The world of digital marketing has given rise to many marketing channels. Email marketing still tops the list as a crucial marketing tool for small and medium businesses for its direct approach and cost-effective methodology. As reported by eMarketer, more than 80% of marketers consider email as the most effective way of gaining prospective consumers and retaining the current ones. The success of an email campaign directly depends on the approach that is chosen. The key is to craft content that people will respond to.
The advent of machine learning has made the concept of email marketing much easier. Though both AI and machine learning are relatively new technologies, their impact on email campaigns is highly apparent. In this article, I will be providing you insights on some of the ways in which machine learning shapes email marketing.
Let us first understand the term ‘Machine Learning.’
What is Machine Learning?
Machine learning refers to machines being able to learn by themselves without being explicitly programmed. It is an application of AI which enables systems to learn and improve from experience automatically. While working with machine learning, various sets of algorithms are required. These algorithms use a set of training data to enable computers to learn.
1. Smart Segmentation
Customizing the email experience of your subscribers refers to gaining a clear understanding that the behaviors and interests of each of them differ. Thus, it is necessary to group them individually and send out emails to each customer separately. Categorizing your subscribers based on factors such as geographies, demographics, psychographics, and behavior is known as segmentation. Email list segmentation lets you garner more ideas and conversations to enhance customer engagement. Machine learning and AI help speed up the process by helping in easy identification of hidden details, purchase patterns, and the behavior of your subscribers more accurately and effectively segments them into lists, thus helping you save time and resources.
2. Prudent Personalization
The best email marketing campaign must be one that focuses on creating emails that seem less machine-generated and more human. Machine learning and AI technologies will help marketers analyze customer behavior and examine their interests in producing data-driven insights. This helps send personalized or tailored emails to each user.
According to a report published by eConsultancy, 74 percent of marketers believe that targeted personalization has been helpful in increasing overall consumer engagement rates. There is another study that suggests that 82% of retailers experienced a growth in their open rates through email personalization, whereas, 75% of respondents are of the opinion that it generates the maximum click-through rates.
Machine learning helps personalize your email strategy. It suggests the type of email that will resonate the most with your targeted customers at a personalized level. Asking subscribers to set their preferences while signing up or when they get their welcome email is the simplest way to gather this information.
3. Product Recommendation
Sending personalized product and service recommendations to consumers has shown an increase in customer loyalty, and is also known to improve conversion and engagement rates. As per a study that was done by McKinsey, 74 percent of people watched on Netflix, whereas 35 percent purchased on Amazon based on product recommendations. Machine learning algorithms can help create such personalized marketing tactics. Machine learning helps marketers analyze purchase patterns, consumer’s browsing behavior, and online activity to send personalized product or service recommendations in real-time to their subscribers, boost conversions, improve engagements, and increase sales.
4. Body Copy and Subject Lines Optimization
The subject line and body copy of an email play a major role in deciding the success or failure of a campaign. The sentences of an email body must be strong and bold enough to persuade targeted consumers to open your email. A clearly defined call-to-action (CTA) and an enticing body copy are essential to drive specific actions. The concept of machine learning makes use of data-driven insights to evaluate which body copy, subject lines, and CTAs will drive positive results and engage the users. These are capable of customizing subject lines that are 95 percent effective than those written by humans. With machine learning, marketers can create subject lines within seconds, which would otherwise take hours to compose. Machine learning helps determine what resonates with your audience, based on your email campaign history, for developing optimized subject lines and body copy by adopting natural language technology.
Conclusion
Email marketing campaigns are always time-consuming and complicated. It requires manual adjustments and examination of consumer data on a large scale. Thanks to machine learning, dealing with these complicated marketing jobs has become much more straightforward. It lets marketers achieve results that would otherwise not be possible. Machine learning is transforming the world of marketing for the better. If you haven’t started learning about machine learning and the ways in which it can help improve marketing to a great extent, there is no better time to start than now.
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