Email marketing is integral to any marketing strategy because it’s a great way to generate leads and convert audiences.
Whether creating your first strategy or looking to modify your process, AI email marketing tools can help you save time, optimize your strategy, and meet your email goals.
In this piece, I’ll go over how AI email marketing tools work, new data about how marketers currently use AI for email marketing, and a list of tools you can leverage in your role.
Table of Contents
What is AI email marketing?
AI email marketing is a machine-learning-powered process that helps marketers create email campaigns that reach the right audiences at the right time with the right messages.
AI email marketing tools use data (like your historical performance data) to help you optimize your email strategy, automation to help you save time on repetitive tasks (like triggering an email workflow), and generative AI to help you create email content.
When using AI in email marketing, you can do things like:
- Analyze past email performance to identify how to optimize your email strategies, like the best time to send your emails or the subject lines that get the most clicks.
- Compile email analytics so you understand the health of your campaigns.
- Trigger email workflows after people take a specific action.
- Clean up your email lists to improve deliverability.
- Write compelling copy that speaks to your audience.
- Personalize email content to specific audience segments.
Some tools have one specific function, like a generative AI email tool, while others offer multiple features.
HubSpot's AI Search Grader
See how visible your brand is in AI-powered search engines.
- Analyze your brand for today’s AI search engines.
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- Assess your brand’s visibility and presence.
- Learn how you compare to competitors.
Why should you use AI in email marketing?
I've found that the most significant benefit of using AI in email marketing is that it saves time while improving performance. The routine processes you spend time on can happen instantly, and you can launch your optimized campaigns faster.
Most AI email marketing tools are also powered by machine learning, meaning that they use data points (from your business and sometimes your industry) to help you optimize your email strategy.
You won’t be left to guess what works best because the AI can look at your past emails, and you can benchmark your performance against competitors to see where you can improve.
If you’re interested in learning more about the impact of AI on marketing, check out this Marketing Against The Grain episode about marketing opportunities that AI unlocks for business.
Click here to listen to the full episode.
What are the challenges with AI in email marketing?
Of course, using AI in email marketing is not without its challenges. AI tools are still relatively new in terms of technology, so they’re not perfect.
Here are a few challenges marketers face when using AI in email marketing and how they solve those issues.
Tone
Anyone who’s asked ChatGPT to write an email for them knows the first output will usually sound formal. Tone is undoubtedly the biggest challenge marketers face when using generative AI for email marketing.
Most AI tools need to be trained to match your brand’s voice and tone, and even then, you’ll probably still need to edit it to sound exactly how you want.
Meg O'Neill, co-founder of Intuitive Marketing Collective, gets around this challenge by using clear and specific prompts.
“I want [my emails] to sound like I’m talking to a friend,” says O’Neill. “I’ve added this requirement to my prompt, and it’s helped a lot. Sometimes, I’ll give [the AI tool] the name of a famous business person and ask it to write in a similar tone.”
Quality
Whether you use AI to write the body copy of your email, generate subject line ideas, or outline an email funnel structure, the quality of the overall content isn’t going to be perfect the first time around.
“The quality is not always there,” says Jeanne Jennings, Founder and Chief Strategist for Email Optimization Shop, an email marketing consultancy.
To overcome this challenge, Jennings takes a collaborative approach by “micro-managing the AI tool at each stage to get the quality content I need. Without my collaborative approach, the output is usually junk,” she states.
Data Accuracy
Ben Schreiber, Head of e-commerce at Latico Leathers, says the biggest challenge he’s faced using AI in email marketing is data accuracy and integration.
“Good quality data is paramount to the success of using AI systems since any inaccuracies may lead to wrong output results,” says Schreiber.
“We have had issues with outdated or incomplete data, which directly affects how well or poorly our campaigns perform.”
Could AI ever replace an email marketer?
In short, no. AI will not replace email marketers anytime soon because humans still need to, at the very least, oversee the quality of the emails sent. As useful as AI can be to your email marketing strategy, it's not infallible and can be prone to blunders if left unchecked by human intervention.
For example, Air Canada was ordered to compensate a customer who was given incorrect information about a refund policy from the airline's chatbot. A tribunal found that Air Canada failed to ensure the accuracy of its chatbot, and the airline was ordered to take responsibility and pay the difference in fare.
And Fable, a book tracking app, removed many of its AI features after users reported receiving AI-generated messages that many deemed culturally insensitive.
The bottom line is that human intervention is needed to clean up any mess an AI tool makes before it reaches your audience. Otherwise, your organization could end up in an awkward position with the public and will have to take full responsibility.
Another reason human email marketers aren't being replaced is that the human mind is a well of creativity. Our unique experiences, education, interpersonal relationships, knowledge, and more make our approaches to email marketing unique.
“When I curated the HubSpot Marketing newsletter, I would always add a fun little 'Song of the Day' at the start of the email,” recalls Erica Santiago, Sr. Marketing Manager at HubSpot. “I'd pick songs based on what I was listening to, the weather, my feelings, and that added a unique flair that recipients appreciated.”
She says, “AI is helpful with personalization, testing, and things like that—but it can't mimic my elite taste in music.”
How to Use AI in Email Marketing
Our State of AI in Marketing report surveyed U.S. marketing and advertising professionals about how they’re currently using AI.
For starters, AI usage for marketing has increased significantly.
64% of marketers who responded to the survey said they currently use AI in their role.
While chatbots are among the most popular marketing tools used by marketers, 80% of marketers use AI through broader software and platforms, such as AI tools in marketing software, photo editing platforms, or video calling tools.
Here are a few specific ways marketers are using AI for email marketing.
HubSpot's AI Search Grader
See how visible your brand is in AI-powered search engines.
- Analyze your brand for today’s AI search engines.
- Maximize your AI search performance.
- Assess your brand’s visibility and presence.
- Learn how you compare to competitors.
Content Ideation
We're busy marketers with a million tasks floating around in our minds. So, racking our brains for fresh email content ideas can be … difficult, to say the least. Fortunately, there are AI writing tools that can do some of the thinking for you and come up with catchy email subject lines, video ideas, image ideas, and more!
Content Creation
One of the most common use cases for AI tools among marketers is content creation. Digging deeper, the majority of our survey respondents (52%) report using AI tools for text-based content creation, such as blogs, ebooks, and emails.
Testing
From subject lines to body copy to design elements, testing is essential to increase engagement and ultimately improve your email marketing performance.
Of marketers in our survey, 36% say they use AI tools for brainstorming, and it’s safe to say testing email content falls into that category.
Not sure how to use AI for experimenting or brainstorming?
“Ask AI to provide you with specific testing ideas so you always have a fantastic list to choose from to continue improving your email performance,” recommends email marketer Bethany Fiocchi Root, CEO and founder of Oceanview Marketing.
Data Collection
Email marketing relies on data, but data collection can be a time-consuming process for busy marketers. That’s where AI comes in.
Not only can AI tools help automate data collection, decreasing time spent on these tasks significantly, but they can also be more precise with the information.
A majority of marketers (including those who don’t currently use AI) agree that AI can help their organizations share data more effectively.
From a leadership standpoint, 28% of marketing directors agree that AI and automation tools help employees make data-driven decisions.
And the more data you have, the more you can personalize your email marketing.
In fact, a third of marketers agree that AI tools can help them personalize the experience their customers get.
Automation
Finally, marketers use generative AI to automate their processes. With AI, everything from scheduling email campaigns to email data entry is taken care of.
Of the marketers surveyed, 49% say using AI for automation makes them more effective at their job.
Email List Cleanup
AI can quickly and efficiently clean up your email list by removing invalid, inactive, or duplicate addresses. How? It's pretty simple! AI can check for syntax errors, confirm domains, and see if the email address exists on other servers. Then, with all that information, AI can identify and remove invalid emails.
You can also activate AI spam filters that block spam, low-priority emails, phishing emails, and other threats to the health of your email list.
Personalization
AI algorithms analyze data such as website activity and purchase history and use that information to deliver personalized emails. AI can also generate highly personalized subject lines, email bodies, and product recommendations.
16 AI Email Marketing Tools
1. HubSpot's Breeze
Click here to learn more about HubSpot AI tools.
HubSpot has multiple email marketing tools and features to leverage to drive clicks and conversions.
AI Features
- Marketing Automation Software that helps you easily create email workflows and triggers to reach your target audiences with the right messages at all stages of their journey.
- AI Email Writer that provides customizable email marketing templates and edits, and generates marketing emails on demand.
- Copilot, which asks your AI assistant to help you ideate and create content, streamline tasks, and draft edits.
Price: Free tools are available.
2. Mailchimp
Mailchimp’s email automation software helps ecommerce businesses create automated email workflows that reach audiences at the best possible time.
AI Features
- Its Content Optimizer compares your email data to industry benchmarks to give you recommendations for optimizing your campaigns and email content.
- You can choose from different versions of AI-generated content that match your intent and brand tone.
- Its Creative Assistant leverages your brand assets to create unique email designs you can personalize to different contacts.
Price: Free forever plans are available. Essential plans cost $13 per month. Standard plans cost $20 per month. Premium plans cost $350 per month.
3. SendGrid
SendGrid helps you create an automated email marketing process with custom workflows and triggers.
AI Features
- Its real-time API scans your email lists and removes junk or undeliverable email addresses to lower your bounce rate and ensure you reach more people.
- Get data-driven insights and recommendations for improvement based on your historical metrics and email performance.
- AI paces your email send and monitors your reputation with ISPs.
Price: Free trials are available. Essential plans cost $19.95 per month.
4. Salesoft
Salesoft offers an AI-powered inbox management tool that helps you clean up your email lists and improve deliverability.
AI Features
- Its Email Bots leverage machine learning to interpret emails and help you reply with engaging, conversational emails that inspire responses.
- AI can qualify a lead as ready for sales and automatically introduce the prospect to the right salesperson for seamless marketing-to-sales handoff.
- Use different Email Bots for your unique business needs, like the follow-up email bot, abandoned chat email bot, and webinar email bot.
Price: Call for pricing.
5. GetResponse
Use GetResponse to design behavior-based email workflows to engage with audiences at key moments with content personalized to their needs.
AI Features
- Share keywords or phrases, email goals, and tone with the GPT-powered email generator that leverages industry data to produce emails most likely to increase your conversions.
- Display different images, text, or AI-driven product recommendations in each email.
- The AI subject line generator helps you test subject lines and learn what stands out in your subscribers’ inboxes.
Price: A free 30-day trial is available; paid plans start at $15 per month.
HubSpot's AI Search Grader
See how visible your brand is in AI-powered search engines.
- Analyze your brand for today’s AI search engines.
- Maximize your AI search performance.
- Assess your brand’s visibility and presence.
- Learn how you compare to competitors.
6. Levity
Levity’s software helps you manage your inbox, understand your email health, and save time.
AI Features
- Build an AI tool unique to your business by uploading your data that it will learn from and use to make human-level decisions.
- Create different AI blocks for every email workflow you want to run (like a workflow for responding to emails).
- Share unique categorization criteria with your AI to automatically sort emails as soon as you receive them.
Price: Call for pricing.
7. Superhuman
Superhuman is an AI-powered inbox management tool that helps you streamline your processes. Best for teams that use Gmail or Outlook.
AI Features
- Immediately sort incoming emails into a split inbox based on your custom rules so you can sort spam from genuine humans and focus on what needs attention.
- Use its Snippets tool to create pre-built templates for phrases, paragraphs, or entire emails that you can quickly add to emails to automate responses.
- Set reminders for email tasks, like following up on unanswered emails or a reminder to respond to a message you snoozed for later.
Price: Starter plans cost $25 per month, business plans cost $33 per month, and enterprise pricing is available.
Most of the tools listed above have multiple AI features, like email writing help to automated inbox sorting. Below, we’ll go over AI email marketing tools that only offer generative features.
8. Hive
Hive offers an easy-to-use and time-saving tool for your email marketing. Simply share a brief prompt of what you’re looking for with its Notes AI, and it’ll help you generate a perfect response.
Price: There is a free forever plan. Teams plans cost $12 per user a month. Enterprise pricing is available.
9. ChatGPT
ChatGPT is a generative AI tool that you can use to write your marketing emails, and all you have to do is enter a descriptive prompt into the chat. It’s a conversational tool, so you can ask it to rewrite the email until you’re satisfied.
Price: There is a free research preview. ChatGPT Plus costs $20 per month.
10. Zapier
Zapier runs on Zaps, automated workflows you can customize to your needs. You can create an email-based Zap to generate email copy with an API key from OpenAI.
Whenever you receive an email matching your Zap's rules, it’ll prompt GPT-3 to write an appropriate response.
Price: A free forever plan is available. Professional plans cost $19.99 per month. Team plans cost $69 per month. Contact Zapier for Enterprise pricing.
11. Copy.ai
Copy.ai is an email copywriting tool you can use to create high-converting emails. It can write email content for you, suggest subject lines, and help you stay on track with suggestions to improve email quality.
Price: Call for pricing.
12. Beefree
Beefree is an intuitive design suite where teams come together to design, collaborate, and review email campaigns.
13. Compose.ai
Compose.ai is powered by GPT-3 and helps you write personalized and on-brand emails.
Its autocomplete feature suggests how you can finish what you’re writing, and its suggestions and generations are always tone- and brand-relevant because it learns your unique brand voice.
It’s an always-free Chrome extension, so you can easily use it on your favorite sites.
Price: A free forever plan is available. Premium plans cost $9.99 per month. Ultimate plans cost $29.99 per month. Enterprise pricing is available.
14. Grammarly
Grammarly’s machine-learning copy-editing tool recognizes in-text errors and suggests how to fix them. I use this feature all the time to assist in my content writing.
GrammarlyGo extracts the context from short prompts and helps you instantly generate appropriate email replies. Leverage the tools on its website, as a Chrome extension, or within your favorite email client.
Price: A free forever plan is available. Premium plans cost $12 per month.
15. Jasper
Jasper Commands helps you create effective marketing emails quickly with machine learning algorithms.
Use it to write entire emails or email subject lines, and its outputs always match your business’s unique writing style and tone for brand consistency.
Price: A Free trial is available. Creator plans cost $39 per month, Pro plans cost $59 per month, and custom business pricing is available.
Leveling Up Your Emails With AI
From writing copy to generating subject lines and even collecting and organizing data to improve personalization, a majority of marketers agree that using AI for email marketing makes their job easier.
When AI tools are used as just that — tools — they can improve your email marketing campaigns and give you more time to spend on creative tasks that make you better at your job.
HubSpot's AI Search Grader
See how visible your brand is in AI-powered search engines.
- Analyze your brand for today’s AI search engines.
- Maximize your AI search performance.
- Assess your brand’s visibility and presence.
- Learn how you compare to competitors.
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