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9 Ways to Leverage Artificial Intelligence for Your Email Newsletter
Stay Ahead of the Trends by Incorporating AI Into Your Marketing Plan
Lenore Sterner & Brandon Storey
June 24th, 2024
Table of Contents
This article has been updated to maintain its accuracy and relevance
Remember J.A.R.V.I.S. in Iron Man? He was the AI assistant that helped Tony Stark reach his full potential as Iron Man to save the world.
While AI isn’t quite advanced enough (yet) to help you become the next Iron Man, it’s certainly a technology you can leverage in the marketing world—especially when it comes to email newsletters.
In fact, a 2021 study found that AI improved the overall reach of emails by 35%. By using AI technology, you can write better emails, improve your open rates, and grow your list, among many other benefits.
In this guide on email newsletter AI, you’ll learn exactly how artificial intelligence can be used to optimize your email newsletter strategy to help you succeed in 2024.
Let’s begin!
Can AI Be Used in Email Marketing?
Curious whether or not AI can be used in your email marketing strategy?
The short answer is: absolutely!
A McKinsey study estimates that AI is responsible for $1.4 trillion to $2.6 trillion of value within marketing and sales departments worldwide.
If you’ve ever launched an email marketing campaign, you know just how much time it takes to ensure your newsletter is successful. Most creators and publishers wish they had another set of hands to help out.
Well, thanks to AI, you’ve now got a helping hand.
And while AI can seem scary, we’re far from a Terminator scenario. Instead, we’re at a point in time where leveraging AI can massively enhance our email marketing strategy. Chances are, you’ve leveraged AI technology already without knowing it – especially when it comes to aspects of AI like machine learning.
Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool you can use to write personalized newsletters, create attention-grabbing subject lines, segment your list, and grow your subscriber count.
Can AI Write Emails?
If you’re human, chances are, you’ve had writer's block at one point or another. There’s nothing more frustrating as a content creator than staring blankly at your computer screen and not knowing what to write as the clock ticks away.
With AI, you can get some much-needed help to craft better email newsletter copy for your audience. Many artificial intelligence tools can give you a snippet of email copy based on a few simple prompts (like telling the AI your niche, the subject of the email, and a bit about your audience).
Want to know something even crazier? Many AI tools will give you the entire copy for the body of your email.
Crafting compelling content that’s indistinguishable from a human can not only help you engage with your audience better to improve your campaigns but it can also save you plenty of time. If you shave off a few hours a week with AI, you’ll be able to spend that time on other parts of your newsletter, increasing your chances of success.
This can be a massive help when you’re stuck in a rut or simply want to come up with a few different angles for an email, saving you from the dreaded writer’s block.
How Artificial Intelligence Can Help Your Emails Reach the Inbox
One of the best ways AI can help your email newsletter is with improved deliverability.
Remember, one of the keys to successful email newsletters is getting your subscribers to read your emails. But, if your subscribers are to even look at your emails, you first need to ensure the emails are landing in their inbox (rather than their spam folder or promotions tab).
AI can help get your emails into your subscribers’ inboxes in a few ways:
Giving you email body copy snippets
Checking your email spam score
Segmenting lists
Optimizing send times
If you want to ensure your emails reach your subscribers’ inboxes, then you need to ensure you’re pulling the right strings. Using AI tools can be a massive help to your deliverability, which is a major component of a successful newsletter.
9 Ways to Leverage Artificial Intelligence in Your Email Newsletter
The future of email marketing is going to be driven by artificial intelligence. If you want to ensure you and your newsletter don’t miss the boat, then you need to start incorporating AI now. Thankfully, it’s easier than you think to get started!
Here are nine ways you can leverage artificial intelligence in your email newsletter:
1. Craft Attention-Grabbing Subject Lines
Your email newsletter won’t succeed if you can’t get your subscribers to open your emails.
Every day, inboxes are flooded with hundreds of emails. The reality is that most of these get deleted with a simple click of the mouse.
If you want to craft the perfect subject line, then you need to start using AI. There are artificial intelligence programs you can use to craft attention-grabbing subject lines. AI tools use this by using NLP—or natural language processing—to speak your audience’s language.
AI machines can now speak the same language you and I write. But, the best part is, they can fire off subject-line examples much faster than humans can.
Using AI can help you land in your reader’s inbox more (and save you a ton of time in the process)
2. Craft Compelling Email Copy
If you want to 80/20 your email newsletter strategy, then you need to focus on mastering your email content. Unfortunately, it can take a long time (and a ton of mental energy) to craft compelling content every time you write an email.
Think about it. The primary driver of email newsletter success is dependent on pumping out lots of valuable email copy. So, if you can find a tool to optimize your content production, you should lean into it hard.
Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool you can use to consistently create quality content without burning out. Even the best email newsletter creators in the world can only write so much content in a week.
Just as AI can help you master your subject lines, it can also help you write the body of your emails. Many AI tools will give you small snippets of copy to work with. And at this point, some will even write an entire email for you, which is insane!
My recommendation would be to experiment with AI for the body of your emails when you need help coming up with fresh content. At this point, it’s best used as a writing prompt to get the creative juices flowing. This is opposed to simply copy/pasting exactly what it says to write.
Idea generation is a massive part of the copywriting process. AI has now accelerated this part of the formula to craft engaging content. Leverage AI for your email copy and watch your ability to consistently send valuable newsletters skyrocket.
3. Optimize Send Times
Timing is everything with email.
You could craft the perfect email subject line and content, but if you send it at the wrong time, you’ll waste the email’s potential.
The perfect send time is achievable. With AI, you can better understand when your subscribers are most active in their inbox. AI can pull various data points, like subscribers’ time zones and open rates, to determine the best times to send a newsletter.
Artificial intelligence does this by using machine learning to understand when a mass amount of people are taking certain actions. When you’re able to land in someone’s inbox at the right time, you can drastically improve your open rates.
4. Grow Your List Quicker
As mentioned earlier, one of the best ways AI can help your email newsletter is by helping you craft compelling copy in your subject lines and your email body. However, you can also leverage AI to expand your newsletter subscriber count.
Here are a few ways AI copywriting can help you promote list growth:
Create AI ad copy to improve paid ad conversions
Improve your social media copywriting
Optimize your newsletter landing page and/or signup form
Remember, you can leverage the power of AI anywhere you’re using copy to grow your list.
5. Fight Writer’s Block
Maybe you still want to write your own content (without fully relying on AI) but still struggle with what you want to write about.
AI like ChatGPT can offer suggestions for the content you want to create. Even if AI can’t quite match the ideas in your own head, AI can get you started or spark inspiration.
Make sure to feed the AI all the details you need, like the niche you are in and what kind of content you want to create. Let the AI come up with ideas to fill out your content calendar in minutes.
6. Keyword and Hashtag Research
Finding the best keywords and hashtags to use for your marketing campaigns can be time consuming and annoying. Let AI do the heavy lifting for you and suggest keywords and hashtags for your content ideas.
Try using prompts asking for the top performing keywords and hashtags about the topic you’re creating content for. Don’t forget to ask for long-tail keywords, too.
If you’re unfamiliar, a long-tail keyword is a phrase (as opposed to a single word) that generates much more specific results. It’s important to include a mix of short and long-tail keywords in your copy for the best SEO.
7. Create Unique Graphics
While AI still has a long way to catch up, graphics are improving by the day. You can use AI tools, like the one available in Canva, to create unique graphics or graphic elements.
As AI graphics are still in their infancy, you can use what AI generates as a starting point that you can edit or use as a reference for a human artist. Just make sure to edit out any mistakes that the AI makes.
8. Repurpose Old Content
If you have a high performing piece of content, use AI prompts to repurpose the content into something else. For example, you can have AI take an e-book and turn it into a blog and a video script.
Using this tactic is a great way to expand your content without having to create new content. It also brings in new audience members who might prefer information presented in a different way.
9. Compose New Title Variations
When you’re writing a blog or email, coming up with the best title can be time consuming. AI can cut that time in half or more by crafting title and subtitle variations to choose between.
Better yet, you can use those titles to A/B Test your content and see what your audience responds to best.
What Is the Best Email Automation Software?
The future of email newsletters is promising, thanks to the many ways you can leverage AI and automate your business.
As the use of artificial intelligence within email newsletters continues to grow, it will get easier to create relevant, optimized campaigns to better serve your audience. And, when AI is paired with the right automation tools, you’ll be able to grow your newsletter on autopilot.
Email automation software like beehiiv can help you automate the mundane processes that are necessary to create email content, engage your audience, and scale your newsletter.
With beehiiv, you can access a suite of robust automation tools so you can grow your business with ease. When you send out a newsletter with beehiiv, it automatically posts a corresponding blog post directly on your own SEO-optimized website, creating a seamless publishing experience.
With trigger-based emails, when a new reader subscribes to your newsletter, the beehiiv platform can send out an automated welcome email (or series of emails) to optimize engagement on autopilot.
But, it gets better. beehiiv helps you earn revenue automatically. One of the niftiest features on the beehiiv platform is built right into the beehiiv Ad Network. With the Ad Network, you can streamline your revenue through automatic ads.
The platform helps take the guesswork out of matching your content with the right advertisers. Advertisers reach out to beehiiv with a budget (what you’ll earn by placing their ad) and copy they’ve already written and edited for easy newsletter placement.
When an advertisement offer comes your way, you’ll get notified. All you have to do is accept the placement in your newsletter with one click. If you accept, beehiiv automatically places the ad within your newsletter, and you start earning.
Get started with beehiiv’s free trial today!
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