The Future of Email Marketing: How to Maximize Profits with AI Automation
This AI Assistant Will Handle Your Email So You Don't Have To
Email marketing is one of the highest returning activities for businesses. But it does require a significant time investment to see results. Between reading, responding to, and sending emails, it's easy to get bogged down in the busywork.
That's why more marketers are embracing artificial intelligence to automate the repetitive parts of managing email. With the right AI tools, you can save dozens of hours per week that can be reinvested into high-value activities that grow your business and improve your bottom line.
In this comprehensive guide, I'll explain how you can use AI automation to maximize the results from your email marketing and make more money.
Save Time Reading and Summarizing Emails
One of the biggest time sucks of email marketing is reading through long messages and chains to understand what they're about. Just a handful of emails can eat up your morning when you could be working on something more productive.
AI automation can help by providing summaries of emails so you know the key details without having to read walls of text. Rather than skimming through each email, you can review the summaries and only open the emails that require further attention.
This is perfect for things like promotional emails from companies, outreach emails proposing partnerships, or inquiries from prospective customers. The AI will condense these long-form messages into concise summaries that give you the gist so you can decide if a full read and response is warranted.
Here are some powerful ways AI can summarize emails for you:
- Browser Extensions: Tools like Otto summarize emails directly in your inbox so you can view summaries as you scroll through messages.
- IFTTT: This automation platform can work with summarization APIs like Resoomer to send you summaries.
- Zapier: Similar to IFTTT, Zapier can connect email apps to summarizers to automatically create summaries.
- Make by Anthropic: This versatile workflow automation tool can watch your Gmail inbox and run new messages through summarizers like ChatGPT, sending notifications with summaries.
I recommend Make as one of the easiest automation platforms for summarizing emails. Once connected to your Gmail, you can set up a workflow like:
1. New email arrives in inbox
2. Make scans inbox
3. Make sends email text to AI summarizer (ChatGPT)
4. ChatGPT returns a concise summary
5. Make sends summary to you via notification
This allows you to review summaries directly in Make and open the full emails if needed. Make's visual workflow builder makes it simple to set up with no coding required.
You can also filter Make to only summarize long emails over a certain word count or emails containing certain keywords. This prevents it from creating unnecessary summaries.
The time savings from not having to read every word of every email really starts to compound. Instead of spending all morning in your inbox, you can review summaries and handle the emails that matter.
Automate Personalized Email Sequences
Sending one-to-one personalized emails is an extremely effective marketing tactic. Open and click-through rates are significantly higher when content is tailored to the reader.
But personalizing emails does not scale well. Doing it manually for hundreds or thousands of subscribers will take up all of your time.
This is where AI automation comes in. Rather than writing each email individually, you can create templates that auto-populate with personalized content for each recipient.
Here are some ways to leverage AI for personalized email:
- Email merge tags - Create templates with merge tags that fill in names, locations, past purchases, interests, etc.
- AI writing - Use a platform like Jasper that integrates with your CRM to auto-generate paragraphs of text tailored to the recipient.
- Dynamic content - Tools like BeeHiiV and Customer.io allow you to dynamically swap in content blocks based on subscriber attributes.
- Segmentation - Break your list into segments to send different versions of emails to each group.
When combined, these AI capabilities allow you to set up personalized sequences at scale. You won't be manually writing each email, but subscribers will feel like you did.
For example, make an email series focused on subscriber education. The AI can pull in:
- Their name
- Location-specific examples
- Past purchases from your store
- Product recommendations based on interests
This level of personalization improves engagement and conversion rates. But the AI does all the hard work of stringing together customized content for each subscriber.
Make is one of the best all-in-one platforms for automating personalized sequences. It has tools for:
- Email templates with merge tags
- Integrations with data sources like CRMs
- AI writing through ChatGPT
- Dynamic content blocks
- Segmentation and filters
With Make, you can map out a complete sequence with emails tailored to subscribers based on their attributes and engagement. This removes the monotonous manual personalization work while still delighting subscribers with relevant messages.
Automate Response Emails
Answering customer emails quickly and thoughtfully is essential. But coming up with unique responses to common questions is challenging at scale.
Rather than writing every response from scratch yourself, use AI to automate and assist with response emails:
- Chatbots - Tools like Chatfuel allow you to build conversational chatbots that can respond to frequently asked questions.
- Templates - Create templates with merge tags that auto-populate with customer data when responding.
- AI writing - Use assistants like Jasper to generate initial drafts that you can edit before sending.
- Auto-responders - Set up automated out-of-office, welcome, and follow-up messages when appropriate.
With the right mix of templates and AI assistance, you can respond to customers faster without sacrificing quality. This improves the customer experience and builds loyalty.
Make is great for response automation because you can connect chatbots, leverage ChatGPT for writing, and build sequences of triggered emails.
For example, when a customer emails with a shipping delay question, Make could:
1. Recognize this type of inquiry based on keywords
2. Pull up the customer’s order data
3. Send details to ChatGPT to generate a draft response
4. Add the draft to an email template formatted with the customer’s name and order info
5. Send the response to the customer
This allows you to respond promptly with messages customized for each customer. And it takes the manual work out of crafting thoughtful replies.
Over time, Make's machine learning will continue to improve at categorizing customer emails and providing appropriate responses. This gives you an automated assistant for handling customer communications.
The Power of Automating Email Outreach
AI automation takes the repetitive grunt work out of email marketing. Rather than manually reading, personalizing, and responding, you can use technology to:
- Summarize long emails so you know what they’re about
- Set up personalized sequences that delight subscribers
- Assist with drafting and sending tailored responses
This allows you to be hyper-efficient with email, reaching more subscribers without burning out.
An automation platform like Make is perfect because it centralizes email capabilities:
- Connectivity to email providers like Gmail
- Workflows that trigger actions based on inbox events
- AI through integrations with tools like ChatGPT
- Sequences for sending drip campaigns and lifecycle emails
With Make's drag-and-drop workflow builder, anyone can automate their email process without coding skills.
And the time savings are substantial. The hours wasted on manual email tasks can instead be allocated to high-value activities:
- Strategizing new campaigns
- Creating high-converting landing pages
- Analyzing performance data
- Improving products/services
- Networking with partners
Rather than acting as an email robot, use technology to hand off the repetitive work while you focus on big-picture growth.
Embrace the Future of Automated Email Marketing
Email marketing will only become more competitive. To see the greatest returns, you need to be efficient with your time while still providing a stellar experience.
AI automation is the solution that allows you to manage email smarter, not harder. With the techniques outlined in this guide, you can:
- Review email summaries rather than reading every word
- Send personalized sequences tailored to each subscriber’s needs
- Respond to customers faster with AI writing assistance
This enables you to accomplish in 5 hours what used to take 15 hours. That extra time can be invested directly into growing your business.
Tools like Make, ChatGPT, and others make it easy to get started with automation even if you have no technical experience. You can build workflows and sequences with drag-and-drop simplicity.
So embrace the power of AI to maximize your email marketing profits. The future of email is automation. With the right platform, you can offload the repetitive tasks to technology and focus on the big picture strategy that moves the revenue needle.