Incorporating AI In Your Email Marketing Strategy: Does It Help Or Hinder?
Table of Content
In a few short years, AI has jumped from being a niche curiosity to the forefront of innovation across many sectors. Today, more and more businesses have adopted AI tools to direct customer inquiries, aid corporate communications, and analyse data.
AI has also proven itself to be a valuable asset to digital marketing campaigns, including EDMs. As email marketing has proven itself to be a lucrative and cost-effective customer retention strategy for a diverse array of businesses, incorporating AI into EDM strategy development and rollout may be able to further reduce the time and cost investments into your company’s EDM campaigns.
But because AI is still cutting edge, there’s the danger of falling into unseen pits – like poor research, having your marketing emails lack your brand voice, or allowing hackers to infiltrate client data through access to your private emails. And yet, AI is here to stay, so rather than completely turning your email marketing strategy over to AI, our best advice for you is to start small by trialling AI with your internal processes first. Integrate an AI assistant into your workflows, or switch to cloud based HR and payroll before experimenting with how AI capabilities can be used for your emails too.
If you’ve already done a little experimenting with integrating AI into your company’s operational processes and are looking to see how these technologies can bolster your digital marketing efforts, then this is the read for you. Currently, these are the 3 biggest risks and rewards when it comes to adding AI to your email marketing roll-out. We’ll be exploring these risks and rewards in greater detail below to help you determine whether AI will help or hinder your company’s email marketing efforts.
The Benefits Of AI For Small Companies
More Streamlined Strategy Development
Email marketing is about more than simply sending an email. It’s about finding out what your customers want, and what gives you an edge over your competitors. With AI, you can streamline your research development to draw up key areas of interest, schedule when to send bulk ‘cold emails’, monitor your response rate or engagement rate, and learn how to improve your EDM strategy based on these analytical results. It’s often easier for computers to see patterns than humans, and without these time sinks of processes like copy-and-pasting templates into individual email threads, your team can focus on more creative matters, like engaging with the clients who do respond.
Marketing know-how and AI accuracy is a winning combination. You can use AI tools to automatically gather information such as your customer’s date of birth, and then schedule an automatic email a week before their birthday with a personalised discount. Or, use AI to draft different versions of emails with the same offer, and see which style or format returns the most interest – a tried and tested strategy that the pros call A/B testing.
Assistance Available At All Times
Currently, the most common use of AI is simply adding AI customer service. For example, if someone wants a refund on a streaming subscription, you can send an AI-generated email explaining the process. But an AI chatbot is as useful for your customers as it is for you as a business owner.
Like Google, it can answer your questions and help you make decisions, but unlike Google, it can provide much greater detail. Use it to soundboard ideas for your next email marketing campaign, and ask the chatbot to provide inspiration, or draft templates. As chatbot integration grows, you’ll be able to use your new assistant to send out meeting invitations, respond to simple query emails, and send automated ‘receipt of inquiry’ replies, 24/7.
Comprehensive Strategy Analysis
Customer behaviour can be a mystery to even the most learned social scientists, and trawling through large numbers and sheets of data is arduous for any human. Thankfully, AI promises to do that work for us. Machine learning will be able to monitor the effectiveness of your email marketing much more effectively, and point out the areas of weakness so you can optimise your strategy. This could be anything from identifying what time of day is best to send an email, to suggesting ways to capitalise on customer purchasing patterns, to drafting cold email templates that are more effective.
The Risks Of Incorporating AI Into Your Marketing Emails
AI Limitations
Currently, the majority of AI EDM models use ChatGPT-3 as a base. It’s the most advanced publicly available AI model, but that doesn’t mean it’s foolproof. It only has select data available to it, specifically, the majority of the internet up until about 2022. This means that mistakes can be made when you ask for specific details. If you’re after up-to-date or new information about your business in your emails, it may not be your greatest source, and relying on it completely can lead to errors in your content.
Your email might start with an incorrect statistic, or have a tone that isn’t right for your clients or your products. So it’s important to manage any AI tools and watch their output for potential issues, before they become large problems. Part of tackling this will be learning how to prompt your AI system to get the best results, and to develop strong quality control procedures for your EDM content.
Vulnerability To Hacking
When a business uses AI systems, cyber attacks remain a considerable risk. Online hackers constantly look for ways to attack company computers with malware and viruses. A cybercriminal can restrict the capabilities of a business’ AI systems to penetrate them and access sensitive information, such as your clients’ addresses, personal information and payment history.
Therefore, it’s important that businesses keep updating their AI systems with recent algorithms to tackle all sorts of cybercrime. Ensure your email accounts are password protected, or require two-factor authentication, to stay ahead of these kinds of malicious actions that can cause real damage to your business and your reputation.
Robotic Tone
AI might never lose its temper or get annoyed, but that doesn’t mean a customer can’t be annoyed with it. At times a chatbot’s email responses can be repetitive or confusing, and the base persona is by design robotic and monotonous. Thankfully, this is an issue that is being worked on, and more appealing dialogue can be written by chatbots given specific instructions, so it might just take some time for you to edit the templates it produces.
In all your marketing emails, don’t forget to provide phone numbers or instructions for your customers to speak to real humans, to avoid them giving up on your company altogether if they can’t find the answers they’re looking for straight away.
Final Analysis
Like all new and groundbreaking technology, there is the fear that AI will upset the applecart and cause chaos. And besides the internet, AI may be the biggest technological change we’ll see in our lifetime – so there’s plenty of reasonable concerns to be had.
Ultimately, AI is the next step in human progress, so there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be the next step in your email marketing strategy development too. With a little research and forethought – like using AI tools with respectable credentials and security protocols – you can get on that train early and enjoy the trip. Learning to use AI to your advantage now will put you above your competitors and ensure your email marketing strategy is the best it can be.
And so to answer the question of whether AI helps or hinders; it’s down to how you use it. Certainly AI has its limitations, and should not be always relied on, but for some aspects of the email marketing process, it can be a huge time saver, and perhaps even boost the performance of your campaign too.
Author’s Details
Arpan Sarma
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Frequently asked questions
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