Generative AI or GenAI is a game-changing technology using the power of machine learning algorithms and large language models to create original content, images, videos, and more, all in response to user prompts. Its exceptional capacity to instantly create content at scale has made it a staple for marketers everywhere. Let’s explore the widespread use of Generative AI for email marketing.
One area where Generative AI has emerged as a champion of efficiency is the world of email marketing. Generative AI algorithms have the ability to craft compelling marketing emails, subject lines, banners, and images instantly and at scale. Persado Motivation AI, a specialized class of Generative AI that drives business results, takes this one step further. It not only takes marketing efficiencies into account, but also marketing performance (i.e. conversions) to create the highest-performing digital messaging. Rather than pull data from the internet as a whole, Motivation AI is trained on a specialized dataset of over 10 years of real insights from Fortune 500 digital marketing campaigns.
In this comprehensive guide, we will delve into the many powerful benefits of Generative AI in email marketing, explore the best practices for leveraging it, examine the tangible results it brings to email marketing campaigns, and look at the exciting future of this technology.
What is Generative AI for email marketing?
Generative AI for email marketing is all about utilizing generative artificial intelligence, often referred to as GenAI, to craft content tailored explicitly for email marketing campaigns. This innovative approach empowers marketers and businesses to enhance their email communication by leveraging GenAI’s ability to quickly generate conversational messaging.
The art and science of GenAI
Generating compelling email content is both an art and a science. On one hand, doing so requires a deep understanding of the brand, its audience, and the message the marketers want to convey. On the other hand, it relies on the scientific capabilities of Generative AI. GenAI can analyze vast datasets, understand patterns, and create conversational content.
The role of prompts
At the heart of Generative AI for email marketing are prompts. Prompts refer to concise instructions or cues provided by users to guide the AI in generating content. These prompts can be as simple as a few keywords or as complex as detailed instructions. Generative AI then uses these prompts to craft email copy that aligns with the campaign’s objectives and messaging.
For instance, a business launching a new product might input a prompt like, “Create an engaging email that introduces our new customizable sneakers and encourages subscribers to make a purchase.” The Generative AI will then analyze this prompt and generate an email that attempts to properly convey the message, present the product’s features, etc.
4 key benefits of Generative AI for email marketing
1. Personalization: Serving diverse segments with effortless content generation
One of the most significant benefits of incorporating Generative AI into email marketing is personalization. Instead of crafting generic content that appeals to a broad audience, GenAI technology empowers marketers to create content at scale to better appeal to different segments of their audience.
Whether you’re addressing a loyal customer, a prospective buyer, or a returning visitor, GenAI can create copy quickly and at scale making it easier for brands to market to more specific marketing segments further personalizing more of their brand experience for more customers. While personalization is made possible through Generative AI thanks to its ability to create messaging at scale, Motivation AI understands what language inspires different audience segments creating the highest-performing marketing messaging for each audience.
2. Brand voice compliance: Ensuring consistency across communications by using a human touch
Maintaining a consistent brand voice across all your email communications is essential for building brand identity and trust. Generative AI paired with human collaboration helps ensure that every email adheres to your brand’s unique voice and style guidelines.
This is particularly valuable when multiple team members are involved in creating email content. GenAI and human teamwork serves as a reliable guardian. It preventing any deviations from the brand’s established tone and messaging, thus enhancing brand recognition and resonance.
3. Optimizing conversions with AI-generated language
The goal of email marketing isn’t just to land in an inbox. It’s to capture the recipient’s attention, spark their interest, and inspire action. Persado Motivation AI excels in crafting subject lines and body copy that drives business results. This allows email marketers to think beyond clicks and opens and optimize language toward conversions.
4. Additional testing and insights: Perfecting your email strategy
A/B testing is a valuable tool in email marketing for fine tuning your campaigns. With Generative AI, you can effortlessly create multiple email variants to test different content strategies. This allows you to gain more insights into what works best with your audience, refine your messaging, and optimize your email marketing strategy for better results. While A/B tests will provide a winning version, they don’t provide insight into why it performed better. Brands should employ more advanced solutions like Persado in order to gain insights into why digital marketing messaging performed well or not.
Brands can go beyond A/B testing by employing multivariate testing. Using multivariate testing, brands can test multiple variations of the same email campaign to determine effectiveness. While A/B tests only allows brands to test out multiple subject lines or other single aspects of an email campaign such as CTA, images, or body copy, multivariate tests could include changing some or all of these features of the email campaign including subject line, delivery time, CTA, images, and body copy. For example, brands can test different subject lines, images, and CTAs testing multiple versions of the same overall email to determine which drives the most conversions. Persado uses experimental design to allow clients to run tests without having to deploy too many variants in the market to gain the benefits of this type of testing.
Generative AI can be used to quickly generate multiple images, CTAs, subject lines, and more so brands can seamlessly test out more and more variants.
Best practices for Generative AI and email marketing
Incorporating Generative AI into your email marketing strategy is a significant leap toward efficiency and personalization. However, like any tool, success depends on how you wield it. To make the most of this cutting-edge technology, consider these best practices:
Define clear objectives
Before you dive into GenAI-driven email marketing, establish clear goals for your campaigns. Are you looking to increase sales, boost engagement, drive website traffic, or achieve a different objective? Defining your goals will provide a clear direction for the AI and help you measure its effectiveness.
Understand your audience
GenAI works best when you understand your audience inside and out. Collect data, segment your customers, and create buyer personas. This knowledge will guide your AI-generated content to be highly relevant to various segments of your audience.
Craft precise prompts
The effectiveness of GenAI depends on the prompts you provide. Be as specific and detailed as possible in your prompts to ensure the AI generates content that aligns with your campaign objectives. For example, instead of “Create a promotional email,” you might use “Generate an email promoting our new product with a focus on its unique features and a call to action for a limited-time offer.”
Maintain brand consistency
Ensure that your brand’s voice and style guidelines are well defined and communicated to the AI. This consistency is crucial for building trust and recognition among your subscribers. GenAI should serve as an ally in upholding your brand identity. And have a human collaborate with and review and refine the AI-generated content.
Monitor and fine tune
Even with GenAI, it’s essential to keep a watchful eye on your email marketing campaigns. Regularly analyze key performance indicators, such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. Identify what’s working and what isn’t, and adjust your prompts or strategies accordingly.
A/B testing and multivariate testing
Leverage GenAI’s capabilities to conduct A/B testing more efficiently. Generate multiple variants of email content and test them against each other to determine which resonates best with your audience. Use the insights gained to refine your approach continuously. While A/B testing is useful to digital marketers, it can also be limited as it usually only tests 2-4 variants of one aspect of the email campaign (i.e. subject line, CTA, image, etc.)
For this reason, brands should also consider multivariate testing to determine the effectiveness of multiple versions of the same email campaign rather than only one aspect. Persado language experiments use experimental design to enable brands to test up to 16 versions of a message. The ability to test a wider range of variants gives the brand even more assurance that they are using the highest-performing copy.
Personalization is key
One of GenAI’s greatest strengths is its scalability. Through GenAI’s ability to create content quickly and at scale, marketers can easily craft a larger variety of creative tailored to the preferences and interests of more audience segments. Brands can suggest products based on customers’ browsing behavior or offer exclusive discounts based on their purchase history. Persado Dynamic Motivation, for example, uses session data (i.e. browsing behavior, buying history, etc.) and Generative AI (specifically the Persado Motivation AI knowledge base) to serve the highest-performing messaging to each customer across the website and email.
Respect privacy and regulations
Always adhere to data privacy regulations such as GDPR, CCPA and CAN-SPAM Act. Ensure you have proper consent to send emails and give subscribers the option to opt out if they wish. GenAI should not compromise your commitment to ethical email marketing practices.
Human touch
While GenAI is a powerful tool, don’t overlook the importance of the human touch. Review and fine tune the content generated by the AI to ensure it aligns perfectly with your brand and the subtleties of your campaign.
Evolve and adapt
The digital world is constantly changing. Stay informed about new developments in GenAI technology, and be prepared to adapt your email marketing strategies accordingly. What works today might not be as effective tomorrow.
Generative AI and email marketing results: not all GenAI is the same
The integration of Generative AI into email marketing campaigns has transformed the way businesses engage with their audience.
Many popular Generative AI tools can rapidly generate conversational copy, but their capabilities are often limited to understanding a prompt and producing text that mimics natural language. While this might sound appealing, there’s no guarantee of performance, as these AI models are typically trained on the vast and diverse content of the entire internet.
However, Persado has pioneered a specialized form of Generative AI tailored for digital marketers, one that is rooted in real-world enterprise communications rather than the wide-ranging internet content. This unique approach is referred to as Motivation AI, and it has been engineered to deliver revenue-driving results. While open rates and click-through rates have traditionally been the focus of email marketing, Persado Motivation AI goes above and beyond, ensuring that every email is crafted for maximum impact.
Understanding the power of Motivation AI
Motivation AI is distinct from tools like ChatGPT, as it delves deeper into the psychology of customer behavior. It possesses an understanding of the specific words and phrases that inspire customers to take desired actions, whether it’s making a purchase, completing an application, booking a trip, upgrading, or redeeming credit card points. What sets it apart is that Motivation AI is built upon a wealth of messaging performance insights gathered from Fortune 500 brands over a decade.
While open rates remain an important metric in email marketing, the ultimate goal is to drive revenue and achieve a solid return on investment (ROI). Email marketers can develop email subject lines and body copy that inspire customers to take action using Essential Motivation, Persado’s self-serve GenAI solution. Marketing and e-commerce teams can also reduce cart abandonment by serving personalized language in the online cart using Dynamic Motivation.
The future of Generative AI and digital marketing
Ever since ChatGPT made its debut in November 2022, it has dominated the news headlines, and companies have been in a frenzy to harness its potential. In the initial months following its launch, McKinsey research revealed that the features of Generative AI have the potential to contribute as much as $4.4 trillion to the global economy each year.
Experts forecast that GenAI will play a pivotal role in enabling marketers to work smarter, not harder. One prominent avenue for this transformation is the enhancement of marketing copy efficiency and the potential for achieving personalized content at scale.
By leveraging GenAI, marketers can streamline the content creation process and deliver messages tailored to specific audiences, thus boosting engagement and conversion rates.
Request a risk-free trial of Persado Motivation AI and boost conversions using the highest-performing language across every digital channel including email, SMS, social media, website, push notifications, and more. Find out why Persado was named the market leader in Generative AI Text Content Generation by CB Insights.
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