Get people to open your e-mail!

Isn’t it annoying when, opening your inbox, you are served spam for breakfast, lunch and dinner?
 But what is spam? It's the sending of mass advertising e-mails over the Internet, mostly unwanted to those who receive them.

The term comes from the crasis of spiced ham, a product of Gormel Foods Corporation that was one of the few foods always available during the Second World War, due to its high preservation capacity. An omnipresent dish, which they tried to dispense everywhere, in every meal. People was fed up with it!

Dead mail walking: is e-mail marketing still convenient?

In an age when many spam filters exist and people can’t stand being bombarded with messages, does e-mail marketing still work?

It's not time to give it a funeral yet: though this tool may seem anachronistic, it’s getting a new lease of life. Think about it, not everyone has a Facebook account, while anyone has an email address: it's a sort of passepartout.

We need to consider that the processes of acquisition and sale have changed: the email must be used to create a bridge between Marketing and Sales, or a boat that can ferry the user from being a contact (lead) to becoming a customer, and then a loyal customer (brand ambassador).

A contact or a customer, in order to progress in their path, must go through an educational phase conveyed by quality content. Only in this way can they identify the brand as reliable and authoritative, able to answer to their known or unexpressed problems.

As Guglielmo Arrigoni points out in E-mail Marketing, the marketer is no longer a hunter who seeks customers, but a gardener who cultivates seeds to make them grow.

How is AI transforming e-mail marketing?

What contribution can AI provide to e-mail marketing? Paroma Sen on Martech Advisor suggested six aspects:

1) AI ensures faster and more efficient A/B testing

The A/B test allows you to test multiple versions of a message on a sample of recipients, to observe which one achieves the best result. In today's hyper-targeted landscape, this test may seem incapable of capturing the various nuances of the user basin. AI and its ability to analyze large amounts of data in real time can help you choose the campaign that is going to perform best.

2) It tells you what’s the best content to offer your users

Refine your editorial strategy with Machine learning: it processes the data collected from customer behavior, thus suggesting the subject, body text, design and CTA, to create the perfect email.

3) It picks the perfect timing

Manual segmentation normally just divides the dispatch of emails by time zones. Through AI, you can include several factors including past and current behavior, building triggers to help you pick the right moment and increase CTR.

4) It enables a smarter customization

Custom email allows you to increase opening rates by 16%, and investment margins are huge as 70% of brands don’t include customization in their email marketing strategy. You can use the data collected and analyzed by AI to set new rules of Marketing Automation, creating custom messages for every single user, which will make you stand out from the competition.

5) It refines segmentation

We know that customization is most effective when it is preceded by a good segmentation, that is, dividing your list of subscribers into various groups based on their common characteristics. However, considering people’s changeable nature, AI will operate an intelligent segmentation in real time, combining all the data available on the user into a single customer view and acting accordingly (dynamic predictive segmentation).

6) It provides useful data and analysis to predict and intervene on Churn

Churn is the rate of abandonment, and of course with the support of AI you can draw conclusions about what causes it and how you can better retain customers and potential customers. When relevance increases, in fact, unsubscribe rates go down.

A practical case study

There’s an AI technology that particularly suits e-mail marketing: we are talking about THRON’s Content Intelligence, a SaaS DAM listed by Forrester among the 20 best in the world.

Thanks to its ability to detect the interests of users from the use they make of content, it completes your CRM with essential information that will help you compile lists of dynamic users, customizing marketing automation.

By monitoring how users interact with the digital assets of the brand, it is possible to adjust the rules of e-mail marketing so that they’ll propose the content that best match every person’s interests.