By definition, newsletter marketing is a cross between traditional direct marketing and digital marketing. It consists in sending emails to a large list of recipients to promote the products and services of a company.
This digital practice, known since the beginning of web marketing, is experiencing a revival thanks to the rise of artificial intelligence.
What role does AI play in digital marketing today?
In recent years, the increase in computing power of our computer tools has allowed the rise of artificial intelligence. Although it is still in its infancy, AI has already changed some business practices in depth and digital marketing is directly concerned.
Modern companies have already discovered many applications of AI. For example, it can be used to simulate the human gaze, and predict where the human eye will go first when opening a web page. This practice is called eye-tracking. Eye-tracking is very effective to boost the conversion rate of a blog page or an online store.
However, what interests us today is emailing. And if there is a precise field of digital that AI is turning upside down, it is the marketing newsletters. Indeed, a customer expects today from companies an unprecedented consideration.
Nowadays, customers have acquired the idea that they should be respected for who they are, as individuals with their own desires. Therefore, the challenge of newsletter marketing is to create the most personalized content possible. The more a company is able to send to its email list a newsletter adapted to each of its readers, the more it can hope for high conversion rates. And this is where AI plays a key role...
The different machine learning techniques
The development of AI in web marketing is part of a singular context. On the one hand, the evolution of digital tools allows marketers to easily glean large amounts of information about their prospects.
On the other hand, digital practices are becoming more and more important in our lives. Our way of following the news, or of creating human relationships, has changed with the new modes of communication. According to the report Digital 2022 report, 52.6 million French people are present on at least one social network. In this respect, it should be noted that connecting to a social network is a useful way to collect information about your newsletter subscribers.
In a broader sense, the web multiplies the ways to get information on the behavior of your prospects. According to the Statista report of 2021, 48.5 million French people, or 90% of Internet users, have purchased at least once online. Now, if for example, prospects are brought to your website thanks to your SEO strategy, it is possible to tag them with a cookie to analyze their behavior.
A machine learning algorithm is designed to be fed with all this information, coming from external sources. Typically, Kiliba can be integrated with a tool like Google Analytics for this purpose. Moreover, in the specific case of newsletter marketing, machine learning can also be fed with information from internal sources. For example, each newsletter campaign sent allows to see, in your email list, which subscriber opens which email, and which subscriber clicks on which link.
The centralization of all this information collected on your prospects allows you to feed the machine learning algorithms, and to perfect the artificial intelligence that depends on it. Let's see how this materializes in the context of newsletter marketing.
The benefits of AI to make your newsletters successful in marketing
As we mentioned earlier, AI is used in the context of marketing newsletters to achieve an essential objective: personalize the campaigns. On the one hand, this means working on the content of the emails. On the other hand, it involves working on the frequency of sending, which allows to put less pressure on the customers. In addition, AI has as a secondary virtue the automation of another important task of a marketing newsletter: segmentation.
Automatic segmentation
By continuously processing information about the subscribers of your email list, an AI can identify what distinguishes them and what brings them together. This eliminates the need to waste time segmenting a list, often imperfectly. AI performs much better than a human at creating precise groups of subscribers. This segmentation is very useful for a marketing team, which can use it to design new offers adapted to each type of customer.
Personalized emails thanks to algorithms
In addition, smart newsletter marketing software can take care of creating the content of your emails itself. This starts with the subject line. The subject line of an email is a crucial element for the success of a newsletter campaign. Indeed, it is the only reading of the subject line that can hold the attention of your recipients when they open their email box. An unsuitable subject line can considerably lower your opening rates.
In newsletter marketing, an AI can rely on past campaign series to find the best thing to write. And it will write it itself, convincingly, thanks to advances in autonomous natural text editing.
On the other hand, an intelligent newsletter marketing software is able to know the type of products of interest to each customer of your email list, on an individual scale. All you have to do is program a promotional campaign scenario, and the AI chooses for you the items to present to each of your recipients. With the help of predefined email templates, with integrated call to action and design, the productivity gain is considerable compared to manual processing.
Less pressure on customers and more loyalty
Finally, AI is an answer to the problem of marketing pressure. In direct marketing, we consider that the frequency of sending a newsletter is a crucial factor of its success.
- Send too many emails, and your subscribers feel oppressed and unsubscribe.
- Send too few emails, and your subscribers will forget or ignore you.
Finding the right balance is even more complex as the feeling of oppression varies from one customer to another. One customer may appreciate being kept informed of your company's news every day, while another may only want to receive one email a week.
For a human, having a personalized approach to the right sending frequency is almost impossible, especially on a list with thousands of recipients. Fortunately, AI is now able, through the continuous processing of information about your recipients, to manage the marketing pressure itself. The effect is undeniable: today, Kiliba has been able to show that its algorithm can achieve a threefold increase in click-through rates, compared to a standard newsletter campaign.
Conclusion
For concrete tips on how to implement AI in your newsletter marketing, you can consult our guide. You will find in the Kiliba marketing automation implementation guide valuable tips to increase the profitability of your campaigns.
You are on the verge of making a killing
