We often get asked if we use ChatGPT in our email marketing campaigns. (This question is becoming more frequent as major ESPs rush to release their own versions.) Despite the proliferation of genAI, I think the answer is simple. I don't use it in my content except to generate ideas or use it as a basic starting point. .
The final content generation will make your team's creative thinking much more sophisticated and empathetic to your audience's needs. That being said, there are three distinct ways we recommend leveraging AI in your email marketing, and they're not new.
- Optimization of transmission time.
- Personalization/Segmentation.
- Product feed recommendations.
Let's take a closer look at each one along with the steps required to perform them properly.
Dig deeper: How email marketing is changing: Take this master class
Optimization of sending time
Send time optimization is a relatively underused technique that helps email marketers set the right weeks, days of the week, and times to send messages. These can be set in several ways.
- Identify appropriate transmission times for each individual subscriber.
- Adjust overall message time based on performance data.
Another element of send time optimization is more than just when to send your emails.It's whether or not Send email. His AI product at Salesforce, Einstein, has a particularly good audience saturation algorithm that identifies subscribers who are at risk of over-communication and those who could use more communication.
A great example of an already available (and perhaps underutilized) email AI capability is the ability to build complex decision trees that automatically optimize send times for each consumer. Email Her marketers can use Her AI to find moments and intervals that maximize a user's individual engagement.
Learn more: Email marketing strategy: A guide for marketers
audience segmentation
Audience segmentation can take many forms, including demographics, geography, psychographics, family status, affinities, and existing and prospective customers. The more discrete the segments, the more customizable the message can be.
For example, a CPG cheese brand might send a recipe for nachos to soccer fans in their 20s or a recipe for grilled cheese sandwiches to parents of young children. With the right data (which we'll get to in a moment), you can easily build dynamic audience segments in almost any ESP.
A great audience segment's best friend: A strategic welcome journey that brings rich data for deeper personalization early in the subscriber relationship.
Learn more: 4 ways to add personalization to your emails today
Product feed recommendations
Whether your brand is CPG or e-commerce, there are ways to personalize your emails to make them especially relevant to each user. Examples include:
- Product recommendations (based on purchase, viewing, and abandonment history).
- Replenish your reminders.
- Tips and tricks for using the product.
- Recipes customized to user preferences.
- Local sales or partner discounts on CPG products.
- etc.
At the beginning I said these are not new, but this is really it's not. Amazon was an early adopter of this technology over 20 years ago.
Another interesting way to experiment with AI is to explore the product feed recommendation feature available within ESP and measure the engagement and conversion benefits of automating the email component.
Dig deeper: 6 essential but underutilized email marketing automations
Prepare your email program for AI
To get good results from the above efforts, you need to prepare your company on two fronts: data cleanup and email templates.
The first step always goes back to the data. Make sure your data is clean and filtered, and collect the kind of information you need to enable advanced segmentation.
Next, you'll need to improve your email template to feature live text and dynamic elements, such as reward points earned or membership status. Image-based emails don't have custom fields, which quickly limits your personalization options. I love using content block templates in my email designs to streamline the creation of dynamic, hyper-personalized emails.
The benefit of these preparation steps is that you don't need the AI features mentioned above to benefit from them. Even if your AI is slow to play, it's better to start preparing now.
Get the most out of AI-driven features in your email program
While we currently recommend using ChatGPT on a limited basis in your email campaigns, steps to develop your AI capabilities and campaign architecture will help you set up ChatGPT for use when it becomes more viable. will help you.
By addressing the above use cases, you'll see immediate results for your campaigns and build a foundation for incorporating more AI technologies in the future. Through today's personalization efforts, you can learn more about your audience, have richer data at your fingertips, and help you take advantage of future AI options.
Dig deeper: From campaigns to conversations: The future of email marketing
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The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.
