AI in Email Marketing: What It Is and Ways to Automate Workflows

Imagine you could send personalized emails in minutes or maximize your open and click-through rates without having to spend hours combing through data first. The development of artificial intelligence (AI) has shifted these dreams into reality, allowing your marketing team to do more in less time—-and with greater success.

AI tools are transforming email marketing, and more and more businesses are taking advantage of this technology to create higher-performing email campaigns that increase customer engagement and boost revenue. One great example of this is Podium’s AI Employee. This AI-powered tool acts as an extension of your team, automating responses to customers. It handles mundane and repetitive marketing tasks for you—so your team can focus their attention on what they do best.

AI is changing the way businesses conduct all aspects of marketing. Knowing how you can best use this technology to increase your marketing team’s productivity and email campaign conversion rates will help grow your business faster.

What is AI email marketing?

AI technologies (including machine learning and generative AI) help your company develop and send more effective messages, so recipients receive relevant emails at the most appropriate times. AI email marketing tools reduce grunt work for your marketing team and get the job done faster. How do they accomplish this? By analyzing customer data to learn about your audience and automating many marketing tasks like audience segmentation.

With AI email marketing tools, your team can automatically send personalized emails sharing relevant, helpful information and even recommend products or services. They can also automate email workflows, sending specific campaigns when a user takes a specific action (such as signing up for your newsletter or browsing specific products or website pages).

AI also improves your email marketing strategies. The tool quickly analyzes data from past email campaigns, so you can immediately make informed decisions and tweak your strategies, resulting in higher conversion rates and marketing return on investment (ROI).

Not only do AI tools use automation and data analytics to help you create successful email campaigns and newsletters that boost engagement, but they also clean up your email list to improve your deliverability. All of this combines to increase the efficiency and performance of your email campaigns to help your business grow.

Benefits of AI in Email Marketing

Here are just a few benefits your company will experience after implementing AI email marketing tools.

Personalization

Email personalization once used to be limited to including the recipient’s name in the subject line or email copy, but AI has completely changed the personalization game. With the ability to analyze user behavior—including their interactions with your website, social media channels, and previous emails—AI email marketing tools can develop ideas for emails that focus on specific products or services they’re interested in purchasing.

Tools with generative AI features can even create email copy based on this data, so your recipients are only receiving content that’s relevant and valuable to them.

Automated Segmentation

Just like with personalization, AI tools analyze lead and customer data to automate the segmentation process. Then, instead of your team spending countless hours segmenting your audience based on their demographics, engagement history, needs and interests, geographic location, and more—your AI tool can handle it (and get the job done quicker). Rather than making generic emails to send to all subscribers, you can develop strategic email campaigns for each segment.

Take auto dealerships for instance—you wouldn’t want to send emails about two-seater sports cars to families with children, or minivans to single, 20-something males. AI-powered segmentation makes your email campaigns more effective, without any more work on your part.

Optimized Send Times

AI tools analyze data to learn when recipients are most likely to open and interact with your emails so you can optimize your send times rather than using guesswork to schedule your email campaigns. When they receive your emails at more optimal times, your campaigns will perform better, as recipients will be more likely to open and engage with your emails.

Predictive Content Recommendations

A great benefit of AI email marketing tools is their ability to recommend additional content to individuals based on their preferences and engagement history. This feature delivers more relevant content and improves their customer experience, all helping to drive conversions.

Automated A/B testing

A/B testing is a key component of all email marketing campaigns. AI simplifies this process, using analytics to determine the best-performing subject line and call-to-action for your campaign.

8 Ways to Use AI in Email Marketing

Now that you understand the great benefits AI email marketing tools have to offer, you may be wondering how your business can incorporate these tools into your workflows. That’s why we’ve compiled a list of the best ways to use AI in your email marketing efforts below.

1. Optimized Send Times

The goal of any email marketing campaign is to engage with your recipients and encourage more conversions. Instead of scheduling blast email campaigns that deliver messages to all recipients at once, use AI tools to optimize send times to specific audience segments or on an individual level.

For instance, maybe you have a large segment of your audience that checks their email during their lunch break, while another has a history of opening your emails after dinner or late at night. The more people who receive emails when it’s convenient for them to open and interact with them, the better results you’ll achieve.

2. Subject Line Optimization

Generative AI and natural language processing technology allow AI tools to create email subject lines for you. By analyzing what tone, style, and subject line copy have previously performed well, it can craft new lines that are optimized to increase your open rates. Some tools generate subject lines autonomously, while others still require some human involvement, such as selecting the context or intent for an email. This process lets you develop effective, attention-grabbing subject lines in less time—and without guesswork.

3. Content Generation

AI email marketing tools help you save time and effort by generating personalized content for your campaigns. These AI-powered writing assistants follow email copy best practices while quickly creating relevant, individualized content around specific topics that you can send in bulk. You’ll save time and keep customers informed about your company and its products.

4. Predictive Analytics

With the predictive analytics capabilities of AI tools, you can get an idea of how your email marketing campaign will perform before you launch. These tools look for patterns in your existing email data to predict how future campaigns will perform in terms of open rates, click-throughs, and conversions. With insight into how a campaign may perform, your team can tweak their efforts to gain better results before even sending out a single email.

5. Automated Responses

When it comes to customer experience, speed matters. AI email marketing tools can automatically respond to customers on your behalf, no matter what time of day their request comes in. Not only that, the automated responses are personalized—so recipients will see helpful, relevant information and answers to their questions. Your business can even set up goal-oriented prompts to direct communications toward specific outcomes. It’s a great way to handle customer support and inquiries while your team is busy or when they arrive outside of your operating hours.

6. Behavioral Triggers

Your marketing team can set up triggers for AI tools to automatically send specific emails when a user takes a certain action. For example, after a person engages with specific products on your site, you may want to send them an email sharing more relevant information about them. You can also send personalized, relevant emails when shoppers abandon their carts or become new subscribers.

7. Predictive Lead Scoring

One way to ensure your marketing campaigns are bringing in high-quality leads is by scoring the leads to determine how likely they are to become customers. AI makes the lead-scoring process easier by incorporating predictive analytics. The tool analyzes your historical data to make predictions about your newly acquired leads, allowing you to quickly view your leads’ scores and see if you need to adjust your marketing strategies.

8. Churn Prediction

While all businesses can expect some level of churn, too much can hurt your bottom line. The predictive analytics features in AI tools analyze customer data for patterns to help predict your churn rate. For instance, if the tool predicts churn will rise over the next quarter, your business will know it needs to counteract that by increasing its marketing efforts and budget.

4 AI Marketing Tools Your Business Needs

Taking advantage of AI for email marketing is easy if you have the right tools on board. Here are a few to consider.

Podium

This all-in-one tool offers numerous AI capabilities, most notably its AI Employee. Podium collects and analyzes lead and customer data to personalize all communications—whether it’s for email marketing, text campaigns, or customer support through webchat. The AI Employee offers numerous workflow automations— including other marketing and sales workflows in addition to email marketing—designed to help you improve customer engagement and drive conversions in all aspects of your efforts.

While some companies may prefer an AI tool centered only around email marketing, having an AI automation tool that encompasses more elements of your business—including lead generation, overall marketing, and sales—helps streamline your entire operations. Pricing starts at $399/month.

Drift

This AI-powered engagement platform offers an inbox management tool to help you launch targeted email campaigns and clean up your list for improved deliverability. Drift can help you prioritize communications to users who are engaging with your website content, sending personalized emails to improve their experience.

The tool also uses AI technology to understand customer emails and generate conversational, appropriate responses that encourage further engagement. One downside is its affordability. With pricing starting at $2,500/month (when billed annually), it may be out of reach for some small businesses.

Phrasee

Phrasee, recently rebranded as Jacquard, helps your business create branded messaging at scale with AI—including your email campaigns. It augments your personalized email campaigns with language learning models (LLMs) to tailor messaging to individual recipients, even when sending bulk email blasts.

This tool lets you learn what works best for each audience segment and helps you design email campaigns around raising your open and conversion rates. Jacquard can also generate email content (including subject lines and CTAs) that’s relevant to your brand while also capturing your audience’s attention. However, the AI tool is designed primarily for enterprise-level companies, with pricing starting at $95k per year. Small businesses are better off with other options.

Levity

This AI tool integrates with your current apps and data sources to better manage your inbox and improve customer communications while saving you time. You can create custom AI blocks for each email-related workflow you want AI to handle, such as automatically responding to inquiries or sending welcome emails to new subscribers. Levity’s tool can also classify and summarize incoming emails, so your team can view the most critical messages first. While any business can benefit from Levity, it’s designed with logistics companies in mind and may not be as relevant for your business as other tools. Business plans start at $299/month.

Your Own AI Assistant for Email Marketing and Business Growth

If you want to create personalized customer communications quickly, then consider Podium’s AI Employee. This all-in-one AI tool is more than a personal assistant—it automates many email marketing workflows, saving you time.

Plus, its email response automation features allow you to communicate with customers around the clock, in the way that works best for them—improving the customer experience and boosting conversions. Podium understands that response time matters, which is why the AI Employee is designed to reduce your response times by half. Watch a demo to learn how Podium can help grow your business.

AI in Email Marketing FAQs

Still have questions? We’ve answered common email marketing questions for you below.

Can AI replace email marketers?

No, AI is a great tool that helps email marketers do their jobs more effectively and in less time, but it lacks some human abilities (like emotion or empathy) needed to replace marketers.

How does AI help in email communication?

AI automates list segmentation, helps personalize and generate email copy, subject lines, and CTAs, and also optimizes send times to improve your conversions and email marketing ROI.

What is the best AI tool to improve email?

AI tools centered around generating human-like, personalized communications are the best for improving your emails.