If you haven’t looked at your subscriber list retention lately, you may be surprised how many subscribers are churning continuously. There are plenty of options out there for great products, so consumers aren’t sticking around for crappy batch and blast email newsletters anymore. They expect each message in their inbox to be relevant, timely, and valuable… or else they’re leaving.

To be relevant, timely, and valuable, brands must segment, filter, personalize, and optimize email delivery. That’s impossible without the right toolsets, but thankfully, artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating marketers’ ability to develop living, breathing campaigns that continue to optimize themselves with machine learning (ML).

This will enable marketers to send messages at a pace their subscribers are comfortable with, with content that’s both personalized and engaging.

30% of companies all over the world will be using AI in at least one of the sales processes in 2020. By 2035, AI is expected to drive $14 trillion of additional revenue and a 38% rise in profitability!

In fact, 61% of email marketers claim that AI is the most critical aspect of their future data strategy. Here are seven ways that artificial intelligence is improving email marketing.

We’re not meeting AI’s full potential in email marketing… yet. In a Good, Better, Best approach to explaining AI in email marketing, we can break down the increasing sophistication and impact AI brings to email campaigns. Here’s how it might look:

AI’s entry-level capabilities in email marketing can significantly enhance content quality and efficiency. Generative AI can rewrite or suggest variations for email subject lines, preview text, body content, and calls to action based on industry best practices. This helps marketers improve engagement rates with relatively minimal setup and training. With generative AI, companies can test and deploy content that is polished and compelling without needing a dedicated copywriter for every campaign.

Example Impact: A retail brand utilizes generative AI to draft subject lines that A/B test well, leading to an uptick in open rates without requiring the time investment of writing each variant from scratch.

As AI is leveraged further, marketers can create dynamically personalized content that responds to each subscriber’s unique profile and preferences. This level incorporates data like browsing history, past purchases, and demographic information to tailor the message and the product recommendations and offers within the email. Dynamic content blocks can change based on location, time of day, and user behavior, making emails more relevant and individualized.

Example Impact: A media platform sends tailored B2C newsletters featuring recommended articles based on a subscriber’s past reading habits, increasing click-through rates (CTR) and boosting on-site engagement.

Companies use a proprietary language model in the most advanced applications that understand their specific products, services, and brand voice. The AI doesn’t just craft well-written content—it personalizes messages in a way that resonates deeply with the recipient and feels on-brand. It can also analyze past customer activity and predict future interactions, allowing for hyper-targeted segmentation. This AI-driven strategy doesn’t just improve email engagement; it identifies new customer segments and automates advanced lifecycle marketing based on potential customer behavior patterns.

Example Impact: A B2B company with a proprietary model analyzes each customer’s history both online and offline, then sends personalized, dynamic, and real-time emails on an optimized schedule with relevant, branded tips for increasing efficiency. The AI identifies upsell opportunities and recommends product upgrades with messaging that feels like it’s written by the brand itself, resulting in a marked increase in renewal rates.

While many email marketing platforms have incorporated generative AI, most stop at surface-level content creation. They often fail to deeply integrate brand-specific nuances, past customer behavior, and predictive insights. This leads to a one-size-fits-all approach that misses opportunities for differentiation and nuanced personalization. Brands that adopt AI thoughtfully can deliver campaigns beyond automation and drive conversions by anticipating and responding to customers’ needs. Those who settle for out-of-the-box generative AI miss out on the competitive advantage offered by a truly tailored AI strategy.

By leveraging AI in a more sophisticated and brand-aligned way, marketers can turn their email campaigns into a true extension of the brand experience, fostering stronger customer relationships and more significant growth.

Here’s the full infographic with detailed descriptions of how AI revolutionizes email marketing.

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Originally Published on Martech Zone: 7 Ways that AI is Revolutionizing Email Marketing