AI in email marketing goes beyond auto-generating email copy. AI lets you enrich every lead in your list, write relevant, personalized emails, and find the best-performing copy in campaigns.
Here’s the problem—you need the proper setup. Leveraging AI in email marketing isn’t plug-and-play, but some tools and strategies make the process much easier.
We’re here to tell you all about them. By the end of this guide, you’ll be able to run email marketing campaigns on autopilot, land more meetings, and improve sales performance. Let’s lock in.
What Should AI Automate in the Email Marketing Process?
Before getting into the tools and strategies, we have to anchor our technical AI setups on email marketing fundamentals. That means automating essential, manual tasks like the following:
Prospecting
Prospecting takes hours. Sales reps must find leads matching ideal customer profiles (ICPs), do research to enrich lead lists, and validate leads. Instantly B2B Lead Finder cuts this to minutes.
Lead Finder’s advanced filters pinpoint leads that match your ICP, the lookalikes feature helps find leads similar to clients, and the news filters enrich lead lists with relevant and timely data.
Lead Qualification
Not all leads are equal. Some could be window shopping, trying things out; others already have their wallets out—just a nudge away from a sale. AI helps differentiate which is which.
AI lead-scoring tools evaluate prospects' interactions with your content, emails, or landing pages to identify sales-ready leads. This enables sales reps to focus on leads most likely to convert.
Personalization
Generic email copy needs spray-and-pray strategies to secure the slightest chance of securing a meeting with leads. You should never compromise quality over quantity.
With Instantly, you don’t have to. Instantly can craft personalized copy with custom variables, templates, or prompts—each email becomes unique and tailored to each lead in your list.
Sales Cadence
Sales cadence isn’t just about the specific time or day to send sales emails. It’s about maximizing the strategic timing of each email and follow-up across all communication channels.
AI for sales emails can create sales cadences based on prospect behavior, ensuring each touchpoint moves the needle toward a desirable action from high-value prospects.
A/B Testing
Email marketing is a game of cause and effect. Each change to the subject line, intro, or CTA should improve your initial email's iteration. You can’t just rely on a gut feeling.
Instantly analyzes your campaign, compares different versions of emails, and finds the best-performing ones with automated A/B testing. It’ll then send that email to the remaining leads on your list.
What Does an AI-Powered Email Campaign Workflow Look Like?
AI-powered email campaign workflows can be as simple or complex as needed. For example, a simple workflow would be using AI to generate personalized first lines based on the company description of leads in your email list.
A complex workflow might involve using AI to:
- Scrape data from your leads’ website or LinkedIn
- Use lead data to enrich leads
- Create personalized emails that align lead data with your value propositions
- Auto-generating spintax and different email variations
- Automating cold emails, follow-ups, and nurturing
- Leverage AI to auto-optimize A/B testing to find the best-performing emails
What you can automate depends on the tools at your disposal. You can’t rely solely on ChatGPT for complex email marketing workflows.
Essential AI Tools for Automating Email Marketing Campaigns
AI tools are great at moving data around. That’s the crux of what we’re trying to do. We want AI to learn from company data, pull lead data from reliable sources, and mesh them together to create hyper-personalized emails.
Then, we need AI to automate and optimize the email marketing process, not just email copy personalization. That includes email warmups, cold emails, follow-ups, and A/B testing. Here are the tools that can do just that:
AI-Powered Email Automation Tool
Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT aggregate data on what they think is a good cold email. Instantly’s AI is trained on millions of actual top-performing cold emails across multiple industries.
Even if you're not an experienced copywriter, Instantly can generate eye-catching, personalized sales email copy that aligns with your audience's needs.
New to cold email marketing? Instantly has you covered. The new AI Sequence Generator can create entire campaigns with just a few clicks.
To start, create a new email campaign with Instantly, add leads, and click on "AI Generator." Input key information about your company, value propositions, case studies, audience, and the number of steps in the sequence.
Instantly will automatically create a cold email sequence based on your inputs, complete with spintax and custom variables for personalization. When prospects reply, manage all your inboxes seamlessly with Instantly’s Unibox.
Unibox has an AI Inbox Manager that automates replies. Let’s say you send a lead an email with a CTA that says, “Can I send a quick video to show you how our process works?”
Instantly’s AI Inbox manager can then send the link to the video along with other contextually important details. If Unibox isn’t confident enough in the data available, it won’t reply.
Instantly Dealflow CRM
Instantly Dealflow CRM is built for simplicity and optimized for email marketing. With Dealflow, you don’t have to switch between apps or do complex integrations. It’s built within the tool.
Dealflow lets you access the Master Inbox, which centralizes all emails from all campaigns and lets you see emails from specific campaigns. This lets you get a 360-view of your sales process.
Businesses that need a more holistic sales cadence can use Dealflow. It allows you to see trends for calls, SMS, and emails to refine strategies and target interested leads.
You also access Instantly’s AI, which analyzes lead data from the CRM to help you find in-depth prospect insights to help you craft personalized emails. The AI can even reply to prospects based on context.
Another simple yet powerful feature of Instantly’s CRM is Salesflow. Here, you can set conditions for lead scoring for the hottest leads most interested in your offer.
For example, you can set a condition that if a lead opens an email three times and clicks a link two times in the past seven days, they’ll be tagged as a HOT LEAD. This allows sales reps to target leads most likely to convert.
Instantly B2B Lead Finder
Email copy won’t matter if there’s a mismatch between prospect needs and your value proposition. The people in your email list must match your ICPs. That’s why we do prospecting.
Instantly B2B Lead Finder streamlines the prospecting, qualification, and segmenting process by helping find leads that benefit most from your products and services.
You can filter leads by job title, location, industry, employee size, revenue, or specific keywords. If you already have previous clients, you can input their domain to find companies similar to them using the Lookalikes features.
Once you’re happy with the lead list you’ve built, you can immediately run a new campaign with it or add it to an existing campaign. Instantly also checks for duplicate leads across all your campaigns.
How to Use Instantly.ai to Automate Cold Email Marketing
Instantly is a comprehensive tool built by cold email marketers for cold email marketers of businesses of all sizes, from SMBs to enterprise-level organizations.
With Instantly, you can streamline and automate each step of the email marketing campaign, ensuring your emails reach the right prospects with personalized, impactful messages.
DFY Technical Setups
If you want to do cold emails right, you’d need the proper technical setups. This ensures that your domains are protected against the potential negative effects of cold email marketing.
You must set up DMARC, SPF, and DKIM records. These records tell internet service providers that the emails you send are from a legitimate domain and enable you to send emails.
Setting up the technical aspects of cold email marketing can be challenging, particularly for those without a technical background. Instantly's Done-for-You (DFY) service simplifies this process by handling everything from domain setup to email account configuration.
Automated Warmups
Before running a campaign, you need to warm up sending accounts. It’s recommended that you enable warmups for two to three weeks first. Instantly does this for every sending account for free.
Simply enable the warmup feature after setting up your domains and sending accounts. You can keep warming up sending accounts indefinitely to help keep a positive sending reputation.
B2B Lead Finder for Prospecting
To access Lead Finder, click the search icon on the top left of your dashboard. From there, you can either use it to find leads that match your ICP and buyer personas or use it to enrich lead lists you already have.
If you’ve narrowed your search criteria, you can enable the Evergreen feature to automate the prospecting workflow. You can set it to add any new leads monthly to a campaign matching your search criteria. Basically, prospecting on autopilot.
Prompts for Personalization
After adding leads to a campaign, you can add personalization to each lead with the help of prompts. Instantly has dozens of pre-built and community prompts from which you can use or take inspiration if you don't know how to start.
To do this, go to your Leads tab and click the AI prompts icon on the top-right (it looks like a brain). This will integrate Instantly with your ChatGPT using your API Key to help you create different variables for your leads and add additional columns to your lead list.
Automated Email Sequences
The sequences tab is where you build the content or copy of your cold email campaign. The variables created from the AI prompts can be used here to personalize your copy.
If copywriting isn’t your forte, dozens of templates are available for multiple industries. When you’re done writing, you can test the deliverability of your email and see the spam score.
In the sequences tab, you can also set the number of emails included in the sequence, including all the follow-ups or opt-out emails.
A/B Testing
In the sequences tab, you can create different variants of your emails by adjusting the intro, subject line, or specific variables based on what you want to test. After setting up these variants, enable Instantly's auto-optimization feature.
This tool identifies the best-performing email in your campaign and focuses on sending only those, stopping the distribution of underperforming emails to the rest of your leads.
Key Takeaways
AI-powered email marketing lets you run campaigns on auto-pilot, from prospecting all the way to A/B testing and iterations. But you need the proper tools to make the most out of AI in email marketing. To recap, here’s what we recommend:
- Instantly.ai is the best all-around AI-powered email automation tool
- Salesforce CRM offers AI assistants that offer lead scoring and sales forecasting
- Instantly B2B Leaf Finder automates prospecting and finds leads that match your ICPs
Instantly is your best bet if you need an AI-powered tool for prospecting, inbox management, cold email automation, and personalization. Try it out today.
