Very few conversations around technology escape the artificial intelligence (AI) topic these days. From the pessimists who believe that AI will eventually take our jobs to the enthusiasts who are ready to fully embrace the rise of AI and everything it brings, everyone acknowledges that the world is changing at a rapid pace - and the transformation is AI-powered.
The digital marketing field and all its branches are not immune to change. According to recent research, three in five marketing professionals use AI in their current role, especially for manual or repetitive tasks. Over 85% of marketers and sales professionals agree that AI enhances content quality and prospecting efforts, while supporting two core personal areas: time and productivity. ( The HubSpot Blog's State of AI Report, 2024)
That’s because AI can perform complex analyses rapidly that would otherwise take marketers hours or days. It can also learn quickly from its past performance and make improvements in real time. When marketers embrace AI, they can adopt more sophisticated strategies and free up time for the creative aspects of their jobs.
But let’s zoom in and see how major email marketing automation platforms like Oracle Eloqua, HubSpot, and Adobe Marketo Engage are innovating with AI to increase the effectiveness of email campaigns, leverage data-driven insights, and enhance personalization. We’ll be looking at key email marketing automation areas and highlight the most prominent AI developments impacting each one of them.
1. Content Creation and Recommendations
Great content is the fuel that sets the email marketing automation wheels into motion – it drives brand awareness, attracts leads and delights customers. This is also where major marketing automation platform invest their significant efforts, offering marketer the tools they need not only to generate compelling content, but also to match content pieces to various audiences for higher chances of conversion.
Content Generation
HubSpot and Eloqua offer AI-powered content assistants to help marketing teams automate and streamline the copy writing process across landing pages, marketing emails, CTAs, SMS and beyond. The content generation tools use prompts to offer, in exchange, valuable, click-worthy content, allowing marketer to save time and enhance their productivity.
Following Eloqua’s prompting best practices, ensures you get the best results when using the platform’s content assistant. Teaching HubSpot’s AI writing tool how to use and apply your brand’s voice and style across all generated content pieces, keeps your brand identity strong and consistent.
Both tools are designed not only to create new assets, but also to write variations of the same piece because sending everyone the same content just won’t do.
It’s no secret that people are more prone to engage with messages speaking their language. This is why, in HubSpot, for example, with just one click, you can change the tone of voice of your copy and adapt it to each of your audience segments.
Not yet ready to fully commit to a marketing automation platform, but you still want to try the AI content writing capabilities available out there? HubSpot’s AI content writer is currently free to use and you can test it out for designing and drafting your sales outreach or marketing emails.
Content Repurposing
Once a long-form piece of content has been created, repurposing it for multiple channels and audiences can take weeks or more, often meaning it’s already dated by the time it reaches its target. That's where HubSpot’s Content Remix comes in, a repurposing software that adapts assets across channels, creating new opportunities to reach and engage your audiences.
Subject Line Optimization and Recommendation
Great marketing emails require equally great subject lines to ensure their success. In Eloqua and HubSpot, you can access AI features designed to generate effective and engaging subject lines for your marketing emails based on prompts or email copy. Analyzing past data from your instance, Eloqua offers, as well, insights into the potential performance of a subject line, before you send the email: a predicted open rate percentage and a Good or Poor status. Constantly testing and monitoring the effectiveness of AI-generated subject lines contributes to refining and optimizing your overall email marketing approach.
Predictive Content Recommendation
On the same realm of AI-powered content, we find an innovative feature from Adobe Marketo Engage: predictive content. Powered by Adobe Sensei, an AI and machine learning technology, this feature matches the right content to the right people at the right time, helping marketing teams with personalization and precise targeting - two vital elements of successful lead nurturing campaigns.
AI starts by identifying your most relevant content pieces and preparing them for recommendations and measurement across your digital marketing initiatives. It then streamlines behavioral, geographic and firmographic segmentation criteria, analyzes the content preferences of your audiences, and adjusts as those audiences move further into their buying journey.
By incorporating dynamic content into your web and email marketing, you’re delivering more relevant experiences to your audiences. Teaming up with AI to help you do it saves you time and sets you on a future-ready path.
2. Sending Time Optimization
Time is of essence when launching email marketing campaigns: you’re battling for inbox space with many other senders, and you want to be there when your recipients are most likely to open your communications.
Most marketing automation platforms offer various scheduling options for your sends, but AI can take things up a notch.
Eloqua’s AI-powered send time optimization feature, for example, uses historical data to determine the best times to send emails for each recipient, enhancing personalization and maximizing open and click-through rates. When you need to accommodate a global database, this kind of feature is particularly useful because it takes off your shoulders the burden of deciding the right moment for a campaign launch. Batch-type campaigns that span across longer periods of time are the perfect candidates for employing this feature. In a dedicated chart, you can view how enabling and using email send time optimization is impacting the overall performance of your campaigns.
3. Data Management
Effective data management is crucial for organizations to succeed in the today’s data-driven landscape. It enables informed decision-making by providing accurate and reliable data for strategic planning and performance monitoring. Efficient data management practices streamline operations, improve productivity, and make sure employees can access the right information when needed.
AI is starting to have an impact in this area as well: HubSpot’s Smart CRM offers a suite of powerful tools that can turn rather tedious, time-consuming tasks into streamlined processes. Employ AI to bring all your team together with a singular system of records, detect anomalies across the platform, evaluate and correct them before they become disruptive, identify and merge duplicate contact and company records in bulk, but also to keep your CRM data clean, consistent, and reliable by leveraging AI-powered formatting recommendations.
4. Data Segmentation
Out of the entire available pool of contacts and accounts, marketer need to identify those who are the best fit for their campaigns – that’s non-negotiable if they want to keep the number of unsubscribes to a minimum. Using historical and real-time insights, AI can help create contact segments based on data patterns.
Predictive Segmentation
The predictive audiences feature within Adobe Marketo Engage, for example, uses AI to evaluate your database and find the people most likely to attend your next webinar or event, but also those ready to unsubscribe when they receive an invitation that’s a less-than-perfect fit for them. The best part about the feature? It’s very easy to use: simply select the likelihood to register and likelihood to attend filters to build the best-possible segment for each event. These filters become more accurate over time, as they learn from past results.
Engagement Clustering
Whether you are targeting contacts or account, knowing who your high engagers are and where you need to prioritize your efforts is always an advantage.
Using blackbox machine learning algorithms, HubSpot analyzes your database to determine the probability that your open contacts will close as customers. The likelihood to close and contact priority allow you to filter out based on a predictive lead scoring model.
The likelihood to close is a score that represents the percentage probability of a contact closing as a customer within the next 90 days based on profile and behaviour. For example, contacts with a close probability value of 22 have a 22% chance of closing as a customer in the next 90 days. The contact priority is a ranking of contacts evenly distributed into tiers based on their Likelihood to close scores.
The options range from Very High, High, Medium, to Low and Closed Won, where Very High is most likely to close, and Low is least likely to close.
Oracle Eloqua and Adobe Marketo Engage offer some compelling AI-backed options for your account-based marketing (ABM) strategies.
Eloqua’s Account Intelligence gives you a clear view of each account's level of engagement. All accounts are assigned an Engagement Score on a scale from 0 to 100 - the higher the score, the more engaged the account. Using the Top Accounts by Engagement Score chart and the Account Performance dashboard, you can drill down further into data to identify opportunities, trends or outliers that may require attention.
Marketo’s Account Profiling leverages AI to automatically discern which accounts have the highest chance of turning into revenue. You can build multiple predictive lists based on recently won accounts, new up-sell opportunities, and accounts in your database you may have overlooked. Then, validate them and create personalized ABM campaigns with email marketing, paid media targeting, and intelligent cross-channel nurturing.
5. Database Churn Prediction
Finding the right balance between over and under emailing to avoid audience burnout and disengagement, while staying top-of-mind in contacts’ preferences, is a constant challenge for marketer. By analyzing behavior patterns like reduced engagement or declining activity, AI can identify customers at risk of unsubscribing and empower marketing teams to make educated decisions.
Oracle Eloqua’s Fatigue Analysis used AI to determine how exhausted your contacts are by your emails, and change your message frequency. There are 9 possible fatigue levels ranging from Inactive – a contact that has not received an email in the last 45 days or is a new contact with no established engagement history, to Oversaturated-High – a contact that has exhibited poor levels of engagement and shows a strong possibility of disengagement. This contact score is available across the platform and ready to use throughout segmentation, orchestration, personalization, lead scoring, and analytics.
6. Reporting & Analytics
Good reporting means not only having access to quality data, but also being able to organize it in a way that makes sense and is easy for all the teams involved to follow.
HubSpot’s AI-driven reporting tool helps you create custom reports that fit your requirements and share through dashboards them across departments. For each report, the tool includes recommended filters and data visualization, it generates names and descriptions to make your analyses more accessible and it allows you to change data parameters on the fly for increased relevancy.
7. AI Honorable Mentions
Image Generation
You know the old saying, an image is worth a thousand words – and marketing assets are no exception. Injecting the copy with the right imagery adds value to the email or landing page message, grabs attention and helps increase audience engagement.
Finding and selecting scalable, safe for commercial use, on-brand original images, is not always an easy task, so HubSpot and Adobe Marketo Engage have come up with solutions for marketers. Through an AI assistant, HubSpot invites users to generate images directly into the platform, to save them into the content library or to add them into content modules. While Adobe Marketo Engage doesn’t provide a native tool for image generation, it encourages its users to try out Adobe Firefly for all their visual content creation workflows.
Conversational AI for Marketing Workflows
Although not actual email marketing automation tools, AI-powered conversation assistants deserve a place in this list since they are designed to support marketing and sales teams in working more efficiently, finding useful information quicker, and optimizing their strategies – all leading to business growth.
HubSpot offers two AI conversational tools, both equally useful, but addressing different needs. The customizable chatbot builder qualifies leads, provides customer support directly on your website and triggers email campaigns, while freeing up time for sales and marketing teams, so they can focus on more strategic activities. ChatSpot promises to empower marketers with actionable information delivered in a conversational manner, including real-time insights from in-depth company research or keyword rankings. When it is integrated with HubSpot’s CRM, ChatSpot can accomplish CRM-related tasks such as drafting emails, building simple reports, and creating records. These two tools are currently free to use, and you can give them a go right now.
Created for both customers and internal teams, Adobe Dynamic Chat is an end-to-end conversation automation tool that expands marketing capabilities and gives customers multiple ways to independently engage with your site, book meetings, and get answers to questions. For internal teams, it aims to make smarter, faster work easier through conversation summaries empowering sales agents pre-meeting and dialog assist, automatically producing a full library of topics, questions, and responses for during live chat conversations.
Final Thoughts
By leveraging these AI features, platforms like Oracle Eloqua, HubSpot, and Adobe Marketo Engage help marketers automate, personalize, and optimize their email marketing efforts, driving better engagement and improving ROI.
An already hyper-dynamic field, email marketing automation only increased its transformation speed under AI’s influence and we’re feeling all the rush. How about you—what AI feature excites you the most, or what other features would you like to see? Where do you think AI will have the biggest impact in the future? We'd love to know.
Meanwhile, if you need help with your digital marketing efforts, don't hesitate to reach out to us, and schedule a meeting with one of our consultants.
