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AI Is Changing How Email Marketing Works – And Not in a Good Way
If your business relies on email marketing, or if you’re planning to launch an email campaign soon, be aware that Artificial Intelligence is rewriting the rules, and even the experts aren’t sure yet how to play the game.
AI can be a huge help for business marketing. People use it for brainstorming, outlining, drafting content, and a myriad of other tasks. What used to take days or weeks to research, plan, and implement is now ready to go in a remarkably short time.
AI is also a huge help for getting organized, both in the office and at home. AI inbox tools will summarize each of your emails for quicker perusal and help you find that tiny bit of relevant information without re-reading a whole long back-and-forth conversation. Another big plus of inbox tools is that they “filter out the clutter so you can focus on what’s most important.”
That’s great when it’s YOUR inbox being decluttered. But it’s less great when your prospective customer is decluttering – and your business emails don’t make the cut. Let’s take a look at the challenges of email marketing today.
Image-heavy emails are penalized
While Artificial Intelligence is improving at lightning speed, image recognition is still faulty, particularly regarding images of text. Tools use optical character recognition to interpret, but they aren’t always accurate, which means your message can’t be correctly reported and sorted. Also, too many images signal “spam” to the algorithm.
The “right” words are different now
Marketing has long focused on keywords and search terms to communicate more successfully with search engines and algorithms. Today’s AI is being trained to understand “natural language,” so the words that last year’s marketers carefully researched and tested may seem calculated and “unnatural,” another spam signal.
“Top of mind” is diminished
In years past, even if your customer didn’t actually click on anything in your email, you knew that at least they saw your name and subject line regularly. And there have been studies that prove how a “nudge” makes a difference in brand recognition and the establishment of authority. With AI inbox tools presorting emails, prospective customers may never even see what you sent.
Future visibility relies on past interaction
Like social media algorithms, inbox algorithms note which emails the user clicks on or deletes, building a profile to measure future emails against. The fewer times your customer clicks on your email, the further back you go in the line for attention. Every email sent struggles to be amusing, important, or outrageous enough to generate some kind of response so that the algorithm will let future emails in.
Each inbox is uniquely personalized
“Personalization” is a massive buzzword these days, and that includes inbox tools. Each recipient of your business email has a customized AI inbox tool specific to their preferences. Marketing segmentation strategies will need to be modified for this new landscape.
Mass clean-ups will affect data
As people start using the AI tools in their email inboxes, list numbers and open rates may change drastically. Users are warming to the idea of purging their overstuffed inboxes, and are instructing their inbox tools to perform mass deletes and unsubscribes. Maybe most of them were never serious prospects anyhow, but their defection could change the marketing team’s report to the CEO.
What email marketing will look like over the coming months is murky. The experts are still analyzing and testing. Further research into specific market segments is necessary, and the ongoing development of AI colors everything, of course.
Because this is what we do, the Sprocket team is staying abreast of the changes. You, however, are already plenty busy doing what you do. Instead of worrying about developments in digital marketing, hand the task over to our team. Call us today to learn how we can help.
Photo by Сергей Сёмин
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Kate Gingold
I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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