AI Email Marketing: How to Use It Effectively [Research + Tools]

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Email marketing is integral to any marketing strategy because it’s a great way to generate leads and convert audiences.

Whether you’re creating your first strategy or looking to modify your process, AI email marketing tools can help you save time, optimize your strategy, and meet your email goals.

In this piece, I’ll go over how AI email marketing tools work, new data about how marketers currently use AI for email marketing, and a list of tools you can leverage in your role.

Table of Contents

What is AI email marketing?
Why should you use AI email marketing?
What are the challenges of AI in email marketing?
How Marketers Are Using AI in Email Marketing [New Research]
15 AI Email Marketing Tools

What is AI email marketing?

AI email marketing is a machine-learning-powered process that helps marketers create email campaigns that reach the right audiences at the right time with the right messages.

AI email marketing tools use data (like your historical performance data) to help you optimize your email strategy, automation to help you save time on repetitive tasks (like triggering an email workflow), and generative AI to help you create email content.

When using AI in email marketing, you can do things like:

Analyze past email performance to identify how to optimize your email strategies, like the best time to send your emails or the subject lines that get the most clicks.
Compile email analytics so you understand the health of your campaigns.
Trigger email workflows after people take a specific action.
Clean up your email lists to improve deliverability.
Write compelling copy that speaks to your audience.
Personalize email content to specific audience segments.

Some tools have one specific function, like a generative AI email tool, while others offer multiple features.

Why should you use AI in email marketing?

I’ve found that the most significant benefit of using AI in email marketing is that it saves time while improving performance. The routine processes you spend time on can happen instantly, and you can launch your optimized campaigns faster.

Most AI email marketing tools are also powered by machine learning, meaning that they use data points (from your business and sometimes your industry) to help you optimize your email strategy.

You won’t be left to guess what works best because the AI can look at your past emails, and you can benchmark your performance against competitors to see where you can improve.

If you’re interested in learning more about the impact of AI on marketing, check out this Marketing Against The Grain episode about marketing opportunities that AI unlocks for business.