template is almost perfect. One of the cooler things about Sarbacane is that it generates templates on the basis of your website design. All you need to do is enter your website URL, and the tool will come up with brand-consistent templates. 

The tool is particularly useful for those who don’t have a team of designers at their disposal. It can also help expert designers to quickly get past the sluggish, preparatory phase, and jump straight into action. 
Let’s consider another AI-powered email marketing platform, Mailchimp. The following template from Alps & Meters was built using Mailchimp’s drag-and-drop email editor.

Image source

“The drag-and-drop feature allows us to quickly and easily rearrange different elements in the email,” says Nick Sapia, Chief Digital Officer at Alps & Meters. “We do a lot of experimentation to find what format works best, and once we find that, we save those as a template and we then can easily edit it from there.”

Designing custom email templates has never been easier. But as usual, AI works best under the guidance of trained users. In the case of design as well, domain experts will be more successful handling these tools. 

Points To Remember:

• Plan your rows: Depending on how much information you want to include in your email, plan how many rows you’d need in the template. The header and the footer will have one row each. The body may have many sections, which in turn may have many sub rows.
  
• Plan your columns: Determine how many columns you need for every row. Again, this depends on the complexity of your email. Take one more look at Alps & Meters’ template: the text and image section toward the end is divided into two columns. 
  
• Crop images: Make sure your logo and icons are cropped as closely to the border of the template as possible. Don’t keep any white space around your logo; you want it placed precisely where you need it placed. Any extra padding will create placement problems.
  
• Adjust padding: Finally, adjust the spacing between the content blocks, rows, and columns. Remember also to device-optimize the padding. Mobile padding will be different from desktop padding. 

AI For List Segmentation

Before the advent of AI, you could segment your contacts on the basis of demographics, time zone, contact details, and shared interests. However, in order to truly engage with your subscribers, you need more granular segmentation, so your emails can be tailored to dynamic personas, instead of static, lapsed ones. 

With the help of AI email marketing tools, you can have access to complex behavioral data, and create highly granular segments. 

Tools like Emarsys do predictive segmentation, so you can build campaigns on the basis of what your customer is likely to do next in their journey along the sales funnel. 

Emarsys offers a number of AI segment templates, such as predictive email engagement, predictive web engagement, predictive life cycle segments for customers and for leads, and predictive revenue. 

You can create relational segments, AI segments, web behavior segments, mobile engagement segments, and loyalty segments. Here is an illustration of AI segmentation in action. 

As you can see, the segment is named “Likely to engage – Email”. The template used is that of email engagement. 

Now you know which of your leads are most likely to engage, so you can tailor your emails to those leads, and maximize the chances of engagement, and eventually, conversion.

Points To Remember:

• Set a clear objective: Do you want to improve targeting precision? Increase conversions? Boost engagement? Enhance customer satisfaction?
  
• Collect quality customer intel: AI-driven segmentation thrives on quality data. Collect demographic, behavioral, and psychographic data in order to create highly personalized segments.
  
• Test your strategy: AI segmentation is not a one-time process. Data is on the move constantly. Test your segmentation strategy with different variables and segment objectives. 

AI For Deliverability Testing

Did you know that 11.1% of all emails never reach the inbox due to deliverability issues? Again, in 2020, 47.3% of emails sent during September were reported as spam. 

Deliverability continues to be a thorn in the side of email marketing. Fortunately, with the help of AI email marketing tools, the thorn can be successfully plucked. 

Take, for example, a tool like Unspam. Unspam notifies you if and when your IP address or domain name has been blacklisted, enabling prompt troubleshooting. It provides accessibility checks, so you know whether or not everyone can read your email. 

The tool also allows you to check for broken links in your email, so as to minimize spamming. The reverse DNS feature verifies your IP address in order to prevent it from getting blocked by ESPs. You can also verify your domain’s DMARC record. 

Here’s a sneak peek into how it looks in action. 

This is as granular as it can get. Depending on the status of each variable, you can troubleshoot any underlying bugs in your email, and ensure foolproof delivery. 

Points To Remember:

• Maintain list health: Before sending out your emails, make sure the email addresses on your contact list are active. AI-based tools like Neverbounce and Million Verifier can help you with that.
  
• Avoid spammy subject lines: Spam filters are highly sensitive to email subject lines. Consider dropping spammy words and phrases like ‘Free’, ‘Buy Now’, etc. Don’t overuse emoticons. Don’t write a subject line in All Caps. In the above example, you can see how Unspam has flagged the subject line.
  
• Include an ‘Unsubscribe’ option: Failing to include opt-out and unsubscribe links is punishable by law. The CAN-SPAM act requires companies to include “a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future.”

AI For Hyper Personalization

Personalization is old; hyper personalization is the new mantra. 

Hyper personalization allows marketers to integrate physical and digital channels through which a customer may interact with a brand. Their online behavioral data can be used to make personalized recommendations when they visit the store, and vice-versa. 

This will gradually translate into greater engagement, loyalty, and voluntary brand advocacy. 

With the help of AI, marketers can now use real-time customer data and advanced analytics to deliver highly targeted emails to customers. 

AI-based email marketing platforms like Optimove and Zeta Global can help you with that. From personalized and relationship marketing to personalized retargeting and real-time marketing, these AI-powered platforms are a veritable gold mine for brands looking to reinforce customer-led marketing.  

Zeta Global, for instance, is an omnichannel marketing platform that uses real-time customer intel to deliver hyper personalized experiences. 

The tool gives marketers access to rich user profiles replete with behavioral data, psychographic data, customer tendencies, motivations, interests, etc. Here’s an illustration of the same.

Points To Remember:

• Intelligent data collection: Given the extent to which AI platforms can “know” a user, it may be difficult to collect truly valuable data. Marketers should determine how far they need to know their customers, because for AI, the sky’s the limit. 
  
  So, instead of plunging headlong into complex data, identify your goals first. What are the questions you’re trying to answer? What issues are you troubleshooting? What solutions are you looking for? Having a crystal clear objective will help you extract valuable insights from your data.

• Personalized, not creepy: Personalization should never feel creepy or invasive. Marketers are often tempted to act on sensitive data, assuming that personalization is infinitely proportional to customer satisfaction. 
  
  The point of leveraging customer data is ultimately to create value for your customers. No matter how much you love data, as a marketer, your goal is to create and deliver value, and encourage a win-win situation for both seller and buyer.
  
  “Understanding who your customers are and what motivates them is what allows you to build a relationship and generate action. It enables you to migrate away from a generalized batch-and-blast approach to become hyper-individualized in your communication. Talking to them and not at them can make all the difference in your comms strategy,” says Caroline Droessler, email expert, Senior Director of Strategy at Zeta. 

AI For Send Time Optimization

Designing an email is only half the job. If it fails to reach the customer at the right time, it’s of no real use. 

So, what’s the best time to send an email? The jury is still out. In an age of hyper personalization, no generic answer will do. Indeed, the question can’t be answered, given that every subscriber is unique, and has their distinct engagement sessions. 

Without AI, all you have is your customer’s time zone and location data from their IP address.

However, your customer may not always check their inbox at the same time and from the same location every day. What if they’re abroad, and their time zone has shifted? Remember, once a user has subscribed to your newsletter, their time zone can’t be changed. 

For maximum engagement, you need to deliver each email at each subscriber’s personalized send time. At the same time, since your email will pass through spam filters, you need to make sure that there is minimum discrepancy between send time and delivery time. 

This is only possible with the help of AI. One of the most popular AI marketing automation platforms for send time optimization is Seventh Sense.

Seventh Sense works with Marketo to help businesses maximize engagement and deliverability by optimizing send times. 

First, Seventh Sense analyzes data in your Marketo instance on the basis of which the platform builds rich engagement profiles for every subscriber. Then, Seventh Sense uses machine learning to predict with great accuracy at what time a subscriber is most likely to engage. 

Seventh Sense is time zone-independent. With the help of AI and machine learning, the platform can deliver emails at the right time and at scale. Here’s another instance of Seventh Sense in action. In this case, the platform has been integrated into HubSpot’s CRM. 

Points To Remember:

• Prioritize accuracy: You want to send out emails to each subscriber at their time. Choose a platform that ensures maximum accuracy. 
  
  Of course, you can’t select the right platform without first trying dozens of them. We recommend going through reviews in order to make the right choice. 

• Pricing models: Tools using AI for email marketing are all differently priced. The prices vary according to the list size. For instance, for a list size of 0-1000 contacts, the average cost would be around $18 per month. For over 100K contacts, it may shoot up to around $420 per month. 
  
  Make sure to factor in your company’s budget while choosing an AI marketing automation platform. 

• User-friendliness: How user-friendly is an email marketing platform? Choose a platform that gives you maximum flexibility. It should be easy to use, convenient, and intuitive. 

AI For Email Analytics

The importance of analytics in email marketing cannot be overstated. 

Instead of relying on guesswork, AI-driven email analytics helps marketers make solid, data-driven decisions. The analytics dashboard is where you measure the performance of your campaigns, and according to data-driven insights, make necessary tweaks in your strategy. 

The benefits of analytics include improved targeting, better personalization, finer customer understanding, and eventually, higher ROI. 

AI platforms like Constant Connect, HubSpot, and Sprinklr provide excellent analytics and reporting. For instance, Sprinkler’s AI-powered Smart Insights feature helps marketers extract valuable insights from complex, unstructured data. Here’s an example of the same.

Sprinklr’s analytics tool comes equipped with over 7500 pre-configured queries to reduce the time spent in extracting insights. The platform has a list of curated queries gathered from social listening. 

So if you are not sure what exactly you must look for in your data, Sprinklr will provide you with the most relevant, pre-selected insights, giving you a head start. 

Mailchimp is another email marketing platform that’s great for analytics. You can track the number of emails sent, open rate, click rate, click per unique opens, unsubscribe rate, revenue, average order revenue, order rate, etc. 

You can also compare emails over time graphs, and view detailed email performance. You can have access to custom reports to get more information about the emails you sent. 

Points To Remember:

• Choose the right email marketing platform: It is important to remember that not all email analytics tools have the same degree of functionality. 
  
  Litmus’ email analytics, for example, has certain limitations. It can’t track subscribers who have disabled images on their email. For subscribers who use web-based email clients, Litmus can’t track when a particular recipient has stopped viewing an email. 

• Track the right metrics: Advanced analytics gives users highly granular data. But you may not need to track everything. 
  
  So, choose the right KPIs to track. In email marketing, these would include open rate, list growth rate, bounce rate, click through rate, conversion rate, and the number of unsubscribes. 

• Optimize your campaigns: Use the data to monitor and optimize your campaigns. The right email marketing platform can provide you with qualified, error-free campaign management services. 

The Future Of Email Marketing With AI

According to Statista, by 2025, email will see a whopping 4.6 billion users across the globe. 

In the past, we have seen the incredible stability of email amidst the rise and fall of many next-gen technologies. Notwithstanding the overarching dominance of so-called ‘email killers’, email has continued to thrive. And this trend is not going to shift anytime soon. 

“Email isn’t going anywhere. It’s going to continue being a primary broadcast channel for owned content. If anything, I could see it being even more important with the fall of social channels like Twitter,” says Karen Hopper, senior director, performance marketing, Bully Pulpit Interactive. 

Now, with the integration of AI into email, the digital marketing mix will continue to be defined by this one channel. According to Selzy, 50.7% of users prefer AI to non-AI approaches in marketing via email. 

As we have been seeing in this post, AI-based email marketing is multidimensional, attending to the different aspects of marketing, from personalization and segmentation to deliverability and reporting. AI tools will only get stronger, and more mature with time. 

Since email marketing is not likely to disappear from the scene, it remains to be seen how future AI integrations will transform the use of email in marketing, especially in relation to personalization, and user engagement. Here’s how Hillel Berg, email marketing expert, and founder of Hillel Berg Email Marketing, sees it:

“As AI technology advances, such personalization will likely become even more sophisticated, potentially diminishing its initial impact. Consequently, brands will need to explore novel ways to stand out in crowded inboxes if ultra-personalization becomes the standard.”

Wrapping Up!

Email marketing with AI is a revolutionary approach to connecting with and engaging customers. As AI continues to evolve, email marketing will grow in lockstep with it. 

If you think we’ve missed anything related to the use of AI in email marketing, let us know in the comments below. 

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