Enhancing Email Outreach by Leveraging AI

Have you ever wondered why some emails stand out in the constantly cluttered mailbox? If you are not new to subtle emailing techniques, you know it’s all about personalized communication, excellent content and smart formatting. They are the fundamentals that make all the difference.

But this sounds rather difficult, doesn’t it? There’s simply so much to do. These days, artificial intelligence (AI) can help do all this and do it fast. 

Let’s explore the ways you can enhance your email outreach strategy using AI! 

Why should you use AI for email outreach?

Let’s delve into some of the main reasons why integrating AI into your email outreach efforts can be a game-changer for your marketing endeavors:

• It saves time — the kind of automation provided by AI helps execute various tasks much faster, including drafting emails, segmenting recipients, scheduling sends, and even responding to simple inquiries. Marketing teams therefore have more time to focus on other important aspects of their work, which contributes to a better company culture.
• It’s cost-effective — when you automate tasks as described above, you can reduce the need for manual work or hiring additional staff to manage your email campaigns, which can lead to significant cost savings.
• It helps resolve creative blocks — AI can help overcome creative blocks by providing suggestions for subject lines, email content, and even design elements based on past successful campaigns. 
• It learns from customer behavior — analytics tools powered by AI technology are able to  analyze customer behavior. Information like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates helps marketing teams identify patterns that can be used to optimize future email campaigns.

If you don’t know where to start, the great thing about AI tools is that there are many free ones available for marketers who are new to using this technology in email outreach. Tools like ChatGPT or Jasper AI often offer basic features that can help you learn how AI can enhance your email marketing efforts without any initial investment.

How AI helps email outreach: best practices

Without further ado, here are some of the best practices used for email outreach and the AI tools that can help you implement them.

Targeting a specific audience

Before you start crafting your emails, you need to make sure they will be reaching the right people. A focused audience is essential if you want your email outreach to yield successful results, and the best way to achieve this is through email segmentation.

Marketing experts are already familiar with the benefits of segmentation: it allows you to target certain groups with relevant content by grouping your audience according to where they live, what they like and how they behave. However, you can employ AI-powered solutions like Segment to automate and improve audience segmentation. 

Simply put, AI technology can guarantee that your emails are specifically tailored to each of your target groups’ specific requirements. Once you enter the necessary segmentation parameters into an AI-powered segmentation tool, it automatically begins sorting your email contacts according to those parameters, and even helps you create personalized content for each of those groups.

Addressing your readers’ personal needs

For years, personalization has been the name of the game when it comes to effective digital marketing. One-size-fits-all messaging simply does not cut it when you’re competing against hundreds of other brands and competitors in your industry. In order to become and stay memorable to your audience, you need to focus on customizing and tailoring your approach.

The benefits of personalization are endless, but the process of getting enough information to make it possible can be quite convoluted and demanding. Again, this is where AI tools come in to help. 

Personalization engines like Dynamic Yield use AI-driven recommendations with testing and optimization features. This tool has a nifty functionality called Audience Manager that enables teams to efficiently analyze insights from their audience traffic, pinpoint different customer behaviors and preferences, and then integrate those into their strategies and campaigns.

Using compelling subject lines

According to a recent survey, a third of recipients will open an email only if they like its subject line.

Therefore, it is clear that your email’s subject line is one of the main factors that can make or break your whole campaign efforts. Here are some of the ways that AI tools can help you with this:

• Generate personalized and attention-grabbing subject lines with a tool such as Phrasee
• Test how your subject lines perform with subject line testers
• Analyse customer churn with AI to track and improve your open rates

Producing engaging content

Just like with your subject line, you need to hold your readers’ attention with content that is interesting, relevant and helpful. According to a study published by HubSpot, email messages should ideally be between 50 and 125 words long. Therefore, it is also important to avoid sending long and tedious emails. 

Nowadays, there is a wide range of AI-powered content creation tools that can help you with this. These tools are able to quickly and easily produce compelling content based on prompts you feed them with. With some additional intervention and proofreading on your end, you can get tons of great material that you can use in your emails, on social media, your websites, and more.

One such tool is the free AI email writer by Close, whose purpose is to help marketers write emails with a gripping twist. This is the result it delivered when given the prompt about a language school, generated in no more than a few seconds:

Providing value for the readers

Another important aspect of successful email outreach is reciprocity. If you do someone a favor, they will want to return it. So, if you share something useful with your recipients, they are bound to take note of it and continue opening your emails in the future.

Offering gifts can be a great way to start building relationships with your potential and existing customer base. You could include a link to an eBook, a membership, or a course they might want to attend. On special occasions, like holidays or the anniversary of your brand, you can take it up a notch by providing loyalty-based discounts and other types of perks depending on your general offer.

Earlier on, we mentioned that AI can help resolve creative blocks. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT can provide you with new ideas for something like a special email campaign quickly and easily:

Optimizing your emails for mobile devices

Nowadays, it is an absolute must to optimize emails for mobile viewing. According to eMarketer, 55% of emails are opened on mobile devices, so making sure they look great on smaller screens is crucial.

AI-driven tools have completely transformed the process of analyzing our devices and our online behavior. For example, services like Litmus automatically optimize email layouts for different screen widths. The tool comes with an intuitive email builder that lets you preview and test your emails on different devices:

Conclusion

There are many things you can do to improve your email outreach efforts, and AI tools are a great supplement to your overall outreach strategy.

However, note that AI still can’t do anything completely on its own. It still needs a human’s keen eye for detail to fine-tune its outputs in order to achieve the most optimal results.

With that in mind, we hope this article will help you get on board and steer your business toward new horizons and awesome suc