L’email face à l’intelligence artificielle by VISEO

Through leadership

Email in the face of artificial intelligence

You probably already know this: reaching your customers' email box is becoming more and more difficult, even though email remains a channel that is very present in marketing strategies.

 

According to arobase.org, studies estimate that there will be 4.2 billion email users worldwide in 2022, more than half of the population. It is also expected that approximately 333 billion emails will be sent every day (excluding spam).

 

Over the last few years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been in constant development. No field escapes it: chatbot, predictive analysis, image recognition. The main automation marketing publishers are starting to enrich their product with the AI features: Send Time Optimization, individualized product recommendation, segmentation of your database according to the engagement potential of openers and clickers, etc. Companies must then develop new strategies to persuade consumers.

 

A marriage of convenience: email marketing and artificial intelligence

 

Email is used by 83% of companies in their communication strategy, and 95% of them confirm that it generates a very high ROI (return on investment). The ROI of social networks, for example, is three times lower than that of email. Studies show that email is 40 times more effective than social networks for the acquisition of customers. All these figures prove that email can promote brands' products and services better.

 

 

The challenge for marketing specialists is to focus on the human aspect, to work on the relationship to generate emotion or personalized experiences, before thinking about doing business. Brands must create in their audience a sense of belonging, although this is complicated by the increasing number of messages received each day. Customers want to be able to choose their preferred channel and their communication preferences in terms of content or marketing pressure. An emphasis on dynamically personalized content and interactive content formats makes it possible to respond to them.

 

 

First, you need to translate your business objectives into a marketing action plan. Then, it is necessary to segment the databases into different clusters based on the analysis of declarative CRM data and multi-channel behavioral data. Declared data are collected directly from the customer, mainly via a form (newsletter subscription, account creation, lead generation, etc.)

 

Behavioral data are obtained from on- or off-line behaviors (products/pages viewed, store visits, customer service contacts, etc.). Companies will analyze behaviors on all touch points of the customer journey. Ideally, anonymous data such as cookies or ID analytics should be reconciled with CRM data. This is what is known as the famous 360° view of your customers. The email channel is ideal for exploiting this data and performing numerous tests.

 

What are the prospects for email marketing in terms of artificial intelligence?

 

Smart email is the latest trend. The idea is based on the context of the recipient: to send the right message to the right person at the right time!  AI allows automatic segmentation to make tomorrow's email hyper-personalized, interactive, and relevant. By cross-checking all data collected, intelligent machine learning algorithms find correlations between the profiles of site visitors, customers, leads and/or recipients, and are able to automatically define segments with shared criteria. Algorithmic analysis of behavioral history, combined with many other segmentation criteria (geographical, identity, etc.), makes it possible to send targeted, personalized communication to a group of individuals with common habits and likes that are automatically identified. With AI, you can create automated one-to-one campaigns.

 

Publishers such as Releevant offer to dynamically contextualize the content of the email according to the location of your IP at the time of opening. The content of the message is adapted in real time for each recipient according to the location or the weather (live content).           

 

Persado pushes an extremely well-prepared and personalized textual discourse per segment or per individual in order to incite a purchase. Thanks to Persado's Artificial Intelligence, brands succeed in finding the right words to persuade customers and prospective customers. In addition, Persado's AI does not stop at text but allows the best choice in terms of photos on emails, banner ads, Facebook Ads, notifications, etc.

 

In concrete terms, advertisers who use artificial intelligence generate 41% more revenue than those who still rely on manual customization methods.

 

In terms of campaign engagement and performance, one of the many features of Salesforce Marketing Cloud Einstein allows you to segment your audience according to their expected level of engagement. Based on an algorithm integrating AI, Einstein analyzes your customers' behaviors over the previous months to send them the right content at the right time.

 

Only 6% of advertisers currently use advanced features driven by artificial intelligence, while 51% of the market leaders already use artificial intelligence, and 27% plan to do so over the next 12 months. Email marketing continues to develop. It is very practical, adaptable, economical, and its KPIs are easy to measure. It meets several of your growth objectives: acquisition, activation, revenue increase, or loyalty.

 

 

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