5 Ways AI Can Boost Your eCommerce Email Marketing

With practices evolving over time, one of the most advanced methods to boost engagement metrics nowadays is integrating AI into email marketing strategies. To put it simply, this implies relying on software to improve your email performance.

How Do Leading Brands Use AI in Email Marketing?

Virgin Holidays

Virgin Holidays is one of the biggest travel companies, selling more than a hundred million holiday packages each year.
When it comes to choosing the right subject line for their email marketing campaign, after struggling to find the perfect subject line, Virgin Holidays chose to use Phrasee, an AI-powered language generation tool. The AI took over the process, the subject lines were generated and tested automatically. This resulted in a 2% increase in sales, which translated to more than a million pounds.



Netflix

Netflix uses AI that reviews the data generated by sources, such as the watching list of the viewer. The recommendation engine analyzes this data and sends out the most relevant recommendations for individual users. This helps Netflix to increase subscriber engagement.



How Can You Make the Best of AI in Your Email Marketing Strategy?

1. Improved Segmentation

Given the volume of customer data that has to be kept organized, it becomes increasingly difficult for online marketers to maintain it and use it purposefully. AI easily screens your customers to obtain data relevant for segmentation. By recognizing the same demographics, geographics, or psychographics, and users with the same purchase behavior, AI categorizes them into segments. Improved segmentation can significantly enhance engagement metrics, since it allows you to send relevant content to respective target groups.

2. Building More Personalized Emails

Based on data concerning buyer personas, AI helps you create more personalized emails. AI tools use natural language processing to create more actionable CTAs and copy with relevant keywords. Given a sufficient amount of data, AI could determine the price points and products which are most likely to make a customer take the desired action. AI also provides recommendations on what keywords to use in the copy of your emails for maximum conversion potential.

Furthermore, AI helps you personalize images and placement of design elements. All of this creates a pleasant customer experience since customers receive the content they expect, while at the same time increases customer engagement.

3. Auto-Generated Subject Lines

We all know that enticing subject lines can do wonders for your email marketing. AI helps you predict how likely it is that customers will open your email based on a given subject line and it can provide suggestions on which subject lines would work best with your target audience.

Additionally, AI can ensure that your subject lines are in line with the tone and the language of your brand. Phrasee is an AI platform which helps you draft better subject lines based on your brand personality and past email metrics.

4. Determining Send Times

Send times of your emails are as important as their content. For that reason, you want to make sure to send emails at the time when your audience is most likely to open and read them. AI algorithms are built to pinpoint the time when your audience is most likely to open an email. AI can do this for each individual person. This makes it a lot easier for you to create a scheduling plan.

5. A/B Testing

A/B testing plays a crucial role in marketing. By comparing two different elements, A against B, you can generate data on what drives customer engagement and use it to your advantage. You can test subject lines, email copy, CTAs, email design, and visual elements. AI can make it significantly easier to analyze data obtained through A/B testing. It can increase the number of data and provide a deeper analysis of it. Furthermore, the comparisons may be broken down into components allowing for a more comprehensive analysis.

There is a number of tools which facilitate artificial intelligence in your email marketing strategy, MailChimp, Automizy, Drip, just to name a few. AI appears to be compensating for limitations regarding what humans can do.
Embracing AI in your email marketing is a safe way to overcome these limitations. By using the best of what AI has to offer, while continuing to adhere to the best practices in email marketing, you can be sure you will see a significant improvement in your email engagement metrics.

If you haven't incorporated AI into your email marketing strategy yet, now is the right time to begin doing so for better in-the-moment personalization – and, ultimately, sales.

Our email expert team in Essence of Email has it all in its hands. Let's grow your sales together.