For years now, marketers have heeded warnings of email’s popularity declining. It’s overhyped, overused, and people are tired of it—or so we’ve been told.
The truth?
Email marketing works. Plain and simple. For every dollar you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $42, according to the Data and Marketing Association.
And for how tired consumers supposedly are of email, they sure are using email. Global email users are set to reach the 4.3 billion mark by 2023.
So, what do all these mixed messages mean for your email newsletter?
Email newsletters are dead. Long live email newsletters.
In all seriousness, building a loyal email audience can drive sales and create bottom line impact for your business. Every marketer’s dream is to build a following of brand evangelists—and the email newsletter is a tried-and-true way to get there.
Email is 40 times more effective at acquiring customers than Facebook and Twitter combined, and 89% of marketers say email is their principal lead generation channel.
So, your email newsletter is a relevant, lucrative opportunity—as long as you can continually grow subscribers. And while earning a newsletter audience can be a painstaking and slow process, it definitely doesn’t have to be. AI in email marketing helps marketers across industries build their newsletter list, and it can help you, too. Here’s how.
Use Artificial Intelligence to Create Better Newsletters
I promised you AI could help you earn subscribers easily, and I wasn’t lying. But there is one caveat. Ultimately, getting more subscribers comes down to sending better newsletters. The more value you offer in the way of high-quality content, the more subscribers you’ll get.
It is still much easier than you’d think to create better content with AI. Below are four ways to do just that.
1. Write high-performing email subject lines automatically.
How will people see the amazing content inside your newsletter if they never open it? Compelling subject lines solve this issue. One subset of AI is natural language generation, which allows machines to write human language. If it’s done correctly, it can draft subject lines that perform even better than what humans can write. Using specialized AI tools, you can also A/B test your subject lines for maximum performance.
2. Automate send times to improve your open rate.
AI is excellent at taking large amounts of data—like when each individual on your subscriber list most often opens their emails—and taking action on it faster and more effectively than a human could. When each person on your list receives your newsletter at the time they’re most likely to open it, they’ll get more value out of your content than if they quickly skimmed while clearing a mountain of unopened emails.
3. Create hyper-personalized newsletters.
Again, this kind of task is where AI truly shines. Can you imagine creating a weekly newsletter that is individualized for every single subscriber, based on what they like to read? This level of segmentation simply isn’t possible for humans to do at scale. With an AI-powered email newsletter tool, each one of your subscribers can receive a super-personalized, highly valuable newsletter—and you don’t have to lift a finger.
4. Pack in more value with outside resources.
Make your newsletters more valuable—and less work on you—by pulling in content resources from other websites that your readers will love. Not only does this strategy give your readership a holistic view of the topic they’re interested in, it means you don’t have to spend tons of time creating that content on your own to benefit from it. And benefit, you will: rasa.io found that users of its AI tool still got more traffic to their own websites even when they pulled in resources to their newsletter from other websites.
Promote Your Newsletter With AI to Earn Subscribers
Once your newsletter content packs maximum value, you can promote it with ease using AI. Try the tactics below and watch your subscriber base multiply.
1. Create effective ads to promote your newsletter.
Paid advertising is easier than ever with AI. Not only can AI write better-performing ad copy than humans, it can improve your ads in many other ways. Managing the campaign is simple, too: Using an AI-powered tool, you can automatically allocate budget, improve campaign performance, and discover new opportunities.
2. Optimize your promotional social shares.
AI is really good at social media. It can help you make informed decisions about what to write in posts, when to publish them, how much to spend sponsoring them, which colors and images to use, and more.
3. Improve your subscription landing page.
Use an AI-powered tool to A/B test your landing page’s images, copy, CTAs, form placement, and more. You can also hyper-personalize the content users see on your landing page using AI, like Delta Faucet did (resulting in a 49% increase in pageviews and quadrupled on-site engagement).
4. Use an AI-powered chatbot to boost subscribers.
Find smart opportunities to implement “subscribe” CTAs on your website, like with AI-powered chatbots. The best chatbots don’t require a ton of back-end work to personalize the branching logic to your business needs, and conversational marketing represents a useful opportunity for incorporating a newsletter subscription CTA.
Ready to Infuse AI Into Your Newsletter Process?
rasa.io is a platform that uses AI to generate personalized "Smart Newsletters."
These newsletters increase reader engagement, because they provide content tailored to a subscriber's individual preferences. And the data generated by these newsletters allows brands to better understand what readers want.
Smarter newsletters mean more value for readers, and more subscribers with a desire for high-impact content.
Jared Loftus
Jared Loftus is the Chief Revenue Officer at rasa.io, an email newsletter tool that uses AI to personalize and automate high-performing newsletters.