The Marketing landscape is constantly changing as new technologies and platforms are being introduced. Although these changes have the potential to bring exciting new opportunities for marketers, email marketing still remains the king of the marketing kingdom. With a 4400% ROI and $44 for every $1 spent, email marketing is such an integral customer engagement channel that businesses from all industries are continuing to send more emails every day. The only problem is when that channel becomes misused or overused.

Today, the average person receives 120 emails per day which, taking into account the time needed to read all of them, is way too much. If we also consider the fact that almost 54% of all emails sent are automatically classified as spam, it is easy to conclude that irrelevant and generic emails do nothing except disconnect the bond between a business and its customers.

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Optimizing Email ROI with AI

Personalization and relevant content are just part of the equation, though. Businesses need to be careful not to neglect the human side in favour of generic robot-like marketing interactions. Marketers need to connect with their customers to create strong relationships – and what better way to do that than to use the customer data they already have.

According to research, the median number of data sources is said to grow from 10 in 2017 to 15 this year. While most businesses have more customer data than ever before, most of them are still struggling with how to put that data to good use.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) makes it very easy for marketers to predict trends and understand correlations between data and their customer behaviour. Rather than manually sift through multiple data sources, marketers can use AI to monitor the “health” of their customer base, personalize their marketing efforts and increase customer engagement and retention rates.

Consumer industries, such as high tech and retail, are the ones who can benefit the most from using AI in their marketing efforts. This is mostly because these industries have the highest number of digital interactions with their customers and, consequently, generate large amounts of data which AI can tap into.

One such example is Teleflora, a floral wire service company which brokers orders to local florists for delivery. Teleflora decided to run a series of predicted product affinity campaigns in which they promoted products based on what their customers were most likely to be interested in on Mother ́s Day. The result? Not only the campaign helped build brand loyalty and reduced cart churn, the AI-powered marketing campaign resulted in a 50% increase in the number of orders over the previous year.

Image Source : forbes.com

Another example of how businesses can benefit from AI is by creating email campaigns that will be sent automatically when triggered by a customer's specific behaviour. For instance, Asics, a Japanese multinational footwear manufacturer, utilized the power of AI to send out personalized emails to customers who abandoned their carts. The idea? Asics assumed that some of their customers abandoned their carts because they couldn't decide which pair of shoes they wanted. Instead of leaving it to chance, they sent a personalized email with product recommendations that were chosen based on their customers interest, thus making their purchase decision much easier.

By leveraging the right data from the right sources in the right way, email marketing can be personalized for every customer. Personalized email campaigns increase customer engagement by 74%, sales by 20% and open rate by 26% thus having the ability to transform and strengthen the relationship between a brand and its customers.

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Summary

Not all companies are on the same data-maturity level. But regardless of what that level is, almost every company has a large amount of valuable customer data that can be used in a better and more proactive way. What's more, companies don't need to wait until they have collected more data or wait for new marketing technologies and channels to arrive. With the help of AI, all companies that are gathering good customer data and interpreting it correctly can leverage that data to create highly personalized email marketing campaigns that have the power to completely reshape their customers´buying experience.