AI in Email Marketing: 8 Key Tasks AI Can Optimize

As an email marketer, you've probably experienced one or more of the following:

• Staring at a blank screen, struggling to come up with original email ideas
• Having no clue when would be the best time to send an email campaign
• Trying to personalize messages for a large and diverse audience

You're not alone.

Fortunately, AI can now help you with many of these challenges - and more.

Savvy teams use AI in email marketing to personalize their messages at scale. It can help them create impactful content, drive engagement with predictive functions, and send effective campaigns while saving a ton of time.

If you want to level up your email marketing strategy with AI, you're in the right place. Here, you’ll find a comprehensive list of the best use cases for AI in email marketing.

Let’s take a look!

AI for Email Marketing: What It Can Do

To understand what AI can do for an email marketer, you need to familiarize yourself with the different branches of AI that can be applied in this area. AI technology uses machine learning (ML) and large language models (LLMs) to perform tasks such as understanding and creating written language, analyzing data, and making recommendations.

In short:

• Machine learning is a branch of AI that focuses on using data and algorithms to enable AI to simulate the way humans learn and gradually improve as they accumulate more knowledge.

• LLMs are learning algorithms trained on vast amounts of data to help with predictions, object categorization, natural language processing (NLP), and other advanced functions.

There are currently two main types of AI, generative AI and predictive AI:

• Generative AI uses data to create content, including text, images, and audio. With it, you can produce effective content for your email campaigns to improve open rates and engagement. It can also help you be more creative when ideating and writing email copy.

• Predictive AI helps predict outcomes. It analyzes thousands of data points, such as email behavior patterns and subscriber data. This can help you predict optimal sending times and identify highly engaged segments with the best content for them. This enables you to send the right emails to the right people at the right time.

Use Cases: What Email Marketers Can Do With AI

While AI is not ready to replace a capable marketer, it can help automate repetitive tasks, streamline processes, and provide unique insights based on big data.

However, some companies use the AI label as a marketing play to capitalize on the trend by making superficial AI claims. In reality, their tools use common if/else algorithms, not AI. Other AI products are simply not advanced enough to be useful or are only accessible to enterprise-level customers with huge amounts of data.

While vendors are constantly developing more robust AI tools, our research shows that AI is still best used for generative purposes, mainly creating content for your emails and brainstorming ideas. This is where you should start with AI before exploring more innovative use cases.

Let's explore each of the most common use cases for AI in email marketing so that you get a better idea of how AI can help with your email marketing efforts.

If you’re looking for the real deal when it comes to software features, we’ve analyzed more than 230 providers to come up with our top picks for the best email marketing software. Find your fit based on features, automations, integrations, and more.

1. Content Creation/Ideation

Content creation is the most widely adopted use case in email marketing and other software categories. The reason for this is quite straightforward: it works.

AI will help you brainstorm compelling subject lines, body text, calls to action (CTAs), and visuals. This allows you to focus on the bigger picture rather than spending time writing.

Most email marketing platforms have integrated content generation features into their workflow in some form. Helpful assistants will guide you in crafting unique campaign content and provide suggestions to improve your existing emails to match a specific tone or to make them more persuasive.

AI email marketing is not limited to email platforms. Standalone AI tools like ChatGPT and Copy.ai can draft excellent email copy for you in a matter of seconds.

Here’s the response we got when prompting ChatGPT to write a newsletter about our latest blog post:

Most of the time, you’ll need to fine-tune your queries or use follow-up questions to get the best results. The example above is a bit overly promotional and too formal, so we entered a follow-up prompt to get a more insightful, casual response:

With some trial and error, you can get an excellent email, or at least a solid idea to get you started on your own copy.

But there’s a lot more you can do when it comes to generating content with AI, including:

• Getting suggestions for A/B testing your subject lines or CTAs.
• Creating a newsletter from a blog post.
• Generating an entire email sequence based on a list of email topics.
• Asking for suggestions on how to make your email copy more persuasive.
• Asking ChatGPT to improve your email’s chances of landing in the inbox instead of the spam folder.
• Building an email marketing strategy based on your ideal customer profile (ICP) and desired business outcomes for the next quarter.
• Generating unique image banners for your broadcasts.

You can look up lists of example prompts for more inspiration. Regardless of which prompt you employ, you’ll need to proofread and fact-check the final result. AI tools are infamous for generating hallucinations and inaccurate information.

2. Personalization

Personalization in email marketing is no longer an option. It's a must! Thirty-three percent of marketers believe personalization to be the No.1 most important thing in marketing, and 74% say targeted personalization improves customer engagement with an average increase of 20% in sales when using personalized experiences.

AI tools allow you to go beyond the essential personalization of first and last names. They help you create emails that feel like they are speaking directly to each recipient.

MammyClub, an ecommerce site for children, wanted to improve their engagement through personalization. They were sending one-size-fits-all emails until they discovered ChatGPT.

According to E-commerce Germany, MammyClub used AI to analyze user data, including the child's age and gender. It could then generate personalized email for each subscriber, recommending the most relevant products. This resulted in an increase in conversions and audience loyalty.

ChatGPT can also help you flesh out your buyer persona and hyper-personalize your emails.

To get started, use the example prompt below:

"You are an email marketing assistant with vast experience in creating targeted, effective campaigns.

The audience for this newsletter is [explain your ideal customer profile (ICP) in as much detail as possible, including demographic, firmographic, and behavioral data].

Use the email draft below and adapt it to this audience, suggesting the best [features/products/services] and the most effective CTA.

[Email draft]"

3. Timing Optimization

Determining the best time to send your email campaigns can be challenging.

Although there’s a ton of research on optimal email send times, these reports work with industry averages and might not reflect your audience’s behavior.

AI can track your actual audience's email engagement and when they're most likely to interact with your messages. It can correlate this data with email attribution numbers (revenue generated for each email) and devise a smart sending schedule.

Your emails will be sent to a custom-tailored schedule and frequency. This has the potential to improve open rates and return on investment (ROI).

The feature is available in some email marketing platforms as “predictive sending” or smart sending frequencies. It's a premium feature that usually requires previous contact data, so it’s best used in accounts with a history of sending emails. Essentially, the tool observes your subscribers’ habitual open times. You can then use that information to set an automation or one-time broadcast to go out at the most optimal time.

4. Automation

Email marketing automation helps you to automatically collect contacts and send out emails without having to manually press “Send.” For instance, you can set up a series of onboarding emails to be automatically sent to every new visitor who subscribes to your newsletter.

AI enhances automation by introducing more robust features, further saving you time and streamlining processes. Some email marketing and marketing automation platforms now offer AI automation builders. Similar to drafting emails using AI, this feature allows you to build automations using prompts. Long gone are the days of setting up exhausting multi-step journeys.

If you want to push the automation envelope further, you can use solutions like Zapier to sync your email system with ChatGPT and generate unique emails for each of your subscribers.

ChatGPT will automatically create unique emails for each person, and the email tool will send them at the right trigger in the automation.

Imagine signing up for the newsletter of an ecommerce brand selling dog food. Instead of receiving a generic welcome email, subscribers will get a hyper-personalized message about their dog’s breed and the best food for them. The best part is you don’t have to write 200 emails for every dog breed because ChatGPT will create them for you on the go.

5. Segmentation

Launching email blasts to your whole audience rarely works. Sending promos for women’s merchandise to male subscribers will most likely result in a quick unsubscribe or, even worse, a spam report (unless you are targeting men who buy gifts for women, for example). The point? You need to segment your audience.

AI-based segments are nothing short of magical. They allow you to effortlessly group your customers based on intelligent insights, which increases the likelihood of engagement and conversion.

Like regular segments, the more information you can obtain about your customers, the better. To build a cohesive user profile, you must collect as many data points from as many sources as possible. The key is in the volume of quality data you have.

AI segmentation can take it from there. Some email marketing platforms offer AI-suggested segments. Other tools, like analytical and business intelligence platforms, can be plugged into your customer database. They use cluster analysis, ML algorithms, and rule engines to separate customers into similar groups. These segments can be later synced or exported back to your email platform, where you can message them. Note that you need to have a large number of subscribers to ensure accurate data here.

Consulting firm Insight Falcon used AI-powered segmentation and personalized service offers for the health tech industry, resulting in a 63.5% email open rate (considerably higher than the standard benchmark for cold email). The dataset is relatively small but still demonstrates the effectiveness of AI segments.

Some platforms focus on specific use cases like churn prediction and allow you to create AI segments of people most likely to churn.

Regardless of your solution, it’s best to approach AI segmentation cautiously. Algorithms are not perfect, and you can’t entirely rely on them when emailing your audience. The risk here is that you don’t have control over the specific filters or conditions that build up the segment.

We recommend that you:

• Manually scan the segment and check a few random contacts to see if they match the criteria you seek before sending the email.
• Avoid using AI segments for transactional emails and any other mission-critical messages (email confirmations, password reset, order invoices, etc.), where mis-segmentation of one person can lead to terrible outcomes for them.

6. Dynamic Content

Traditional dynamic content in email marketing depends on if/else rules and email merge tags to serve different content to different segments. In contrast, AI adopts a more advanced method by using big data patterns to display the most relevant content to the right audience.

With predictive AI content, you can serve emails based on user preferences and the likelihood of opening them. In more practical terms, this means that you design a set of variants and let the AI display the best one for each audience.

Product recommendations in the ecommerce field are a common use case for dynamic AI content in email, where an AI personalization engine displays and A/B tests the most relevant products for each person.

7. List Cleaning

A clean email list is the backbone of any successful email strategy. It helps you maintain good deliverability, improves your email-sending reputation, and ultimately helps you avoid email spam filters. That can ultimately lead to better engagement and more sales.

Standard list cleaning tools rely on techniques like email verification, which involves putting email addresses into one of three buckets: valid, risky, or invalid.

AI email cleaning can do that and much more to help you maintain a good list.

AI employs algorithms that constantly learn and evolve using live feedback. It tracks patterns such as what types of emails are most likely to bounce, whether it’s a soft or hard bounce, and whether the domain name is still active, among other factors.

It can also tap into the makeup of your contact list and analyze delivered emails, opens, and reads to suggest which contacts will most likely end up inactive, stale, or dead. Note that this email marketing technology is still in its earliest stages. As such, the outcomes of these technologies have not yet been well-validated.

8. Anomalies Detection

Sophisticated email marketing and email infrastructure tools rely on big data to detect unusual or risky patterns that can negatively impact your deliverability.

Internet service providers (ISPs) and email inboxes constantly employ new methods to monitor email messages and often introduce new penalization methods. While this is great for email readers who want to avoid spam messages, it can have adverse effects on well-intentioned senders.

AI anomaly-detection tech can use multi-layered network monitoring to catch actions that might draw unwanted attention from ISPs and email clients such as Outlook, Gmail, etc. It examines outgoing messages to identify sub-optimal sending patterns, using ML to adapt to the complex and ever-evolving ISP monitoring and penalization methods.

This technology can help you avoid ISP blacklists with features such as email throttling - the platform paces and schedules email retries based on each ISP’s specific rules.

Some large email marketing platforms are already offering features like this. After all, they have billions of emails going out to help train their algorithms.

Making the Most of AI for Email Marketing

We've explored how AI will change email marketing by streamlining critical tasks such as content creation, personalization, timing optimization, segmentation, and automation.

You won't have to worry about staring at a blank screen wondering how to write a compelling email, stressing over the best time to send it, or struggling to create a targeted segment. AI can now handle these tasks for you - or at least make them much easier.

To elevate your email marketing further, we recommend checking our Best Picks and Comparison Tool, where you can dive into the specifics of different email marketing tools and select the best one for you.