Skip to Navigation
The number of emails sent and received around the world has been rising since 2018, and it’s still increasing—it’s predicted to reach 408.2 billion in 2027. So it’s more important than ever to make your message stand out
Personalized emails are the key to higher conversions, but high-level customization takes resources you don’t have. That’s where AI email personalization comes in, making the process less time-consuming and more scalable.
Let’s find out how it works and how it can help your business.
What is AI email personalization?
AI email personalization is the practice of using artificial intelligence to customize outbound messages for individual recipients. It automates the process of data analysis, segmentation, and content creation for email campaigns and makes your messaging more engaging.
Instead of marketers adding personal details into each email manually—which would take forever—AI algorithms quickly analyze the relevant data and automatically insert personalized content based on the recipient’s behavior and preferences.
Using machine learning (ML) algorithms and advanced data analytics, AI assistants can handle vast amounts of real-time and historical data from previous marketing campaigns, interactions with customer touchpoints, and other data sources such as social media.
These insights enable you to create highly targeted content and send it at the optimal times, meaning recipients are more likely to open and act upon the messages.
You can also use AI tools such as Smartwriter.ai or Warmer.ai to generate the content. But note that the content will still need a human edit since you can’t rely on AI 100% to bring the copy close to your recipients, despite its capacity for data analysis. Even so, AI still saves you a ton of work.
Examples of AI email personalization
AI email personalization can improve cold email outreach, discover sales opportunities, or respond to inbound inquiries. Here’s a more detailed breakdown.
- Engage sales prospects: Sales reps can spend hours searching through a prospect’s socials looking for an icebreaker, but AI can do it in seconds. For instance, if their LinkedIn profile reflects an interest in a specific area of your industry, you can reference this in the email and send them a link to some interesting news or even a related podcast.
- Engage existing customers: If customers are using an app to work toward a goal—such as learning a language or running a certain distance each day—then AI can analyze their data and send them a round-up of what they’ve achieved each week. It’s like having a personal coach cheering them on, keeping them motivated (and wanting to use the app).
- Cross-sell or upsell: AI taps into customers’ psychographic traits and lifestyle choices. Let’s say an ecommerce store sells some plant-based foods. AI can detect if a shopper regularly buys these items and create them a custom email with recommendations for the store’s other plant-based choices, related promotions, or a recipe to try.
- Reward VIPs: Want to know who your most valuable customers are? AI-powered tools will identify those who spend the most and those who’ve been with you the longest and use this information to generate reward emails. (“Congrats, Joe! You’ve been a loyal customer for two years—here’s $20 off your next purchase.”)
How does AI email personalization work?
Following on from those examples, let’s find out how exactly AI email personalization works.
Collects and analyzes customer data for insights
As indicated, AI tools can gather and sift through a huge amount of customer data, both real-time and historic, from various touchpoints and databases such as CSV files. In addition to improving lead generation, these insights help you figure out the type of content people want to see in marketing and sales emails and how often they want to receive them.
Segments audience into groups for targeted emails
Using machine learning to analyze large datasets, AI can identify patterns in behavior and interactions. It uses these to divide your target audience into segments based on attributes such as demographics, purchase history, preferences, needs, and pain points. This enables narrow targeting, allowing you to create email content that’s customized for each segment.
Generates personalized content based on customer data
With traditional methods, personalization just meant inserting the recipient’s name or customizing the message intro. But AI goes much further, using the data it collects and analyzes to write email content tailored to the recipient’s needs and interests.
Uses predictive analytics to forecast customer actions
Predictive analytics shows how a customer is likely to behave in the future, given their behavior in the past. If AI analysis highlights purchase intent or churn risk, you can tailor the email content accordingly. You can also anticipate their needs—for example, sending them a reminder to order a new supply of medication a week before they’re due to run out.
Triggers emails based on customer behavior and actions
You can set up AI workflows to watch for triggers and generate specific emails for specific actions. When a shopper abandons their cart, they’ll automatically receive a custom email with a reminder and maybe a promotion. You could use Agentic AI (a type of AI that retrieves information and acts independently) to create email templates and send a sequence of follow-ups after a newsletter sign-up.
Monitors email performance and adjusts in real-time
AI will monitor your key metrics (such as click-through and response rates, unsubscribes, and eventual conversions) to check how an email campaign is performing. It will let you know the results and make the necessary adjustments on its own in real time. For instance, it can see which subject lines lead to higher open rates and optimize future emails accordingly.
Benefits of using AI for email personalization
Now, here’s a detailed overview of why AI email personalization tools are a game-changer for sales and marketing.
Increases conversion rates with targeted email offers
AI can improve open and reply rates, which in turn leads to conversions. Again, that ties to AI’s capacity to tailor your marketing and sales outreach to the needs and preferences of each prospect or customer.
This helps the recipients feel valued, encouraging them to read the content and take action, whereas non-personalized and irrelevant emails cause frustration and fail to grab people’s attention.
Saves time and resources by automating personalization tasks
We all know the importance of personalizing emails, but humans can’t achieve a high level of personalization at scale if they’re creating each message manually.
AI tools help businesses save significant time and resources, boosting efficiency for marketing and sales teams. In turn, they can spend more time on high-value activities. Plus, AI analyzes customer data in seconds, eliminating the need for a team of data scientists.
Generates data-driven insights to optimize email performance
Insights backed by data are critical for email campaign optimization. And, as you might assume, it’s the AI tools that provide them at scale. In addition to analyzing customer preferences via interactions and your CRM, AI can do the following as well:
- Track key email performance metrics
- Determine the optimum send times and frequencies
- Correlate personalization efforts with results
This means you can continually refine your campaign based on hard evidence, while the AI algorithm actually learns and improves as it collects more data and generates more emails.
Scales personalization efforts for growing customer bases
As I already mentioned, AI enables you to handle vast amounts of customer data and streamline the email creation process. This makes it possible even for small businesses and startups to manage big campaigns.
It’s also ideal for companies experiencing growth. For example, as you expand into new regions, AI can use geolocation data to customize content to the recipient’s home area, including offers and suggestions based on local weather and events.
Best practices for effective AI email personalization
It’s clear that AI-generated personalized emails bring many advantages, but here are a few things to consider before adding AI to your tech stack.
Prioritize customer privacy and data protection
73 % of consumers are willing to share their data in exchange for a more personalized experience, rising to 81 % for Gen Z. But you must always ask them for consent—and you need to assure them that you’ll keep their information safe.
Be transparent about how you’ll use their data, explain the benefits, and allow customers to exercise their right to be forgotten. Whatever AI email marketing tool you use, make sure it includes robust security settings so that you’re compliant with regulations around data protection.
Create compelling and relevant subject lines
AI can help you create subject lines that will resonate with each recipient by analyzing successful subject lines from past campaigns to understand what appeals to specific segments.
AI can generate multiple subject line variations for you to choose from. It can also ensure that your email doesn’t contain words that are typically flagged by spam filters, improving deliverability.
Leverage customer lifecycle data for targeted timing
To give your AI tool the most accurate, up-to-date information, ensure it can access data from all touchpoints and stages of the customer lifecycle. Then it can build targeted contact lists and send relevant emails to engage recipients at specific stages of their journey.
AI tools can also use historical customer data to figure out when people are most likely to open and read their messages, and adjust the email cadence to match. You’ll gather more insights if you allow recipients to set how frequently they receive emails and the type of content they favor.
Maintain a consistent brand voice while personalizing content
Your brand voice must be consistent across all channels, from your social media to the live chat on your company website. You’ll need to ensure that the personalized elements don’t alter the overall tone and character of the email.
You can ask AI-driven tools to communicate in a certain style and prompt them to mention specific words and phrases. However, marketing teams should still be involved in checking emails for consistency and professionalism.
Ensure responsive design for all devices and platforms
There’s no point in letting AI craft the perfect marketing email if the recipient can’t read it properly or view the images you’ve chosen. It’s vital that you use responsive design, which means the message always displays in a way that’s compatible with various devices and email clients.
If you’re including dynamic content, make sure there’s an alternative version for recipients whose email client can’t display it (otherwise, they’ll miss out on key information). It’s always worth testing and previewing emails before sending them.
Conduct A/B testing on personalization strategies regularly
A/B testing is crucial for improving your email marketing and outreach efforts, and it’s definitely something AI can help with. For example, using generative AI for enterprise, you can automatically create multiple versions of a personalized email for testing at scale.
The best AI tools have the functionality to factor in the results of your previous A/B tests, identifying the best-performing content, subject lines, and CTAs for different audience segments and applying these findings to the latest campaign.
Maintain a balance between automation and human touch
As with any type of automation, the idea is to enhance rather than replace human input. For example, AI tools save time and resources when creating emails, but the tech is still evolving, and AI doesn’t always replicate the most subtle nuances of human communication.
So, it’s a good idea for copywriters and sales reps to review personalized email drafts and refine the language and tone to secure alignment with their brand voice and check for errors. This way, you maintain a truly personal touch for each recipient.
Final thoughts
Bombarding prospects and customers with generic emails won’t boost your conversion rate. Recipients are more likely to open and respond to personalized messages, and AI enables you to create these at scale—using data-driven insights to suggest and generate engaging content.
Apart from improving your key metrics to boost campaign performance, AI email personalization helps you to build customer relationships that lead to long-term brand loyalty.
