How to Hyper-Personalize Email Marketing with AI: From Abandoned Carts to Lifetime Value

Think personalization and the first thought popping into your mind would be–adding a human touch. Personalizing your email marketing campaign is not much different. But run-of-the-mill email personalization tactics just don’t cut it anymore.

Enter the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and take your email marketing efforts to a new level with hyper-personalization. Let us show you how.

What Is Email Personalization?

Email personalization is an effective email marketing strategy that marketers use to give audiences more tailored content depending on several factors, including products added to the cart, their customer journey stage, or any other action taken on the website.  

Personalization in email marketing uses data and email automation (AI) to lead prospects down the sales funnel through a personalized customer experience.   

Other than making users feel valued, special, and seen, email personalization helps:

• Increase open rates
• Improves relationship building
• Boost customer engagement
• Drive sales

How Does AI Fit into the Hyper-Personalized Email Marketing Puzzle? 

Email personalization is a great human-focused process (after all, personalization provides the human touch). Now, with AI, you can take these efforts to the next step–creating hyper-personalized emails. 

Here are six of our favorite ways:

1. Harnessing Data for Personalized Email Campaign

Email personalizations are not possible without customer data. And you want as much information about the lead as possible to create a hyper-personalized email. AI can be an incredible tool for collecting and leveraging these data for your campaign.

AI-powered algorithms can automatically collect and analyze social media data, including customer interaction, brand mentions, and conversations around your business. It can also aid in keyword and hashtag tracking.

Next, using AI-driven Natural Language Processes (NLP), you can better understand the context and consumer sentiment. Not to forget, it can help you detect emerging trends and patterns in social media conversations.

Incorporating all this information, you can create converting lead magnets, like interactive quizzes, to collect zero-party data so you can hyper-segment your leads based on quiz answers and final outcomes to send more impactful and personalized emails and boost ROI. 

2. Data-Driven Insights

Hyper-personalizing your emails isn’t just splattering first names in the subject lines and across the body. It requires a deep understanding of your consumer behavior. Something AI does with ease.

AI consumes customer data, including interactions, purchases, personas, and even social media activities. This rich diet allows AI to zero in on highly targeted segments–a crucial part of email personalization. 

Leveraging the audience segments, you can divide your consumers into different groups and target relevant content and products based on their interests. For example, a group repeatedly engages with your brand’s social media posts about sustainable fashion. The email content of these segments can focus on sustainable fashion products. 

3. Dynamic Content Creation & Ideation

Marketing emails have a set template. These templates are then personalized based on the segment–AI can help here.

Using already-defined email templates and variables, it can whip out exclusive offers, product recommendations, and scroll-stopping subject lines. 

Obviously, we also have to talk about ChatGPT. While such AI cannot flesh out unique and persuasive email content, it can definitely help you with content ideation. This way, you don’t have to start from scratch.

Simply open ChatGPT and type in your prompt. Tell it about your business, needs, and products, and it will give you customized ideas. Don’t forget to add your customer personas and segment details, and you’ll have a list of hyper-personalized email ideas.

Next, using AI content generators, you can even write entire emails (however, it will need editing and more personalization tactics by human editors/marketers). Not only that, you can also generate unique visuals to save you countless hours. 

These ideas should be enough to get your creative juice flowing–thus creating converting emails for your marketing campaign.

4. Email Automation

Email automation, powered by AI, uses triggers like date, contact’s activity (wish listing a product), or event (for example, black Friday) to send out related emails. Your triggers and triggered messages are based on the consumer’s journey. It can be something like:

Trigger: Abandoned cart

Email: “Free shipping on your cart items!”

In this way, when 70% of e-commerce shoppers abandon their carts, these automated emails can help recover lost sales. Plus, every time you send an automated email, you get more information about each contact. This can help the AI lead and direct the next move. 

Say the recipient is not clicking on your recommendation. Based on the past behavior of that customer segment, AI can then try different tactics to close the deal.

5. Optimizing Engagement and Conversion Rates

Higher engagement and conversion rates, in the form of open, bounce, click-through rates, and more, are the end goal of every email marketing campaign. AI shines in accurately tracking and measuring this.

A report by Zero Bounce shows that 78% of recipients will mark an email as spam because it “looks like spam.” AI can help you track and optimize this. Through detailed content analysis, sender reputation monitoring, and engagement analysis, it can help you streamline your email delivery. 

For example, if you send an email too soon, you risk burning out the contact, leading them to unsubscribe or block your email address. On the other hand, sending out emails too rarely means you’ll miss out on business opportunities. 

But, with AI tracking the engagement and conversions generated with each email, you can build an optimized schedule with the right sending frequency.

6. Personalized Sender Information

Personalizing the sender’s information is at the heart of hyper-personalized emails. It humanizes your brand and makes the customers feel heard and cared for. Plus, the added benefits of being unique and enticing the receivers to convert while building relationships. 

Integrating AI chatbots on your website and other customer touchpoints can allow you to collect this data. Using that data, you can leverage AI’s predictive analytics to know which product, content, and visuals are most likely to resonate with each recipient. 

Taken together, this hyper-personalized communication style will foster an individualized connection with each contact, improve engagement, and boost sales.

Hyper-Personalization with AI

AI can be your best friend in creating the most personalized email and experience for your leads. Especially today, integrating AI in marketing is a necessity that you need to leverage for your email marketing campaign.

Predictive Hyper-Personalization 

AI can both track and predict customer behavior, anticipating their future needs and preferences–personalization like never before.

Here’s your chance to stay ahead of the curve and sell products/services to your existing customers before they even hit the shelves.

Emotional Intelligence

As AI evolves, you’ll have to go beyond the basics metric to craft emails that sync perfectly with customer behavior, emotions, and cultural identifiers. 

Fortunately, AI is becoming more emotionally intelligent. This will further allow it to evaluate whole new sets of data, like writing styles, response history, interacted content, and more–helping you build a deeper emotional connection with your users. 

An Immersive Email Experience

Videos and images are okay. But by using AR and VR, you can make the emails highly immersive and interactive. 

For eCommerce brands, it could mean virtual try-ons or exploring 3D models right there in the emails.  

The Future Is Here: Grab Your Seat at the Table

Email marketing is one very effective part of eCommerce marketing, and focusing some effort on it will easily get you far.

ChatGPT and Gemini are just the start–AI is here to stay. We are seeing it transform the marketing world, and it’s high time you, too, redefine what AI can do for your email marketing campaign success. 

Hyper-personalization is one of the many ways AI can supercharge your effort. When used right, it can empower everything from predictive analysis to A/B testing. The question is: how many benefits can you reap from it?