For the people who keep saying email is dead, your inbox must be a lonely place to hang out. For most, though, it’s overrun with emails from brands trying to get your attention, whether you asked for it or not. It can be frustrating to sort through the junk, but in that pile, there are usually one or two good messages that make the slog worthwhile. And people do click. Which is why 69% of marketers say email is still the backbone of their strategy.
That stat above is from Mailchimp’s The Revenue Blueprint: Strategies for Performance Obsessed Marketers. Email is considered essential because, unlike engaging on social networks, the brand owns the relationship and has direct access to valuable data about its customers and prospects. But just because it’s still essential doesn’t mean it needs a shake-up.
John Miller, the co-founder of the marketing automation platform Marketo, argues that the B2B marketing playbook (one he helped define) is outdated, including how marketers use email. Miller shared his ideas on how email marketing has to evolve at the MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum. His session, ‘How AI will make B2B email more authentic and personal at scale‘, examined what is wrong with email marketing today and how he sees it evolving with the help of AI.
Miller said that people have been saying that email is dead since 1989, but the truth is that there is no substitute for email today in B2B marketing. Not only does it provide you with a wealth of data on your customers, but it’s also scalable in a way that no other tool is. But that doesn’t mean the way marketers use it today is working. For most, it’s not.
The nurture campaign many brands use comes to mind as one tactic that needs to change. If a person fills in a form to get content, the general practice is to add them to an email nurture campaign that then sends them a series of emails designed to lead them down the path to conversion. Because when you fill out a form for an ebook, you are definitely showing intent to purchase, right? Wrong. Miller said that no amount of email pushes someone to buy.
Yet, the nurture campaigns continue.
So, if the current email playbook is dead, but email is more essential than ever before, how can we improve it? What can we do with email to show its value in the marketing mix?
Personalization is key
According to the Mailchimp study, performance-obsessed marketers make email marketing their primary focus, while “baseline” marketers (those who follow standard marketing practices) tend to focus more on social media, digital ads, and their websites. Performance-obsessed marketers are defined as “Top-tier marketers who experience substantial growth across key metrics by leveraging innovative tactics, advanced strategies, and cutting-edge technologies.”
What makes performance-obsessed marketers stand out in their use of email marketing? They use advanced email strategies such as targeted email and automated journeys. Eighty-seven percent use automation to manage email, including for content creation. Examples include generating personalized subject lines and creating dynamic content based on customer behavior. These marketers also use channels like SMS (56%) and chat (48%), which work nicely with email.
In his session, Miller discussed using email to build relationships. He quoted an ITSMA study that found 75% of executives will read unsolicited marketing materials that contain ideas that might be relevant to the business. Offering relevant content is a great way to personalize the email experience. It’s not about pushing someone down a conversion path but providing them with information that helps them in their job. It’s about the relationship, not the sale.
It’s not just the content shared that makes a personalized email. Litmus’s State of Email in Lifecycle Marketing found that personalization is a must-have, and it’s done in a number of ways:
- Subject line/preview text
- Dynamic content
- Personalization/merge tags
- AI-powered product and content recommendations
- Live/real-time content
Litmus also noted that hyper-personalization will become crucial to stand out in a crowded inbox. That’s where AI comes into play.
Using AI to improve email marketing
According to the Mailchimp report, you must be performance-obsessed to drive revenue and AI will play a big part in how email marketing happens. In the Mailchimp study, 85% of all marketers surveyed have plans or have already integrated AI tools into their organization.
Revenue leaders, a subset of performance-obsessed marketers, are using AI for scalable automation:
- 55% create content and power customization
- 51% target customers with customized content depending on their last interaction
- 48% run personalized marketing campaigns
- 47% map out customer journeys that adapt to individual behaviors and preferences.
Of course, while these are all great examples of deeper personalization using AI, some things must be in place for them to work. The Litmus report lists the biggest obstacle to successful email marketing as having the appropriate data for segmentation and personalization. Without the right data, even AI can’t personalize email accurately.
Miller talked about the Marketing Intelligence Engine, something we don’t have today, but will see in the future. This engine looks to be the future of marketing automation platforms, of which email is a large component. A marketing operations AI agent will help with building campaigns, streamlining lists and segments, and support continuous data hygiene, and a strategy optimizer will support intelligent orchestration such as one-to-one journey optimization, smart channels and time choice, and AI campaign suggestions.
We may not be here yet, but the work is happening already. Bloomreach is making strides in this area. As we said of the announcement of their AI, Loomi, and its ability to create full marketing campaigns:
If AI is the pilot, we actually believe you become the air-traffic controller. So, instead of being responsible for building a campaign, which you maybe very efficiently, could build 100 campaigns in a week or more using AI, we actually believe you should use AI to build 1000s, millions of campaigns. And then, if you think about the view of an air-traffic controller, you’re watching all of these campaigns, you’re absorbing the big metrics. So where is it green? Where is it red? Where are we stalled? Where are the challenges and giving you that opportunity for those uniquely human decisions?
If we allow AI to perform more of the operational work, it does leave marketers more time to think creatively about how to deliver better experiences to make their brand stand out, including in the inbox. They have more time to analyze and evaluate, to talk to customers and design email campaigns that work for those customers. Even if we allow AI to write the emails, marketers can still be the idea generators. As the Mailchimp report notes:
It’s all about figuring out how to let AI take care of the basics without losing that creative spark and strategic thinking that drives innovation.
My take
I suspect we are closer to seeing AI take on much of the operational work of creating email campaigns than some may think. Bloomreach is doing it for B2C, HubSpot is starting to bring in more AI and it’s only a matter of time before we see Salesforce deliver AI Agents for its marketing automation platforms.
To see this happen faster, marketing automation platforms must adopt AI more quickly. What’s slowing them down may be how they are built. Miller said that current marketing automation platforms can’t handle the unstructured content that AI needs to create more personalized experiences. AI agents will help here, as will better integration with data platforms like CDPs and data warehouses.
The marketing tools are changing, and AI is playing a greater role. Now, we need to see how the playbook needs to change and how the strategies can evolve to support both short-term goals and long-term brand building.
