Email automation has been superseded by autonomous email. But for some is a concept that is easier to ignore than embrace. Automated email, also referred to as triggered email or behaviour-driven email, is any email message automatically sent in direct response to an individual user’s specific actions made (or not made) on your website or web app. Autonomous email does everything for you.

Transactional emails are highly valuable to consumers because they provide crucial information like receipts or password resets, but because of CAN-SPAM these emails can’t provide or contain much promotional content, they also include order confirmation content.

Marketing emails are the standard means of sending promotional and incentive messages to large segments of your customer base, like discounts, sale items, promotions, new product launches, well as newsletters, but they don’t offer the one-to-one communication customers now expect.

Email automation refers simply to the process of the fusion of elements into an email with some of the process handled automatically for you. By bridging the gap between transactional and marketing email, automated email provides a scalable and efficient method for marketers to send user-specific messages responsively.

Automated email achieves the best of both worlds between timing and content to provide marketers with messages that have:

Relevance – When a user receives an automated email, it’s because they’ve taken an action which triggered a workflow. As a result, the message they receive is highly relevant to them and they’re more likely to open and engage with the email. But automatic, definition requires human input, with all their inherent foibles typically errors and omissions. the advent of AI enables software solutions to run without humans and also offers much greater profit as a consequence.

Engaging content – AI-autonomous email content is designed to increase user engagement with your app or website. This could mean teaching new customers how to use your product, encouraging users to give feedback, or providing a lapsed customer with an incentive to return. But the practical enhancement comes through the rise of hyper-personalised product selections for your customers, both on-site and far more practically via email, as this enables the opportunity to do so when the customer is in the market, rather than just when they visit your site.

Brand building – As a highly personal communication channel, AI-autonomous email serves as an extension of your brand. It allows you to strengthen the connection between you and your customers by communicating thought leadership, assisting with cross-sells, or sharing timely updates about features they haven’t used yet. Simply put, email automation drives user engagement. Customers are much more likely to open, read, and take action with an automated email.

What is the distinction between email automation and autonomous email

There are many examples of autonomous applications that are now commonplace, they cover a broad spectrum of applications from remote operation of equipment to predicting imminent consumer purchases. 

Autonomous email marketing is a way is still email automation but goes further to use all the data on your site to identify and refine elements of your database to make the message pertinent, but the distinction goes much further. It identifies each consumer’s imminent wants, needs and desires, from the products you offer, ranked and presented precisely timed to align with that consumer. For email marketing, it is called hyper-personalisation software.

Deep dive: Propensity response models in predictive analytics.

PPS identifies imminent purchases based on previous buying history and perpetual impressions and is verified by McKinsey, Forrester, Bain and Statista all renowned research firms, to deliver a 20-fold increase in ROI greater than traditional email marketing and omnichannel marketing combined. Let us underline that number: automatic email has been superseded by autonomous email as it outperforms it at a ratio of 20:1. You will get twenty times the sales you are getting at the moment from automatic solutions.

Regardless of the vertical of ecommerce, your concern is focused on, you already know marketing and promotions are cut-throat. Therefore not only is it essential to have software that competes at the highest level against enormous competition, but most significantly, it needs to be cutting-edge, and perpetually advancing, to stay ahead.

Hands-free hyper-personalisation for each customer 

It’s widely appreciated that hyper-personalising product selection for each consumer encourages an enormous level of additional income. Their loyalty delivers a hike in basket size (AOV), immediately, which converts as they now stay with you because you’re showing them what they want, into customer lifetime value (CLV). What is less appreciated is how much more powerful it is over automatic solutions, where you still need and must use some degree of human input.

Behind the scenes, there are other benefits. The rate of return (RoR) falls enormously, as it’s what they want rather than impulsive, or the wrong size, colour, fabric, cut, style etc. A machine learning algorithm doesn’t get the product selection wrong. It’s unique and personal to each consumer!

Hyper-personalisation uses data captured as each visits your site, including what they look at, return to most often, etc. It then aligns this with both that individual’s buying history and their perpetual purchases, to rank every SKU on your site in order of ones with the greatest likelihood of being imminently purchased by that person. 

Instead of waiting for consumers to buy specific products, promoting this season’s stock for example, it uses a predictive analytics algorithm to work out which products offer the greatest buying propensity for each consumer. There is no segmenting involved, AI hyper-personalisation has made audience segmentation redundant, it does’t need it, as it talks to an audience of one.

Then, using a machine learning algorithm, it also calculates when that person is most likely to do so. At that precise moment, it sends them their unique email with their tastes, interests, and likes, which delivers you the highest ROI possible. It is 100% autonomous software, that requires zero human input.

Installed as a plugin, (approved by your respective platform) and gathers all the required website data you need, and then applies it in the most immediate and lucrative way possible. It uses the product details, images, language and currency you use.