How Big Data and AI Are Changing Email Marketing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has affected almost industries to a certain extent and digital marketing has seen significant developments powered by this innovative technology. In this industry, email marketing has also taken great strides in utilizing AI and Big Data to simplify and improve this outreach strategy.

There are many different tasks carried out by these cutting-edge technologies in email marketing. What are they? Here are the top 5 ways Big Data and AI are changing email marketing:

Email Optimization

Optimizing the emails that you send is essential for businesses that want their marketing strategy to succeed. Various factors need to be considered in email optimization that contribute to a successful marketing strategy.

The most important ones are email deliverability, content creation, and performance monitoring. Each one of these factors can be aided and simplified with AI and Big Data solutions in the following ways:

Email Deliverability 

AI can contribute to email deliverability in more ways than one but the most common method is through personalization. Mail service providers generally filter through any email marketing content and categorize them, respectively.

In that process, emails sent to large email lists entailing one and the same content can easily be categorized as spam. AI personalization limits the chances of this happening because each email has different content than the other.

Email Content Creation

Big Data has revolutionized the way customers perceive email marketing content creation. With this technology, you can meaningfully engage with each individual customer on your email marketing list.

By gathering data relative to the customer personas you are targeting, it will be easier to create content that resonates with the target market. You can send exclusively personalized content to each customer on the list without facing much trouble gathering the data needed to do so.

Performance Monitoring

With AI-powered technologies, it will be much easier to monitor the progress of the email marketing strategy. There are tools that are powered by AI that can track the progress and growth of your overall strategy.

The AI-powered tools will monitor KPI metrics like the open, click-through, conversion, bounce, and unsubscribe rate. All these metrics can help determine the success of the email marketing campaign.

The results of using AI technologies in this capacity will result in more efficient emails that fit the requirements of the business.

By serving customers with the content they need, businesses can get higher conversion rates that will increase revenue. You can also identify early on when the marketing strategy you are implementing is not doing well.

Enhanced Personalization

 

Although email personalization is one of the most efficient techniques to meaningfully reach customers, it can be quite challenging to implement. AI can come to your rescue and try to simplify this email marketing strategy by providing various solutions.

From analyzing customer behavior and determining what interests them to establishing the correct words to include in the subject line, AI can do it all. There are some AI tools that help users develop and personalize subject lines and even the content included.

Adobe Campaigns can help business owners and marketers identify the best images to include in an email. The tool analyzes how the user has interacted with similar images in the past using 3 million references.

Afterward, you will get recommendations on how to adjust the photo for a heightened engagement rate. If you are running a campaign marketing outdoor gear, AI can help with determining which color tent would be perfect for what type of buyer persona.

You will then send the exact content each one would like to see and your click-through rate and efficacy of the call to actions used in the email will reflect through the improved figures.

The whole marketing strategy is data-driven and provides insight that can be sourced nowhere without the help of AI. It enables businesses to send relevant emails that will spark the interest of each individual recipient on the email list.

The personalization is quite comprehensive and targets customers individually instead of larger groups. AI personalizes each email sent by the business, leading to a higher conversion rate because of meaningfully engaging with the target audience.

Therefore, implementing AI-powered solutions give you inside information on what they like and how they prefer their emails to be delivered. That is all the information you need to successfully engage with the maximum number of customers possible.

The AI technology used for this purpose is similar to the one used by Spotify and Netflix for movie and song recommendations. It assesses customers’ behavior and tries to establish a pattern to offer advanced recommendations that the audience would like to see or read.

Improving Relevance

Being relevant is the key to any digital marketing strategy and, more especially, an email outreach campaign. If you do not offer relevant content in the way customers expect, the entire email marketing strategy will be a waste.

That requires you to be always on your toes to learn about the latest industry trends that can help businesses keep up with the constant changes facing email marketing.

Right now, the greatest advantage you have as a business is having insight into user preferences. Therefore, you can use these preferences to draft up emails that will successfully reach the targeted audience. You can maintain relevancy using Big Data to know what customers are talking about and what products are currently trending.

That data can then be used to market similar products that you supply to potential customers. If that trend has gone viral, users will not hesitate to buy the product marketed to them by you. Big Data technologies allow you to start detecting what is relevant in your respective industry early on.

That gives you ample time to plan a successful strategy to create content interesting enough for the target audience. For example, if a particular sneaker trend is starting to gain momentum, you will gain insight into what type of sneakers are growing more popular.

Afterward, you can then look at your product range for those sneakers and start sending out email offers to people interested in that trend.

Simple AI can also help you determine what customers are searching for by identifying the keywords they are using. If one of the trending keywords fit the business’ niche, you can start planning an email marketing strategy around it.

It could be product offers or link to a full article on the business’ blog depending on the keyword itself and its relevance to the company. Businesses can maintain their relevancy using AI and Big Data and by listening to customers’ conversations on social media and search engines.

Second chance marketing

“Second chance marketing is one of the greatest email marketing tactics to be implemented on leads that have grown cold.” – says Mia Hoffman, marketing specialist at twiftnews.

For example, if a user loads up their cart and abandons it before checking out, that is the perfect opportunity to do second chance marketing.

E-Commerce businesses can gather data on the previous search history of the user and then use it to compile a comprehensive list of things the cold lead might like. Using Big Data to govern your second chance marketing strategy is one of the most effective methods to get a positive response.

For example, if you are pursuing cold leads and decide on using the exact same product type they bought, that will lead to unfruitful outcomes.

Probably the customer only needed that item once and does not need to make recurring purchases. Rather, marketing other products that will interest the recipient can be the most successful method.

How does big data fit in the picture?

Analyzing customer behaviors of other clients that fit the persona of the cold lead can help you reach a breakthrough. That is where Big Data comes in; it makes it easier to filter through all the information and determine a spending pattern.

Once that spending pattern has been identified, it can be used to implement second chance marketing to customers that fit the relative personas.

You can also send the contents of the cart to recipients that did not check out and ask what went wrong. Open the platform for open discussion by conducting a brief survey on their experience and remind them to check out whenever it is convenient for them.

You should also include a direct link to the cart to offer users an opportunity to check out again. For example, a fashion eCommerce shop uses both these second chance marketing techniques. It sends a reminder when customers have abandoned their carts and try to isolate products that would make cold clients convert back to them again.

Send time optimization 

The goal is to reach customers when they are free and have time to consume the content you are sending to them.

Failure to do so will result in unread emails that are later deleted without even being read. Over the years, email marketers have determined that the time they send emails has an impact on their open rate. That has made it important for email marketers to closely monitor the time zones of their prospective customers.

For example, sending an email when the target audience is at work can result in a lower open rate. Similarly, sending an email when the audience is using their phones can help boost this outreach strategy. If you have international customers, this can be a problem because their time zones are not synchronous.

The solution to that problem has been segmenting the subscribers you have according to different time zones and sending the email then. Although that has been the most practical and functional method, Machine Learning has even better ideas. You can send emails individually and not to a subscriber group that has been segmented by time zones.

That makes it possible to engage with the target audience at the exact time they are free to do so. You can send each email according to when the recipient is most likely to open and read it. The approach has a higher success rate because it is custom-made for each individual and not just one large group with different schedules and circumstances.

Benefits of Send Time Optimization

When the targeted audience receives a notification of the email you have sent with their devices on-hand, the odds will favor that inbox being opened. Whereas if you send an email when a phone is on mute or if it is in a locker room at work, it might lead to lesser possibilities of being opened.

Instead of the email being opened, the recipient might opt to remove the notification my marking the mail as read or deleting it. Send Time Optimization ensures this does not happen by indicating when the target audience is using their phones.

The ultimate results are higher revenue caused by the improved click-through rate that exposes customers to the enticing marketing material you have prepared.

Final thoughts

AI and Big Data have greatly impacted email marketing by making personalization more easily accessible to smaller businesses. You can also optimize the time of sending emails individually instead of grouping your lists by time zones.

Businesses also now have the ability to market to cold leads using second chance marketing. Another useful application of AI is monitoring the progress of the overall strategy to see whether it needs improvement. Also, AI improves the relevance of the content created and shared using email marketing means.