The AI market grew beyond $184 billion last year, a jump of almost $50bn from the year previous, and the growth is showing no signs of slowing down. Fuelled by vast investments from the world’s major IT and tech players, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and more, AI is projected to eclipse $826bn in sales in 2030, making it one of the fastest growing economies on the planet.
The advancement of AI has created opportunities for businesses in all sectors to digitise, automate and update, simultaneously building a growing sense of pressure for organisations to adopt the technology or risk falling behind.
As such, plenty have implemented AI into their systems, processes and decision-making. For example, many make use of the technology to help speed up everyday processes such as writing emails and drafting action points from meetings. On the other hand, others find the tool a useful assistant and to go a little deeper, using it to analyse trends and data for actionable insights.
In B2B email marketing, AI can help speed up audience targeting and segmentation processes, craft expertly personalised content and suggest strategic solutions to reach new or existing customers. However, despite these opportunities, the true success of any campaign is driven by the data behind it.
Without accurate and clean data, AI simply has no basis.
The power of data
In any industry, data is almost always king. But it has to be the right data.
Whether you’re using your own data or have purchased it from a third-party, ensuring that it is clean and accurate is a crucial step for success. Inaccurate, incomplete data could have you reaching out to an audience who aren’t interested in your brand, or, in some cases, aren’t even there. That’s a whole lot of AI informed time and content wasted.
You should also have your content set up to collect customer information from every touch point through relevant calls to action (CTAs). This could be by downloading content on your website, following social media channels for updates, arranging meetings to find out more, for example.
The data gathered from these CTAs and touch points, when collated, analysed and used correctly, can reveal a world of information about not only your current audience, but also the audiences you want to reach. About how they interact with your brand, which products and services they are most and least interested in, where they work and even sometimes if their business is still trading (a common issue with low quality data sets).
This information is critical to understanding how you reach your audience effectively for maximum success.
By informing your email marketing process from start to finish, data helps make it easy to craft tailored campaigns which hit the right audience with the right content. Whilst AI may be a useful tool along the way –be that to segment your target audience or create personalised, informed content – remove the data from the equation and you are left with poorly segmented lists and uninformed content being sent far and wide.
This is why, despite investment, AI will struggle to outrun quality data.
Balancing data and AI
The reality is that AI is becoming increasingly prevalent, especially in marketing, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down.
So, with data and AI informing one another throughout the email marketing process, how can you find a balance to leverage both for success?
1. Targeting and segmentation – It’s well known that an email marketing campaign is only as good as its contact list; an accurate, clean list assures you that your content has the highest likelihood of landing in your target recipient’s inbox. But when you have a huge list of contact details it can be hard to know how best to segment them to maximise targeting. In this case, AI can be a really valuable tool to help speed up and streamline the process. As long as you know who you want to target – this could be by role, location, demographic, for example – AI will use that nice clean data to build an expertly segmented list for you to work from.
2. Personalisation – Most widely-used AI platforms are large language models, such as the much-loved ChatGPT. As such, their capability lies in content formation – this might be tailoring your email copy to align with each segment of your target audience, or it could be to tailor the language of your copy to a specific region or job role. Regardless of your aims, you’re going to need accurate, clear data to feed your platform of choice if you want to end up with anything remotely useful. Think for instance the target roles, ages, locations, businesses, that you’re hoping to reach. If you’ve already run the campaign and you are going through phase two, analyse your data to see what did and didn’t work and use that to build out your prompt for maximum personalisation.
3. Analysis – With any successful marketing campaign, the post-project analysis is key to ensuring long-term success – whether you plan to run the same campaign again or want the insights for future activity. AI can help to track all the data points you collect throughout your marketing efforts, from open rates and bounce backs, to clicks, responses and engagement. You can then use this data to identify trends, make reports and suggest actions to improve future efforts. Data informs AI, AI informs data, and so on.
Email marketing is ultimately about reaching the right people at the right time with the right message. While AI can be a huge help in doing all of these things successfully, the results you can get from it will only ever be as strong as the data feeding it. No matter how much investment you put in.
