You’ve probably had your first taste of artificial intelligence from science fiction films that depict robots gaining sentience through the wonders of the technology, and robotic email marketing is now here. While sentience may still be a while away yet, some such advancements are actually available now.
But as far as we are from having robots that might take over the world, artificial intelligence has already made it relatively far from the day it first came to be. There are emerging trends with the technology across various industries as it’s utilised to improve different processes. In the field of digital marketing, artificial intelligence plays a crucial role, particularly when it comes to email marketing.
Sending emails has been an integral part of digital marketing for its direct approach and cost-effective methodology. With the help of artificial intelligence, email marketing is more powerful than ever. It has introduced several benefits to garner higher conversions, including personalisation, automation and data analysis. To give your email strategy that extra boost for more favourable results, AI is key in upgrading your email marketing tactics.
The convenience of automation on robotic email marketing
AI-powered systems make it possible to set up automated or drip campaigns that are driven by customer data and are based on what stage someone is at in the customer journey. The technology uses past purchases, interests and browsing behaviour to set up automated campaigns that are designed to nurture your leads.
AI can also help you determine what kind of content and images that are going to be most effective in drafting your welcome emails, order update emails and retention emails among others to achieve the highest amount of engagement and conversion possible.
Predictive personalisation in robotic email marketing
Some of the most successful email marketing campaigns are focused on creating emails that look like they were written personally by humans rather than being machine-generated. AI technology helps analyse consumer behaviour and study their interests to generate data-driven insights. This makes it possible for you to create customised emails that are tailor-made for each of your individual subscribers.
Subscribers are more likely to skip your email if it doesn’t tickle their fancy. In other words, AI can tell you what content is needed to resonate most with your target audience at a personalised level. The best way to gather data for an effective approach to this method is to ask them to set their preferences while signing up or after they’ve received their welcome email.
But these are limited thoughts toward a utopian future only, limited by what we know and perceive currently, therefore limiting our potential opportunity. Remember that the purpose of email marketing is the generation of revenue, and closely followed by perpetually maintenance of CLV too. This then opens Pandora’s box to a realistic future potential, allowing the AI to achieve uninhibited, and most likely unimaginable opportunities.
Let’s move to how far it’s got so far, and consider predictive personalisation. Consumers no longer want to overtly be sold to. That demands replacing the labours of your marketing copywriters and designers, into simply and purely the presentation of exactly the products that each individual consumer is most likely to buy, and offer it to them at precisely the right moment. This then is the very definition of predictive personalisation, and any retailers not using today, are at a disadvantage.
Statistics on predictive analytics, provided by the likes of McKinsey, Forrester and Statista, already prove it delivers a twenty fold increase on “all other forms of digital marketing combined”. That’s the equivalent you taking your entire online marketing budget and giving it away, for all the benefit is has done you in comparison to not using PPS, a form of robotic email marketing.
Below are the statistics download at the time of writing, from one retailer that has adopted PPS – predictive personalisation software, illustrating the realisation of it’s powerful ROI potential on a month to view graph.
The client has a database of just 6165 email subscribers, and within 30 days has achieve £13,454.58 attributed sales, adding 10.71% to his turnover. With zero human involvement the GP is 50%, and delivering the perfect product selection to each individual means the RoR has become negligible.
The Calculation
£13,454.58 t/o – 5% RoR (Est.) = £12,781.85 x 50% GP = £6390.92 – £100 PPS = 6290.92% ROI
Key: Black line – Email sent. Yellow Line – CTR. Orange Line – Attribution
You might wonder how to add it to your campaign, but this is the wrong way of looking at it. The perspective you should take – given that you now have access to such a massive revenue stream added to your efforts, is to install PPS first and then consider how to add the processes and elements you currently enjoy, to it.
The role of Big Data in robotic email marketing
Both personalisation and automation of an email marketing campaign wouldn’t be possible without the help of big data. You don’t have to be a big company to deal with this kind of concept, especially if you’re still trying to segment your subscribers to create more personalised emails. This is fraught with danger, incurring big overheads and low return rates, but most evident is the need to achieve a return from this effort before seeing dividends.
Predictive personalisation, which is wholly autonomous starts much higher up the ROI curve, not requiring any human input whatsoever. It has learnt the foibles , needs and wants of every individual consumer before it begins. It doesn’t matter how good an individual employee is on understanding and appreciating their customers, because they can’t know them as well or the precise moment an individual wants a new top, shoes, lipstick, what brand, what colour, or what consistency, as AI can.
The naysayers will now be grumbling about it not carrying the corporate voice, but as all the data is dictated by the content of your site, that’s exactly what is done. Without holidays, sick-leave or even sleep it perpetually watches the buying history and impressions of each individual, and offers the perfect product selection for that individual at the perfect moment. It is essential to ecommerce marketing. Humans will always have their idiosyncrasies and incur mistakes, but AI doesn’t. It just perpetually adds to your revenue stream as nothing before experienced.
With email marketing becoming more common than ever, it’s getting more difficult to make your emails worthy of your subscriber’s time since they are receiving a huge amount of emails daily. But with the help of big data, you’ll have a chance to stand out from the noise.
Analysis of huge sets of data can help you avoid bombarding subscribers with mass generic emails in the future. With personalisation and unique content as your point of focus, you’ll be able to stand out from all the clutter they receive from other marketers on a daily basis.
The Importance of Machine Learning
As both personalisation and relevance increasingly become more crucial for email marketers, machine learning is steadily playing an important role through its application to personalise you relation with each consumer, timing and especially product content. With its combination with big data, an effective AI for email marketing can be put into place set to achieve the following objectives:
AI knows what promotion works best with each of your customers based on their history, interests and habits, whether it’s product recommendations, discounts, freebies, or rebates.
When a customer abandons a shopping cart, AI can retarget that customer by sending an email either to have them reconsider and finally purchase the product or recommend a similar item. Emails will have a CTA that leads to a landing page where your customer can easily complete the purchase. Thanks to the AI that’s set to make product recommendations, the probability of conversions becomes enormous.
SwiftERM is a Microsoft Partner Company.
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