How to Improve B2B Email Personalisation Using AI

Standing out in people’s crowded inboxes is increasingly difficult. With almost 3.5 billion emails competing for your customers’ attention daily, your message risks getting lost in the noise.

Personalisation could be the key to cutting through and delivering on customer expectations. An astounding 66% of B2B customers expect the same level of personalisation, or better, in their professional lives versus in their personal lives. And 76%  of customers get frustrated when they don’t receive it.

So with expectations sky high and research suggesting personalisation improves performance, why aren’t more B2B companies using it to their advantage?

The truth is, many brands struggle to achieve it at scale. Email marketing teams work under constant deadlines. As soon as one campaign deploys, the next is due. Even for the most streamlined teams, the demands of personalisation make it hard to develop customised content and hit publishing deadlines.

But AI-powered tools like ChatGPT now let you have your subscriber-delighting cake and automate it too. The bots handle the heavy lifting, while humans provide the creative direction and final review. It's the best of both worlds - efficient systems producing content with a personal touch.

Personalisation Possibilities

By now, most people are used to the idea that generative AI is great at brainstorming ideas for simple content.

You can use AI to rapidly develop a list of ideas for subject lines, headlines, and calls-to-action. AI excels at ideation for these foundational email elements. With the right prompt, you can even ensure that AI is optimising for both relevance and deliverability.

AI can also review data from your top-performing email subject lines, such as those with high open rates or sales conversions. It can then rapidly generate a large number of fresh subject line ideas inspired by these proven examples.

However, you can use the same principles to get AI to help you write meatier chunks of copy and tailor them to the needs and interests of different audience segments. It can step in to help when you’re drafting template emails for cold outreach or one to one follow ups. In fact, if you use a email marketing platform that allows you to build templates using dynamic content, AI can help you improve the relevance of almost any type of email.

Take a standard monthly email newsletter, for example. If you have segmented your subscribers, you can personalise the newsletter copy and offer curated content based on the attributes of each segment. 

Perhaps you want to send a different message to people who have already purchased from your company to people who are still in the consideration stage. Or maybe you want to reinforce your marketing messages based on the interests of your subscribers, indicated by the types of content they’ve downloaded.

Similarly, communications like webinar invitations can be personalised based on whether a recipient has attended a previous event, or if they’ve viewed the sign up page but not filled in the form.

Marketing automation platforms that offer dynamic email templates often also provide dynamic landing page builders. If your email is designed to drive people from different segments to segment specific landing pages, AI can help cut down the workload and ensure the continuity of tone and messaging for a seamless experience. 

How to Personalise Using AI 

Segment Your Audience for Relevance

Segmentation is the first step in personalising your email marketing. By analysing your data and identifying specific audience segments, you can tailor your content to resonate with each group.

Your email marketing tool or marketing automation platform likely offers built-in analytics and segmentation tools. Use these to gather data on your subscribers' demographics, interests, behaviours and past interactions with your brand. Look for trends and commonalities that allow you to cluster contacts into logical segments.

For example, you may want to separate segments by:

• Industry or company size

• Job role or function

• Content downloads or purchases

• Engagement with past emails

However, it is critical to make sure that you’re handling your subscriber’s data carefully. Recent updates to ChatGPT4 means you can now upload spreadsheets full of data and enable Code Interpreter to help analyse it. But just because you can, it doesn’t mean you should.

Transferring customer data is likely to put you on shaky ground in relation to data privacy regulations. Instead, focus on using your existing marketing tools for analysis and segmentation, then use AI to help with subsequent steps.

Define Personas 

Once you have defined your audience segments, the next step is bringing them to life through personas.

Personas are fictional but representative profiles that capture the needs, challenges, motivations and goals of a segment. They help humanise an audience to craft more relevant messaging.

This is an ideal application for AI. You can provide the attributes of each segment, then have the AI generate a descriptive persona. You can even have the AI play the role of each buyer persona to help you think about the type of content that would resonate with them. From there, ask them to provide recommendations you can use to tailor your email marketing strategy for each segment. 

Streamline Content Creation  

Now that you have defined segments and created representative personas, it's time to develop tailored content for your emails.

Leverage your marketing automation platform's dynamic content blocks to create customised versions of each email for different segments. Then, use AI to generate the personalised content variations to populate each block more efficiently.

The AI can quickly produce introductions, offers, calls-to-action, and other copy tailored to the attributes of each segment's persona. An AI image generator like Midjourney, or Adobe’s new capabilities through Photoshop, can help you to create targeted images. This allows you to scale personalisation without laborious manual content creation.

Be sure to provide the AI with clear direction on your brand voice, tone, visual identity, and information to guide its messaging for each segment. Then review the output and refine as needed to maintain quality and accuracy.

The goal is to use AI to streamline the process while humans focus on strategy and creative oversight.

Enhanced Content Curation 

Curation can provide extra added value for subscribers and AI can help you to up your content curation game. Use it to build a recommendation engine to help you filter and find content your readers will find valuable.

The goal is to enhance your customers’ experience by surfacing content related to their interests and needs.

It might not be advisable to use AI data analysis to uncover patterns in your customer data. However, you can feed it spreadsheets of data on your own content. 

Train AI on your existing content inventory to have it identify blog posts, guides, case studies or other assets to recommend based on your target segments. You can draw from a bigger pool of content by developing a repository of relevant external content from authoritative sources.

Keep People in Charge

When leveraging AI, be careful not to over-automate. While AI tools can streamline processes, human oversight remains critical. AI provides the scale, while humans provide the heart.

Your mailing list is a valued asset. When customers give you their email addresses, they are showing trust in your brand. They trust you to communicate responsibly and respect ethical boundaries. They deserve to be repaid with thoughtful content, not just automated outputs.

Ensure a positive experience by maintaining human involvement at every stage.

Only view AI generated content as a first draft. Carefully review and edit before sending. Even where it is possible, avoid connecting AI directly to customer-facing email templates as quality and accuracy cannot be guaranteed.

The most effective approach is for talented marketers to strategise campaigns, then use AI to optimise on execution. Humans need to be involved in creative direction, review, and sending approval. Their judgement is needed to:

Ensure brand consistency and accuracy

• Provide quality control to catch any errors

• Maintain compliance with regulations

• Deliver messaging with care and respect

The most effective marketing happens when talented people are empowered by AI, not replaced by it. This balance enables automation with humanity.

Get Ahead with AI

Email marketing remains an impactful channel, but standing out requires personalisation. As expectations for relevance continue to rise, AI can enable data-driven personalisation at scale.

Integrating solutions like ChatGPT into your workflow allows you to scale relevance while maintaining oversight. AI can generate personalised content faster, which leaves humans to focus on strategy and quality. The key is finding the right prompts, the right balance, and using the technology responsibly. 

Used in this way, AI will help future-proof your email marketing. Audit your current use of personalisation and develop a plan for selective AI integration. The brands that learn to use these technologies effectively now will gain a competitive advantage.

By pairing human creativity with AI, you can craft resonant messaging at the scale your audience expects. Seize this opportunity to get ahead of the curve.

What if you’re simply not there yet and you’re increasingly worried that you’ll be left behind in the AI revolution? Get in touch to start a conversation about how we can help you optimise email marketing through selective AI integration customised for your brand.