Using AI in your B Corp/1% for the Planet eCommerce brand and email marketing? You probably don't know this...

ChatGPT entered our lives by a storm less than 2 years ago (only! Can you believe that?) and started a whole AI revolution.?

Everywhere you look, there’s an AI solution, widget, or option that you can use.

Email marketing is no different.

Almost every Email Service Provider I’ve seen in the past 1.5 years had at least one AI-powered part - building automations with prompts, creating images from scratch, or analyzing data. As you can imagine, I’ve seen and worked with a few handfuls of ESPs during that time.

There’s no way around it and no point in resisting it - AI in email marketing is here to stay.

We need to embrace and use it within reason and be aware of how it affects our world. Funnily enough, it’s not an issue that I’ve seen many talk about in the email space.?

As someone who’s building a business for impact, this article will hopefully show you the upsides and downsides of AI in email marketing, and give you some food for thought.

Let’s dive in.

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How can AI help your email marketing?

(And the difference between predictive, generative, and autonomous AI in your emails)

AI can come in handy on many levels when it comes to identifying trends, analyzing incoming data, suggesting courses of action, and even coming up with new ways forward.

• On the first level, predictive AI can foresee which actions or elements inside an email broadcast or even an entire flow will be the most successful and will offer insights about that. It will also analyze email stats and can suggest new segments, or alert you about a behavior pattern amongst your subscribers.

• Then, Generative AI can help you create flows, write and design email campaigns, or come up with ideas that will make your work faster and more efficient. Of course, it’ll create those based on the prompts you give it or how it was previously trained.

• On the highest level, there’s autonomous AI. Meaning, it can make its own decisions and act independently upon performance patterns it recognizes. Yet again, it depends on how it was trained and how it keeps on learning.

Here are some examples of how AI can help you send better, more ethical emails:

• It can send more relevant and hyper-personalized messages to each subscriber, thanks to the data they’ve initially provided you with and their behavior throughout their customer journey. That way, you can scale your 1:1:many impactful conversations with your subscribers.
• Alert you about trends that are either already happening or about to happen so you can act on them and improve the subscriber experience.
• Save you a whole lot of time trying to come up with those ideas or identifying trends.

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But there’s a catch…

(AKA what you need to know as an impact-driving brand)

The dark side of AI is that it’s hungry for energy.

And by that, I mean that when you’re using AI for your email marketing, you’re upping your brands’ carbon footprint.

Just to give you some stats (we do love those!):

• A single AI model can emit more than 626K pounds of carbon dioxide, equal to about 5x the lifetime emissions of an average car (The MIT Technology Review).
• It is believed that in the next 5 years, AI’s energy consumption will increase by 300% (Dr. Van Rijmenam).
• If ChatGPT and its integrations will be responsible for 9 billion searches a day (which isn’t too far-fetched of a number), its electricity demands will be the equivalent of 1.5 million EU residents per year.

I couldn’t find email and AI-specific stats during the write up of this newsletter. Nevertheless, we do need to take into account that using AI for your email marketing has an increasing footprint on our environment, and it’s something that you need to think about and be aware of.

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What you can do about it

Yes, AI can be awesome for your email marketing and how effective they are.

But you do have to think whether it’s worth it for your brand to use it and at what cost.

You can decide to use AI for your marketing and find other ways in your business to offset its carbon footprint. You can also decide that you’re fine with being less efficient with your emails and minimizing your AI usage.

There’s no one right way to approach this, just what works for you.?

Generally speaking, putting your money where your mouth is and choosing to work with AI data centers that use renewable energy can help.?

Specifically with emails, if this Email Service Provider suits your needs and aspirations, you can use EcoSend (affiliate link) and it will offset your emails’ environmental impact for you.?

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Ethical Emails ’ pledge

If we want to use our email marketing for the greater good, we also need to consider the impact that the new technologies within our ESPs create - the good parts and the bad parts.

Depending on my clients’ ESP of choice and how they use AI, I’m introducing a new part to my onboarding process about if and how we’ll use AI as a part of our strategies and email program as a whole.

My aim is to show the pros and cons of it and present my clients with the existing options - but they will have the last call and I will support and respect whichever decision they make.

As always, I’m also going to keep an eye on new developments, what they mean for my clients’ impact, and advise on possible ways forward. Email is a part of an entire system, and as such, we need to refer to it within a greater context of the brand’s entire operation.

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