Artificial intelligence has changed the economics of creating marketing content remarkably quickly. Work that once took hours can now be done in minutes, and marketing teams can generate more social posts, advertising variations, product descriptions, campaign ideas and images without needing more people to produce them.
There are obvious advantages to that. The less talked-about consequence is what happens when every business can suddenly create far more content. The amount of marketing competing for our attention increases, but the amount of attention we have to give doesn’t.
That’s an interesting problem for marketers. Producing enough content has traditionally been one of the challenges. Now we’re moving towards a world where producing it is the easy bit. Getting somebody to notice it, care about it and remember who it came from is much harder.
Against that backdrop, email starts to look surprisingly well suited to where digital marketing is heading.
The Value of Having a Direct Audience
Businesses have spent much of the past decade building audiences on platforms they don’t control. You can accumulate thousands of followers on a social network, spend years creating content for them and still have relatively little say over how many people see your next post. Algorithms change, organic reach fluctuates and advertising becomes more expensive as competition increases.
Social media and paid advertising are still hugely useful, and they’re often how people discover a business in the first place. But there is a difference between reaching somebody through a platform and establishing a direct relationship with them.
When somebody voluntarily joins an email database, a business has that direct connection. Deliverability still matters and inboxes are obviously competitive, but there isn’t a social algorithm sitting between the brand and its audience deciding whether a particular message deserves to appear.
A good email database therefore becomes more than a marketing list. It’s an audience a business has built and can continue communicating with over time. As reaching people elsewhere becomes harder and more expensive, the value of that becomes difficult to ignore.
Email Needs to Catch Up Creatively
For something so commercially important, email doesn’t always receive the same creative attention as other parts of a brand.
It’s fairly common for a business to spend months developing a new website, refining its visual identity and creating carefully considered advertising, only to send customers emails based on a template that hasn’t changed much in years. Internally, those things might belong to different teams and budgets. To the customer, they’re all the same brand.
Someone can see an advert, visit a website, sign up for an account and receive a welcome email within the space of a few minutes. If those touchpoints feel completely disconnected from one another, people notice, even if they couldn’t necessarily tell you exactly why.
Good email template design is really about solving that problem within the limitations of the inbox. The typography, imagery, hierarchy, spacing and calls to action need to feel like the wider brand, while the design itself still has to work across different screen sizes, devices and email clients.
And email can be an awkward environment to design for. Outlook has its peculiarities, dark mode can change colours in unexpected ways, images might not load and something that looks great on a large screen needs to make just as much sense on a phone. Accessibility and readability have to be considered too.
Those restrictions aren’t particularly glamorous, but they’re part of the job. Designing an email isn’t simply a case of creating something attractive and handing it over to somebody to turn into HTML afterwards. The way it will eventually be built and behave in an inbox should influence the design from the start.
Automation Raises the Stakes
The monthly newsletter is only one small part of what email has become.
A new subscriber might receive a welcome series. Someone who leaves a product in their basket could receive a reminder. A new customer might enter a post-purchase journey, while somebody who hasn’t interacted with a business for six months could receive a completely different sequence.
For larger businesses, there can be dozens of these journeys running at the same time, and most of them happen automatically.
The effort put into those journeys can pay back for a surprisingly long time. A social post might have a useful life measured in days and an advertising campaign might run for a few weeks. A welcome email or abandoned basket journey can keep reaching people every day for several years.
If 50,000 people eventually receive the same automated email, a small improvement to that email has effectively been repeated 50,000 times. Equally, a bad design or confusing piece of messaging can be repeated 50,000 times without anybody inside the business giving it much thought.
This is also where businesses can end up with an email estate that’s difficult to manage. Campaigns are created individually, templates get duplicated, somebody makes a slightly different version for another department and before long there are ten variations of what was originally the same thing.
It makes more sense to build a system around the work. Reusable modules, templates and clear design rules allow teams to create new communications without rebuilding everything every time. They also make it much easier to keep the brand consistent as the number of emails grows.
What AI Can Actually Do for Email
A lot of the current conversation around AI and email focuses on writing subject lines or generating copy. Those are useful applications, but they’re probably not where the biggest change will happen.
The more interesting opportunity is in how communications can adapt to different people. AI can help analyse behaviour, identify patterns and determine what content is likely to be useful to a particular customer. Over time, the email one person receives could look quite different from the email sent to somebody else, even if they’re technically part of the same campaign.
For a database containing hundreds of thousands of people, doing that manually would be impossible. Automation makes it achievable.
But there’s an obvious catch. Giving a system the ability to create more variations doesn’t guarantee those variations will be any good.
If the underlying template is weak, the brand isn’t clearly defined or the customer journey hasn’t been thought through properly, AI simply gives the business more opportunities to repeat those problems. The quality of the system it is working within matters just as much as the technology itself.
Access to AI probably won’t be much of a competitive advantage for very long. Most businesses will have access to broadly similar tools. The difference will come from the strategy, creative thinking and brand behind them.
A company with a strong email programme can use AI to make it more efficient and more relevant. A company with a poor one can use exactly the same technology and end up sending more emails nobody particularly wants.
From Individual Campaigns to an Email System
One useful way to think about this is to stop treating every email as a separate job.
Look at the experience from the customer’s side instead. What happens after they first subscribe? What do they receive after buying something? Are transactional emails recognisably part of the same brand as marketing emails? Does a newsletter feel connected to the website it sends people to? What happens when somebody hasn’t interacted for a while?
Once you look at all of those communications together, inconsistencies become much easier to see.
It also changes the way email is designed. Rather than starting with a blank canvas every time a campaign is needed, teams can work with a collection of components that have already been designed and tested. Headers, product modules, editorial blocks, calls to action and footers can be combined in different ways without losing the overall identity.
There is still plenty of room for creative campaigns. The difference is that the basic production problems don’t need to be solved again every time somebody wants to send an email.
For busy marketing teams, that can save a surprising amount of time. More importantly, it gives customers a more consistent experience.
What Happens When Quantity Becomes Easy?
We’re probably heading towards a period where businesses can create more marketing content than their customers could ever realistically consume. In that environment, producing another piece of content isn’t necessarily an achievement.
Getting somebody to want to engage with it is.
A large social following is useful, but so is having 10,000 people who have deliberately asked to hear from you. An enormous content library has value, but so does sending one genuinely useful email at the right time.
The temptation with AI will be to use the extra production capacity to do more of everything: more campaigns, more posts, more variations and inevitably more emails. Some of that will work. Some will simply add to the noise everyone is already trying to filter out.
For email, the better opportunity is probably to improve the communications that are already being sent. Make them more useful, make them feel more like the brand and think about the entire customer journey rather than the next campaign in isolation.
Email has been around for so long that it’s easy to overlook it whenever something new comes along, but its basic proposition hasn’t really changed. Someone gives a business permission to communicate with them directly, and the business gets an opportunity to make something of that relationship.
AI will undoubtedly make those communications faster, smarter and more personalised, but businesses will still need to give people a reason to open them. As the internet fills with more content, having an audience that has already chosen to hear from you is likely to matter even more.
About the Author
Barry Button is part of the team at Email Squad, a specialist email design and production studio helping brands and agencies create better email campaigns, templates and automated flows.
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