6 Best Practices for AI-Driven Email Personalization
Email Marketing
Explore AI-driven email personalization strategies that enhance engagement and boost customer relationships through smart segmentation and predictive analytics.
Want to make your emails stand out? AI can help you create personalized emails that connect with your audience and boost engagement. Here’s how:
Smart Segmentation: Automatically group customers based on behavior and preferences.
Predict Actions: Use AI to forecast what your customers need next.
Dynamic Content: Customize emails with relevant products and messages.
Perfect Timing: Send emails when your audience is most likely to engage.
Faster Testing: Quickly test and improve email elements with AI insights.
Data Privacy: Keep customer data secure and compliant with regulations.
These strategies can increase click rates by 139% and open rates by 26%. Ready to dive in? Let’s explore each in detail.
How to Create Personalized Email Campaigns with AI ...
1. Set Up Smart Customer Segments
AI-driven customer segmentation is changing the game for email targeting. By analyzing detailed patterns in customer behavior, AI creates precise and actionable customer groups.
Build E-commerce Customer Groups
AI goes beyond basic segmentation by examining purchasing habits, website activity, and even social media feedback to create detailed customer profiles.
Recent studies reveal that 73% of customers expect personalized experiences.
Chuck Schaeffer, CEO of Johnny Grow, highlights the impact of this approach:
"Defining business processes by customer type or segment is extremely effective in growing revenues and margins from high-contribution customers and lowering cost-to-serve for low or negative-margin customers."
Lisa Richards, CEO of the Candida Diet, saw clear results after introducing AI segmentation in January 2024. Her method included:
Transaction history
Quiz responses
Browsing behavior
Tailored content delivery
The results? A 20% increase in customer engagement with their content. Richards elaborates:
"Our AI engine uses customer data, such as transaction history, quiz responses, and browsing behavior, to segment customers by their candida severity and unique needs and prepare content chunked for their context."
Keep Segments Current
Creating customer groups is just the start. Keeping them updated is just as important. Static segments can quickly lose relevance, but AI solves this by continuously refreshing customer groups based on real-time behavior. This ensures your email campaigns stay relevant and effective.
62% of business leaders report improved customer retention thanks to AI-driven personalization. Plus, marketing teams using AI tools save an average of 5 hours per week on segmentation tasks.
To maintain effective segmentation:
Continuously collect and update customer data
Keep data clean for accurate AI processing
Use AI to monitor and adjust groups automatically
This dynamic approach not only keeps your email campaigns relevant but also reduces the time and effort spent on manual segmentation. AI makes personalized, impactful marketing easier than ever.
2. Use AI to Predict Customer Actions
AI takes your understanding of customer behavior to the next level by analyzing data and spotting patterns that can predict future actions. This goes beyond basic segmentation, offering deeper insights into what your customers are likely to do next.
Predict Customer Needs
AI can identify patterns in customer behavior that signal their intentions, allowing you to send timely emails that meet their needs before they even express them.
For example, 74% of marketers say targeted personalization boosts customer engagement rates. This shows how powerful AI-driven predictions can be in improving the effectiveness of your email campaigns.
Here are some ways AI can predict customer behavior:
Purchase timing: AI looks at past buying habits to estimate when a customer might make their next purchase.
Churn risk: AI flags customers who may be losing interest, giving you a chance to re-engage them.
Product interest: AI monitors browsing activity to identify what products customers are eyeing.
These insights allow you to create campaigns that respond to customer actions in real time.
Build Targeted Campaigns
To make the most of AI predictions, follow these steps:
Connect your data sources: Sync your email platform with tools like your CRM, website analytics, and social media to get a complete view of your customers.
Define clear goals: Set specific objectives for your campaigns, such as improving conversion rates or increasing customer retention.
Optimize continuously: Use AI to analyze campaign performance in real time and make adjustments to keep your emails relevant and effective.
Experts predict that AI could generate $14 trillion in additional revenue and increase profitability by 38% by 2035. This highlights the massive potential of integrating AI predictions into your email marketing efforts.
3. Create Custom Email Content
AI is changing the way email content is tailored by using customer data to deliver highly personalized experiences. It goes beyond just adding a name - it’s about addressing preferences and behaviors unique to each person.
Show Relevant Products
AI can predict what products will grab a customer’s attention by analyzing their data. This includes purchase history, browsing habits, category favorites, size and style preferences, and even price sensitivity. For instance, if someone often checks out outdoor gear, the AI might highlight items like hiking boots or camping equipment in their email recommendations.
But it’s not just about product suggestions. AI fine-tunes every part of your emails for better engagement.
Adjust Content Per Customer
AI can personalize every element of an email, from subject lines and copy to calls-to-action and visuals. A great example is Netflix, which uses viewing data to send recommendations tailored to each user’s unique tastes.
To make the most of AI-powered personalization:
Link your CRM, website analytics, and social media to create a complete customer profile.
Experiment with different content variations to see what works best for various groups.
Keep an eye on engagement metrics - like open rates, clicks, and conversions - to measure how well personalization is working.
4. Pick the Best Send Times
AI helps fine-tune email timing by analyzing customer habits, ensuring messages land when recipients are most likely to engage.
Send Across Time Zones
About 30% of email opens happen within the first hour of delivery. This makes timing a critical factor for the success of your email campaigns.
Here’s how to improve delivery across time zones:
Use engagement data to pinpoint when individual customers typically check their email. For U.S.-based campaigns, Eastern Time can serve as a good starting point.
Treat the Eastern Time Zone as a baseline to align your campaigns effectively.
By using these strategies, you can better align email sends with customer routines, boosting engagement.
Match Customer Schedules
AI tools analyze various data points - like past open and click rates, device usage, email client preferences, location, and engagement history - to determine the best times to send emails. Research shows that 75% of users open emails during just seven specific hours each week.
AI systems continuously refine these insights by tracking metrics such as:
How long it takes recipients to open emails after they’re sent
Engagement levels at different times of the day
Response trends across the week
Seasonal shifts in behavior
When combined with personalized content, these timing strategies can deliver an ROI as high as 4,400%.
5. Test and Improve Emails
AI takes email testing to a whole new level by making it a data-driven process that delivers faster insights and better results.
Speed Up Testing
With AI, testing becomes much more efficient. Instead of running basic A/B tests one at a time, AI allows for multivariate testing. This means you can test multiple elements - like subject lines, content blocks, call-to-action buttons, layouts, images, and personalization - simultaneously.
"Since we build rapid prototypes quite often, using AI has helped us code A/B tests faster and without bugs. We're able to produce rapid prototypes quickly, increasing our testing volume and rapidly validating hypotheses." - Jon MacDonald, CEO of The Good
For instance, Airbnb's relevance team saw a 6% boost in booking conversions by using AI to analyze over 250 test variations. Managing this level of testing manually would be nearly impossible.
Once testing speeds up, you can use the insights gained to improve your email campaigns.
Apply Test Results
AI doesn't just collect data; it helps you make sense of it. It identifies patterns and offers actionable suggestions to fine-tune your future campaigns.
Take Ashley Furniture as an example. They used an AI platform to analyze customer experiences, which led to a redesigned checkout process. The result? A 15% increase in conversion rates and a 4% drop in bounce rates.
"The key is to use AI responsibly; I use it to process data more efficiently, automate repetitive tasks, and be a more concise communicator. I embrace it for the doing aspects of my job but never for the thinking aspects." - Tracy Laranjo, CRO Strategist
AI also keeps an eye on your campaign performance and adjusts elements in real time. For example, when testing subject lines, AI can spot trends in what works best and create new options based on those successes. This kind of refined testing leads to more accurate personalization. Amma, a pregnancy tracker app, used AI algorithms to optimize push notifications, boosting user retention by 12% on both iOS and Android platforms.
To get the most out of AI-driven testing, focus on these steps:
Set clear testing goals
Connect your email platform with data tools like CRM or website analytics
Keep an eye on AI insights for trends
Use successful elements in future campaigns
Leverage AI suggestions for creating new content
It’s worth noting that 27% of marketers are already using AI tools to brainstorm and test email content. AI isn’t just a tool - it’s an advantage.
6. Protect Customer Data
As AI enhances targeting and testing, keeping customer data secure is more important than ever. With AI-driven email personalization on the rise, safeguarding data is critical for both compliance and maintaining trust.
Get Clear Permission
Transparency about how AI uses customer data helps build trust with your audience. For example, MailerLite communicates this clearly:
"We use advanced technology, like AI, to tailor the content of our emails to your interests, ensuring you receive the most relevant information".
When collecting data for AI-powered personalization, make sure to:
Offer clear and explicit opt-in options.
Explain how AI processes customer data.
Provide easy ways for subscribers to update their preferences.
Keep consent records up to date.
Include simple opt-out options for personalization.
Your privacy policy should clearly explain how AI handles customer data. This not only builds trust but also ensures you're meeting legal requirements.
Follow Data Rules
Proper data protection practices are essential for staying compliant with regulations and maintaining effective personalization. Laws like GDPR and the EU AI Act directly impact email marketing, making it crucial to handle data responsibly.
Here are some important steps:
Collect only the data you absolutely need.
Regularly review AI systems with human oversight.
Train your team on compliance and ethical data practices.
Keep detailed records of your privacy policies and practices.
Wrapping Up
Recent data highlights a clear trend: consumers increasingly expect personalized experiences, making AI-driven email personalization a game-changer for e-commerce. With tools like Neon Blue's AI-powered solutions, marketers can craft campaigns that genuinely connect with their audience on a large scale.
AI is reshaping email marketing by delivering precise, data-informed personalization. It analyzes customer behavior, fine-tunes campaign elements, and offers actionable insights to improve performance.
To recap, brands can leverage AI for advanced personalization through smart segmentation, predictive analytics, and dynamic content. This approach allows marketers to move past basic strategies and deliver experiences that truly engage their customers.
AI platforms also offer features like hyper-personalized content, automated campaign optimization, secure data management, and ongoing customer insights. Together, these capabilities help build stronger customer relationships and deliver measurable results.
