Email marketing is a key part of any marketing strategy. It’s also a source of valuable first-party data – a must-have resource as stricter data privacy regulations and customer concerns over data make consent a key consideration for marketers.
Statista predicts there will be 4.97 billion global email users by 2028, with Forbes reporting that 88% of them check email every day. That’s a lot of eyes on your content – if you send it with the right message to the right people at the right time.
The reason email can be so effective is that it can be highly targeted and personalized, especially with the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI).
” Email is not just as a broadcast channel to send more messages, but as a revenue system built around data journeys, trust, and timing.”– Saumya B. Verma; DMI Webinar
But that’s not all. The use of AI tools and platforms (along with AI agents) can help predict customer behavior, identify churn risk, optimize timing, and anticipate purchase intent. This shifts email from a ‘broadcast channel’ to a personalized decision engine.
In this blog, we’ll show you how to use AI to optimize and boost your email marketing activities through:
- Hyper-personalization
- Content creation and optimization
- Segmentation and targeting
- Send time optimization
- Predictive analytics and customer behavior modeling
- A/B testing
- Workflows
- Deliverability and spam
- What’s the future of AI in email marketing?
Hyper-personalization
Personalization in email marketing has come a long way since including a person’s name to get someone’s attention.
The advancement of AI now enables marketers to hyper-personalize emails that use predictive scoring such as likelihood-to-purchase models, next-best-offer logic, and churn propensity signals, according to Insider One.
Put simply, predictive scoring uses AI to estimate what each person is likely to do next, so you can tailor emails to match that behaviour.
Data that helps generate hyper-personalized emails includes demographic and declared data, behavioral data, transactional data, and predictive and AI-scored signals.
Some simple ways to build emails that are tailored to each recipient are:
- Real-time product recommendations: Embed a dynamic recommendation block inside your email that pulls from purchase history data and/or trending products in the customer’s preferred categories. Then, use AI to determine the content at the time of sending rather than at the building stage to reflect current inventory and behavior.
- Personalized subject lines: Leverage AI to use behavioral and contextual data to create tailored subject lines that make an inbox ping. This could be by mentioning a product abandoned in a cart or content that’s location-based to tap into local events.
- Lifecycle content blocks: Be aware that every subscriber is at a different point in their relationship with your brand. By using AI, you can include content blocks in your emails based on the lifecycle stage to cater to many subscribers without a separate campaign build for each.
- AI-assisted offer selection: Use email platforms that integrate with smart writing assistants (such as Copilot or Gemini) and feed in specific contextual data that prompts AI to craft personalized offers. For example, Gmail’s AI-powered contextual Smart Reply with Gemini helps you respond faster by generating contextual replies based on email content.
A notable example of AI-driven personalization is Spotify’s Wrapped, which gives a roundup of each person’s best-of-the-year playlist based on what they listened to. Details can be found in the app, but they are also used for email content and advertising.