"From College Grad to Email Spammer: My Top Recommendations for Email Marketing, Automation, and AI-Powered Tools"

Years ago, as a recent graduate in Computer Science, working as a freelance Web Developer, I had a disappointing experience with my marketing strategy, which focused on quantity over quality. Using an old yellow pages directory from the 2010s, I cold-called and bombarded companies with emails, hoping to land web development projects. I flipped through the pages, selected businesses by service categories, most of them physicians, small schools, beauty salons and spas, thinking they would be a good fit to request my services, and bombarded them with irresistible deals to build their websites. My cell phone rang constantly, each call raising my hopes that a potential client was finally reaching out to request my web development services.

However, my inbox was not overflowing with ideal responses. Reality hit hard as most replies were from not potential clients. Before long, my email address was blacklisted by many companies, making me feel this imposter syndrom. This disastrous experience made me realize there had to be a more efficient and less intrusive way to offer my services.

This is why Today, I want to talk to you about Email Marketing and its effectiveness when interacting with potential clients, exploring, prominent tools, and recommended practices to optimize your marketing strategy through a Customer-Centric mindset. We’ll analyze key tools like HubSpot and Mailchimp and how Reinforcement Learning, an artificial intelligence, can help you to make the best decisions when running an Email Marketing campaign.

Email Marketing is still?King…

Before we get into the topic, according to a post on MarketSplash.com titled: ‘1000+ Email Marketing Statistics: Usage, Revenue, & Insights’, recent statistics have shown that 306 billion emails are exchanged daily. This still proves the significance of Email Marketing and why this is the best approach to reach out.

In a recent publication by Forbes “Reviving B2B Email Marketing: Strategies For The Digital Age”, 87% of marketing leaders reporting that email is critical to their success. Let's explore Email Marketing in more detail.

According to Forbes in their article “5 Benefits of Email Marketing in 2024”, Email Marketing is a method of digital marketing that involves sending customers and potential customers emails with the goal of promoting and selling a product and building brand awareness and loyalty. Email marketing is considered one of the most effective forms of digital marketing because of the low cost, the ability to customize and track performance and build relationships with customers.

Email Marketing Process

Based on Ian Dodson's insights in the book “The Art of Digital Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Creating Strategic, Targeted, and Measurable Online Campaigns” there are 4 vital steps that comprise an effective email marketing process:

1. Data: The first step in any Email Marketing campaign should always be the creation of a suscribers list. This is a compilation of emails contacts who have consented to receive your communications.
2. Design: This steps involves deciding which content you should include in your email and the design principles you must follow, to ensure that your email end ups in a subscriber’s list inbox, ready to engage and excite them
3. Delivery: This step is all about the delivery of your marketing emails. You will learn how they are managed through an email service provider (ESP), which facilitates everything from email style and layout to scheduling.
4. Discovery: Analysis and reporting are fundamental when revising and refining your digital practices. Leveraging analytics tools will allow you to track very cent spent on your email marketing and let you track open rates, total opens, and unqiue opens. You will be able to track ROI through CTRs, unsubscribers and bounce rates.

Adopting a Customer-Centric Mindset when creating Email Marketing Campaigns

As someone who has been working in the Digital Marketing area for different industries such Media and Pharmaceutical, it’s very important to reconsider the selling model and adopt a more customer-centric mindset. We are in the hyper-personalization era, for example in a pharma company the challenge is to connect with Healthcare Professionals (HCPs) with the right information, delivered on the right channel at the right time. These companies will be looking for plug-and-play, but customizable off-the-shelf analytics and automation solutions to manage customer relationships and personalize the engagement model across channels.

The Dos and?Don’ts

Without sufficient quality data to create accurate segmentations, delivering content at the wrong time can lead to a disastrous user experience and no impact.

Having accurate segmentations will help you to deliver the right content, to the right user at the right time, resulting in a successful campaign.

Email Marketing Automation and Artificial Intelligence

Taking it a step further, Email Marketing Automation, is referred to as automating the processes and actions that involve email marketing, using a set of email-specific automation tools and resources. With email marketing automation, you can set up the email drip once with predefined rules. As people continue to meet the trigger you have defined, emails will be sent to them without any manual intervention. These emails are highly customizable, scalable, and also hyper-personalized.

Now imagine having a super agent that over time will start to understand what is the right content, the right time and the correct channel to deliver to the right user?

This super agent is called Reinforcement Learning, an Artificial Intelligence that offers you this business intelligence to make accurate decisions.

Imagine you have a virtual pet dog. You want to teach this dog to fetch a stick. Every time the dog successfully brings the stick back to you, you give it a treat. If it runs off or does something else, it doesn’t get a treat. Over time, the dog learns that fetching the stick gets it treats, so it starts fetching the stick more often.

Reinforcement learning is like training that virtual pet. It’s a type of artificial intelligence where a computer program (or "agent") learns to make better decisions by receiving rewards (treats) or penalties (no treats) based on its actions.

if you are interested in implementing this kind of technology, you can find different AI-powered email marketing tools in the market that integrate this technology. One of them is MailChimp, an email and marketing automation platform for growing businesses. Mailchimp puts data-backed recommendations at the heart of your marketing, so you can find and engage customers across email, social media, landing pages, and advertising, automatically and with the power of AI. In 2021, Mailchimp was acquired by Intuit. They help you to connect with people when it matters with their suite of automation features: customized purchase paths, email scheduling, custom triggers, and more.

Another popular Email Marketing tool is Hubspot, with features that increases the efficiency of marketers and makes it easier for them to reach their target audience in no time.

HubSpot vs Mailchimp- Comparison

HubSpot and Mailchimp are powerful email marketing tools. HubSpot, at $20 per month, offers advanced automation and comprehensive support but is more complex. Mailchimp, at $13 per month, is user-friendly with advanced analytics, making it ideal for budget-conscious users. Both offer free plans, landing pages, and integrations.

Recommendations?

• Email Marketing tools are your allies to automate different tasks when creating a campaign. Mailchimp or HubSpot are great platforms to kickstart this journey.
• Pick AI powered tools as most of them include Reinforcement Learning to provide this business intelligence, so you can take the best decisions in this Email Marketing campaigns.
• Staying up-to-date with the latest trends in Email Marketing is essential. Hyper-personalization, Machine Learning, and automation revolutionize how we communicate and interact with potential clients. In this evolving industry, embracing these advancements is crucial for transformation and success.

One final question for you:

“In what ways do you see AI shaping the future of Email Marketing?”

References

(1000+ Email Marketing Statistics: Usage, Revenue, & Insights (marketsplash.com))

5 Benefits of Email Marketing in 2024 When was the last time you opened up an email from a brand you liked because the subject line said a product you…www.forbes.com

Council Post: Reviving B2B Email Marketing: Strategies For The Digital Age Email marketing has a tremendous amount of potential, but only if it's good, value-adding email marketing.www.forbes.com

Build Campaigns with Free Email Marketing Tools | HubSpot Leverage free email marketing tools to send personalized emails at scale, A/B test campaigns, and use drag-and-drop…www.hubspot.com

The Future of Email Marketing: Trends and Predictions for 2025 Stay ahead of the curve with insights on upcoming trends in email marketing. This article forecasts the evolution of…www.dhirubhai.net