AI in Email Personalization — Tailor Content for Every Subscriber

AI in Email Personalization — Tailor Content for Every Subscriber

Last updated

Are your email open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates low? Do you find it hard to stand out in a noisy customer’s inbox?

No matter how good your products or services are, they won’t sell well if consumers don’t find personal value in them. That’s where you need a channel to share your compelling messages. It’s email marketing.

Although email campaigns are among the most effective communication tools, they can still fail to provide the desired engagement. Why? The reason for that is that most emails seem generic and too salesy. How do you encourage people to at least open them and read, let alone click the included link? The answer is “with the help of email personalization and artificial intelligence.”

You may manually or automatically insert recipients’ names into subject lines. However, this is just the tip of a bigger AI email personalization iceberg. Plus, as the amount of customer data continuously grows, managing this personalization manually can be impossible.

In this article, we’ll share strategies for engaging different subscribers on a personal level through marketing campaigns, creating more meaningful relationships, and significantly outperforming generic blasts.

Understanding AI Email Personalization

AI email personalization is an approach where email marketers employ AI tools, big data, machine learning, and other related technologies to dynamically customize email content for each recipient. What does it mean to “customize”? It entails that user behavior, preferences, and browsing history influence what email content the person sees.

Let’s assume there is a sales prospect. This person has changed their job and posted this information on LinkedIn. Your sales team might utilize an AI tool to run through their profile, automatically update the email template, and congratulate them on their new position. While it may not directly boost sales, it can establish a rapport between the prospect and your representative.

In short, a personalized email is relevant and timely; it looks like it came from a real person.

Transforming Email Campaigns with AI

AI lets the marketing team process larger datasets that were impossible to analyze before. At the same time, writing relevant messages doesn’t take as much time as it could without AI tools. Thanks to AI, traditional, static email strategies become dynamic and adaptive.

Here’s how it fundamentally changes the personalization email marketing landscape:

For instance, AI tools analyze past open rates and user engagement to generate personalized subject lines. Whether you’re an online store or a streaming service like Netflix, AI can pick the offers and messaging likely to appeal to the target audience.

But it’s not only about emails. AI can enhance a customer journey, from landing on the website to interacting post-sale. Each stage requires a different approach. AI software can teach marketers what content serves better at which point, be it a welcome discount right after registration or re-engagement prompts after periods of inactivity.

AI is also indispensable for predictive analytics. Accumulated data can tell a lot about how a consumer might behave in the future based on previous actions. By uniting the information from all the tools, AI allows for integrating multiple channels and getting a 360-degree customer view.

The best part is that AI can’t become outdated. Powered by ML, it continually learns from customer interactions, feedback, and other data points. The only responsibility is to check the data quality the system consumes to avoid irrelevant, biased, and offensive information to pile up.

Why Personalize? The Compelling Benefits of an AI-powered Email Marketing Tool

Have you noticed that you’re spending increasingly more time on Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok? One main reason is that social media rely on AI algorithms to suggest personalized content that will most likely interest you. Imagine the same systems work for you in crafting emails, boosting brand loyalty, and driving up lifetime value.

Personalizing emails is a really successful tactic. Email campaign segmentation alone has the potential to boost revenue by up to 760%. While there’s a growing demand for transparency regarding using data, people share their detailed information with brands for targeted emails.

In December 2021 and January 2022, Statista conducted a study among various consumers, including those from the USA. 49% of Americans who responded stated that they would “definitely likely” or “somewhat likely” quit using a brand if it didn’t personalize their experience. The nation is among the most conscious ones, as Singapore has 81% of such replies, followed by Brazil and Colombia with 80% and 76%, respectively.

Image credit: Statista

As you can see, now is the best time to start personalizing your emails if you want to significantly increase eCommerce conversions, retention, and engagement. Moreover, this strategy works well for SaaS and a range of other business types.

Sending Personalized Emails: A Step-by-Step Guide

Implementing AI email personalization requires a systematic approach. How do you go from staring at a blank screen to firing off powerful marketing emails? Let’s overview the best practices to follow.

Step 1: Identifying the Right AI Tools and Platforms

A strong personalization strategy hinges on the right tools. Whether they rely on web scraping for data collection or GPT-3 for generating an email subject line, you need to make sure they can seamlessly integrate with your current tech environment, are user-friendly for all team members, and bring a good return on investment. Here are five popular AI platforms for crafting personalized cold emails, for example:

However advanced, AI still requires manual reviews, adaptation to your needs, and content refinement.

Step 2: Integrating AI with Existing Email Marketing Software

Now that you’ve picked the best software, you need to connect it with your current tools. For the content to be as personalized as possible, the solution should establish a bidirectional connection with other tools, including:

Step 3: Developing a Data-Driven Approach to Segment Audiences

After syncing the AI tool, you can proceed to audience segmentation. Collect as much data as you can during this stage. What did customers tell you when they signed up or updated their profile? Use every opportunity to gather crucial segmentation data.

For example, you can customize the email subscription form to require not only an email address but also a first name, last name, occupation, and company. However, don’t overcomplicate your forms. It’s important.

Other sources of information could be:

Cocofloss, a store selling dental health products, offers a quiz on its website. The information will be useful in crafting a dedicated email campaign for each prospect.

Screenshot taken on the official Cocofloss website

That’s what you see at the end of the quiz, “Share your email to create personalized recommendations for a sparking smile!” Sounds very interesting.

Screenshot taken on the official Cocofloss website

I left my email address and received the following email. There was a welcome message, a special discount, and links to corporate Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.

Screenshot taken from the newsletter from the official Cocofloss website

Make sure the AI system gets better with time. Feed it with new data and analytics so your messages remain relevant as trends and preferences change.

Step 4: Designing Emails with Personalization in Mind

Information is collected. The email platform has synchronized with your tech ecosystem. What’s next? Let’s draft AI personalized emails. Consider these tips for effective email marketing personalization:

Align Emails with the Buyer’s Journey

Create a buyer journey map and start with outlining strong brand personas. As each stage calls for different approaches, set up automatically triggered emails for each one on the purchasing process.

New subscribers need a welcome sequence to engage with the brand and understand its value to stay with the company longer. On the other hand, existing customers will benefit from emails composed based on their data on past purchases, offering additional products or services.

That’s where you can use free ChatGPT, one of the leading AI writing tools. Suppose you own a fitness app. Ask ChatGPT to generate a welcome email for new subscribers who sign up for the app. Make sure it includes a personalized greeting based on the time of day they sign up and a special offer for their first month.

Use Behavior Triggers

Whether a person does something on the website or achieves personal or product-related milestones, marketing automation can come in handy. Schedule emails for certain purposes, such as:

Your ChatGPT prompts may look like this: “Create an email template congratulating a user for completing a 30-day challenge in a wellness app. Suggest they share their achievement on Instagram with a personalized hashtag.”

Leverage Dynamic Content

It means designing such emails that adapt to individuals based on their behavior or demographic data. This could involve showing different products, offers, personalized images, or GIFs to catch the attention.

Display a company’s logo to make the email more recognizable. It’s also one of the great ways to improve the click-through rate and avoid spam filters. Craft the email subject line and body as though they were letters from/to a friend.

A case in point is Stitch Fix. The service is all about using recommendation algorithms and data science to offer customers tailored selections. Once in a while, it sends such picks and adjusts them according to new variables.

Screenshot taken from the newsletter from the official Stitch Fix website

Optimize Scheduling and Targeting

Emails should arrive at the right time when users are most likely to open them. Take into account when it’s the best time to send an email according to buyers’ habits, preferences, and time zones. For example, you could schedule your new subscriber’s email to appear at eight in the morning, assuming they check their inbox first thing in the morning.

Ensure Clear Next Steps

Email personalization strategies should be cohesive with your entire campaign. The link in the email that encourages recipients to click must work. As such, it should be relevant, clickable, and lead to the existing page. It would be great if the product you’re promoting is available and doesn’t go out of stock before the person receives the email.

Take care of security and eliminate doubts. Given the rise in phishing and spam, reassure users by maintaining a consistent design and clear, trustworthy communication in every email.

Here is what you may ask ChatGPT: “Compose an email for an online course platform that includes a clear call to action for learners to start a new course they showed interest in, with a direct link to a preview video on the course landing page.”

Step 5: A/B Testing Email Examples

Finally, you need to determine what makes personalized messages resonate and what doesn’t. Sometimes, minor email features like button color or wording can be a game changer and impact entire emails.

A/B testing helps uncover these roadblocks and opportunities. For example, if you employ cold email personalization AI, compare the performance of AI-written intros against those you write manually or standard generic intros.

Test only one variable at a time to gain the most valuable insights. If you take too many components at once, it will be tough to determine what works and what doesn’t. Following the campaign, examine the data to decide which variation performed best in terms of engagement and conversion metrics.

Personalized Email AI: Common Pitfalls and Ethical Considerations

AI is a multi-purpose and potent solution for email personalization. However, it’s still a tool with a fair share of risks for you to carefully consider and address.

1. Privacy and Data Security Concerns

When you introduce AI into email marketing tools, you and your audience give consent to process sensitive details. How will the company, be it OpenAI or Lyne.ai, handle that data? It raises concerns among buyers, reducing their desire to disclose personal information.

Preventive measures: Use VPNs and comply with relevant regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

2. Over-Personalization and Intrusiveness

AI email personalization can often look creepy if it’s tied to extra details that the addressee didn’t knowingly share, potentially making people feel uncomfortable.

Preventive measures: Set clear guidelines for using AI and personal information. Allow users to choose what to share and what to hide.

3. Algorithmic Bias and Discrimination

These problems can arise when the data isn’t of high quality. AI algorithms utilize this, promoting stereotypes and offensive language, leading to discriminatory outcomes.

Preventive measures: Use representative and varied data to train AI models. Check the responses for bias and avert its escalation.

4. Technical Glitches and Misinterpretations

Like many other tools, AI can also make mistakes. From misinterpreting data to technical glitches, there are various risks. They can lead to misunderstanding and irrelevant recommendations, diminishing customer trust.

Preventive measures: Test and monitor emails before sending them and keep an eye on user responses and engagement metrics to quickly identify and rectify issues.

5. Dependency on Automation

If you employ AI too much, you can lose the essential human element in email communication. You still need human oversight and adjust the content to sound less robotic and more authentic. Moreover, you need to ensure the email’s tone of voice is in line with the overall brand voice.

Preventive measures: Preserve human supervision and enrich messages with anecdotes, personal experiences, or storytelling elements.

Personalization in Email: Conclusion

Email marketing is among the tried-and-tested strategies for promoting products and services, sustaining communication with prospects, and incentivizing them to make more purchases. AI has stepped into this sector, enhancing the capabilities of modern email platforms.

Experiment with AI. Re-engage subscribers. Choose an AI-powered email marketing platform or complement your current one with AI solutions and extensions. Improve your cold email templates, and let your email campaigns reach new heights.

Receive email design content like this to your inbox.

No spam. Just related email content.