Will Artificial Intelligence (AI) Revolutionize Email?

by Roland Pokornyik

The breakthrough already happened last year in the research of artificial intelligence, since the first computer passed the Turing test – which means that it could fool over 30% (33%) of interrogators into thinking it is a human being. I’m sure that interrogators are not average people, but trained professionals, so maybe most of us could be fooled by an AI nowadays.

There are more and more tools emerging in the email field, which already use the benefits of artificial intelligence and automation. The first tool was X.ai, which is a personal assistant who  schedules meetings for you.  I haven’t personally used to tool, but I’m on the waiting list to try it. Expectations are quite high – at least from investor’s perspective – since X.ai already raised over $11 Million VC financing. X.ai is for business email, not for marketing emails, but it definitely shows the trend at least.

image source: Conversica.com

Besides them, there’s another, even more exciting concept I saw recently, called Conversica. They state that their software will help you to automate email conversations with your leads to qualify them for sales. The interest is really high for Conversica as well, since they raised $16M private equity already. Conversica seems to be a more complicated solution, which can definitely be beneficiary for businesses who do online sales. I hope we’ll get access soon and may start experimenting with the tool. Obviously it must be much higher priced than X.ai.

The amount of funds raised is not a KPI, but it definitely shows the excitement about the mix of artificial intelligence and email (marketing). Both of these solutions focus on personal, low scale email sendings, but definitely as artificial intelligence and marketing automation evolves, something similar should come to mass emails.

How will artificial intelligence boost the performance of emails?

Email marketing has evolved from so many aspects in the last couple of years, that I’m sure that time will come when super AI will change the way we do email marketing. But how will AI help you?

  • It may engage in conversations with your real conversations with people who completed a certain a certain interaction with your email.
  • It may help you to craft, write and design email templates faster.
  • Imagine that an AI may even configure your marketing automation funnel automatically based on feedback it collected from your subscribers.
  • Or maybe in a “far” future AI may be able to take care of most of your marketing channel, and you’ll only need to focus on improving human interactions and customer care.

Email marketing – Marketing automation – “AItomation”?

The shift from purely manual, mass email based email marketing to personalized marketing automation is happening now. **Will “AItomation” be the next step in online marketing/sales? What do you think? **