Boost Email Engagement with AI and Customer Feedback
Digital marketing leaders are looking to increase email responses from their customers and reduce unsubscribe rates, but boosting those metrics requires additional data to help personalize messaging with information on past purchase behavior inquiries and engagement.
Artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT or other AI-based programs can be used to help optimize email subject lines, while more thorough data analysis and voice of the customer (VoC) feedback can ensure the efforts are working.
Matt Moorut, director, analyst, for Gartner’s marketing leaders practice, explained email is still a fundamental touchpoint for consumers in Europe and North America.
“Email is one of the most preferred channels for receiving messages from brands and businesses — whether those messages come from brands you’ve bought from before or not,” he said. “In other words, audiences are happier to receive emails than messages on other channels, so marketers naturally find value in sending campaigns on that channel.”
Email is a ubiquitous channel across all generations, which makes it a massive driver for utilization across the board.
“The fact it often works as a unique identifier is valuable to a lot of marketers since it can enable centralization of disparate data sources,” Moorut said. “It’s been a workhorse channel for some time, and continues to drive a strong ROI, relative to other channels.”
He pointed out the relative ease of ability to send a time-sensitive message based on an action taken — like an abandoned cart message — makes it hugely appealing, given those messages can directly drive increased sales levels.
Moorut explained a best practice for email is to segment your audience and target them with specific messaging that resonates with them.
“That’s great and all, but you quickly hit the limitation of capacity to manage such a volume of communications to multiple different segments,” he said. “Platforms including ChatGPT have the ability to reduce the burden on marketers by enabling them to proof messaging instead of writing it, which should allow them to manage more messages to more segments at any given time.”
He added several platforms already use AI to try suggesting the next best message for audiences, or to highlight the right kind of segment to target.
“Beyond that, there are platforms that have been using AI to optimize things like subject lines,” Moorut said. “Those kinds of use cases are easy to test for ROI.”
Subject lines are critical to email success, and digital marketers only have a few words to play with, and AI can help to optimize the words used.
When thinking about AI improving the body of emails themselves — the copy and the images themselves — then the first step will be setting up your taxonomy in a way that enables any AI to easily understand the task in front of it.
“That might take some serious data mapping work, so will likely take some time to set up well,” he said.
Chris Smith, chief marketing officer at Delinea, admitted writing email content is still a tedious manual task and said it would be quite useful to automate with AI.
