Today’s consumers are bombarded with email marketing campaigns and promotions.
With so many communications reaching their inboxes daily, consumers are forced to decide which messages are worth their time, and which are sent straight to the trashcan… and the deciding factor is usually personalization (or lack thereof).
The growing preference for personalization over generalization is why tailored email marketing is no longer considered a “bonus” for consumers — it’s an expectation that can make or break someone’s experience with (and perception of) your eCommerce brand.
So, how can your eCommerce brand elevate its personalization efforts to meet the needs of today’s consumers?
You leverage artificial intelligence (AI).
AI-Powered Personalization Strategies
Using AI to support email personalization enables brands to streamline and optimize their efforts, from quickly analyzing customer data and segmenting audiences to crafting hyper-personalized messages and leveraging predictive analytics.
Here are a few specific ways AI can transform your brand’s email personalization efforts from a manual, time-consuming process into a scalable, data-driven strategy.
Analyzing Customer Behavior and Purchase History
AI tools can analyze your customer’s behavior, interactions, and past purchases, using real-time data to determine less obvious customer preferences and trends. By tracking (and leveraging!) these AI-powered insights, your eCommerce business can create highly tailored email content that resonates and increases the likelihood of conversion.
Example Tools → HubSpot, Twilio Segment, Xineoh
Dynamic Content Generation Based on User Preferences
AI tools can also generate data-driven dynamic content, allowing your eCommerce brand to enjoy the ease of templated emails while leveraging tailored, unique dynamic content at the same time. These AI tools can help create unique, highly appealing dynamic content such as personalized product recommendations and location-based offers.
Example Tools → Klaviyo, Optimove, Insider
Predictive Analytics for Sending the Right Message at the Right Time
AI tools can use predictive analytics to determine the best send times too, ensuring the right content reaches the right person at the right time. AI tools can also analyze engagement patterns and make strategic changes to boost open rates, such as scheduling emails when users are most likely to open and interact with them.
3 Benefits of Using AI in Email Marketing
Using AI in email marketing can offer eCommerce brands many benefits such as saving time, streamlining operations, and better integrating data into campaigns. However, there are three benefits of using AI that eCommerce brands wanting to succeed with email marketing will find especially enticing!
1. Increased Open and Click-Through Rates
AI can significantly improve your email open and click-through rates by using historical data to create highly personalized subject lines, email copy, and offers. And, research shows emails with personalized content — especially subject lines — are 26% more likely to be opened!
2. Improved Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty
Studies show that 3 in 4 customers feel “frustrated” when the content and offers they receive aren’t relevant to them. That’s because customers feel seen, heard, and valued when they receive highly relevant emails — which AI-powered, data-driven personalization can support.
3. Stronger Use of Data in Decision-Making
Did you know A/B testing can improve conversion rates by 49%? AI tools that leverage predictive analytics and historical data analysis can help you optimize your brand’s email marketing efforts, making improvements with data-driven strategies like A/B testing.
Email Marketing Platforms with Built-In AI
Whether you already have a tried-and-true email marketing platform or are in the market for a new one, several email marketing platforms have built-in AI capabilities to help you succeed.
1. Klaviyo
Klaviyo — DIDO Agency’s preferred email marketing platform! — offers brands a wide range of AI capabilities, including predictive analytics, product recommendations, generative content and responses, A/B testing, and more.
2. HubSpot
HubSpot’s AI – called Breeze – offers brands several tools for email marketing (and beyond) such as conversational AI, analytics and data enrichment, workflow automation, generative AI for content creation and writing, and more.
3. Mailchimp
MailChimp uses Intuit Assist for AI, offering users AI-powered features like automated campaign generation, lead generation, customer journey targeting, generative AI for writing and editing, data-driven suggestions and analytics, and more.
Challenges of Using AI in Email Marketing
Using AI in your brand’s email marketing efforts can be beneficial in many ways… but that doesn’t mean it’s not without its own set of unique challenges, too.
One of the main challenges of using AI in email marketing is the consumer’s concern about ethics and data privacy. Research shows that 68% of consumers are concerned about online privacy, with 57% saying AI poses a “significant threat” to that fragile sense of privacy.
This consumer hesitancy perfectly illustrates the importance of adhering to email marketing regulations and transparent data protocols. A strong commitment to protocols like GDPR and CAN-SPAM can ease your customers’ minds about the safety of their data and privacy (but you should be following these protocols, anyway!).
Looking Ahead: The Future of AI in Email Marketing
The industry’s current AI tools are revolutionizing email marketing by making data-driven hyper-personalization achievable at scale… but the future of AI in email marketing is even more promising. Over the next few years, eCommerce brands can expect AI tools to become even stronger, with more sophisticated algorithms and capabilities for better email marketing.
However, it’s important to remember that with great power comes great responsibility. eCommerce businesses must find a way to balance AI-drive personalization, consumer concerns about protection and privacy, and relevant regulations and protocols, too.
Despite the balancing act required for your eCommerce brand to leverage AI, one thing is for certain:
Using AI in email marketing is a promising path forward — and it’s only getting better.