Contextual Content and AI: The Wingmen for Email Marketing Campaigns

Contextual Content and AI: The New Wingmen for Email Marketing Campaigns

Sudipto Ghosh

March 24, 2018

The Performance of Your Email Marketing Campaigns Hold the Key to Measure How Well Buyers Respond to New Omnichannel Experiences and Preferences Offered to Them

AI and personalization are definitely on the horizon for email marketers in 2018! According to the Email Marketing Industry Census 2017, by Econsultancy in association with Adestra, optimizing mobile email is the most trending technology for marketers to acquire, engage and retain their customers. With a certain overhaul coming to email marketing in 2018, I think AI and contextual content for personalization would drive better ROI for marketers.

Here’s how you can run smooth email marketing campaigns with contextual content and AI as your wingmen.

Email Interactivity based on Social Feeds

There lies a huge opportunity in 2018 for the email marketers. Email marketing campaigns could leverage personal data, AI, and contextual marketing strategies to build a mailable ‘micrsoite’ that not just makes inbox look visually attractive, but also engaging. Heard about website optimization? How about bringing that to the email inboxes! I know Email Monks builds some really cool and scary mailable ‘microsites’.

Not Just Any Content, But Dynamic Content

In 2018, email marketers should look for ways to make their emails looks more dynamic and interactive. Interactivity could include playing a short video, a live-streaming event, or even the first survey that you want your customers to fill in for you. As long as you keep it meaningful and concise, the email interactivity performance would make some sense to execute and repeat success.

According to a Yes Lifecycle Marketing report, personalized subject lines are still the best way to catch a subscriber’s attention. Personalized email subject lines generate 50% higher open rates, 58% higher CTOs, and nearly 2.5 times the unique click rates of subject lines without personalization.

For example, when I reviewed local ice cream parlor and reviewed on a social media platform, I was flooded with emails featuring their “New flavors”, events and franchise management schemes! One email even invited to their manufacturing and processing plant. That’s crazy, but I liked the idea of involving the customers in the business.

The contextual content was mesmerizing.

In a recent interview, Ivy Shtereva, Director, Marketing and Marketing Operations – Yes Lifecycle Marketing, said, “Consumers today span a handful of generations that are defined by vastly different experiences and preferences. Marketers must understand these nuances in order to optimize their audience’s experience and maximize their engagement and conversion rates. For example, Millennials are more likely than any generation to have made a purchase on Amazon in the past month (79 percent), followed by Generation X at 69 percent. With this in mind, retailers could adjust their communication to Millennials who are likely shopping for similar products on Amazon.”

So, social media monitoring and integrating it with your CRM/Email automation stack really means that you have interactivity at play.

AI to increase your Open Rate!

Yes, you can do that. Email marketing campaigns can boost their performance by simply ensuring that their email newsletters are created based on the subscriber’s data. Then, AI takes on as it analyses predictive behavior to create emails and other forms of communication with the best engagement potential.

For example, SendPulse helps email marketers create customized segmentation and personalization narrowed to a granular level for newsletter engagement. For making customer-level interaction on service quality to integrating with social and mobile messaging platforms, SendPulse brings in AI to make email marketing look simple.

Read More: Is GDPR Really Changing Ad Tech?

Respect Data: Grow your Email Marketing Legacy with a Safe Launching Pad

While AI and contextual marketing in email campaigns would continue to throw some surprises, data privacy issues remain a big concern. Respecting personal data should be at the core of your email marketing strategy. More so, if you fall under the jurisdiction of GDPR. What’s voluntary in marketing technologies reap better results and customer experience than the ones that are imposed.

In an era of mobile-first and omnichannel optimization, email marketing software and automation technology companies have some really cool things to show the customers. Bring it on!