The Future of Email Marketing: Can AI Replace Human Touch?


AI email marketing entails using artificial intelligence to improve email campaigns through automation and personalization. AI automates processes like categorization and optimization while customizing content for each recipient based on user data. But can AI replace marketers?

Despite features like automation and personalization, AI-driven email campaigns cannot replace email marketers who assist in humanizing data. AI solutions don’t consider feelings or empathy. They only use storytelling to humanize their messages, boosting customer loyalty and trust.

Given the surge in data volumes, AI’s popularity has skyrocketed. However, the technology is only in its early phase; it has more to come. In this article, let’s delve deep into how marketers can use AI for their benefit instead of fearing its dominance.

Can AI Replace Email Marketers Completely?

Given how important email marketing is, it is expanding quickly in the industry. As AI can evaluate massive data much more effectively than a person, it aids in formulating email marketing strategies.

Moreover, it lowers the cost of managing personnel and other adjacent systems for the organization. The key issue is whether AI can completely replace email marketers.

Even while we cannot predict what will occur in the year 2100—humans may even end up battling AI!

Based on other corporate growth/success measures and vision, it cannot determine the type of advertisements that should be executed.

AI can add new content blocks, but these tools lack feeling and compassion. So, while you can have automated, data-driven email campaigns, they can’t replace skilled, considerate email marketers.

Things AI Can’t Do

Here are a few things AI can’t do, thus giving the competitive edge to human marketers:

1. Feel and Emote

AI can’t express or transfer emotions. As a result, it is impossible to translate these feelings into material that customers can relate to throughout their buying process.

Feel and Emote

2. Establish Relationships with People

AI can’t establish human bonds because it lacks emotions. AI-based systems are only capable of what is specified in their programming.

The tools lack empathy and can’t comprehend moral and cultural issues to take appropriate action based on these emotions.

3. Operate Independently

For specific jobs, AI devices need human programming, as well as updates. AI systems will occasionally need to be replaced as the demands and needs of businesses change.

Even if you delegate most of the work to AI, including content development, overseeing a marketing team still needs human management.

4. Create Fully Accessible Emails

From an email developer’s standpoint, ChatGPT will have trouble producing completely accessible emails, email templates, or emails that function in dark mode.

The AI will suggest a method that won’t be as effective in our environment because designing emails for accessibility frequently necessitates making the code less “efficient.”

5. Think Critically

Artificial intelligence can’t make critical-thinking-intensive decisions. While AI is excellent at assisting with data collection and analysis, plan building and strategy require the human ability for critical thought.

Considering these limitations of AI should help you see why digital marketers are still necessary now and will be for the foreseeable future.

Think Critically

Why AI Can’t Replace Email Marketers

AI can analyze marketing data more quickly and effectively than humans, saving you time and money on repetitive tasks.

But today, not even the most sophisticated neural network can take the role of an email marketer because:

1. Someone Must Press the Button

For ChatGPT or other AI tools, prompts need to be written. Have you ever commissioned a neural network to analyze your data?

A task that an AI can complete must be developed and prepared. Finally, someone must understand outcomes.

Neural networks are not self-sufficient systems; humans must turn the program on and off to function.

2. AI Tools Can’t Think Strategically

Marketing encompasses more than just small, specialized jobs that artificial intelligence cannot handle.

Creating a brand, defining a UVP, and developing a long-term strategy are all tasks now performed by human email marketers.

3. The Quality of AI Content Creation Is Still Low

Yes, you can speed up writing and illustration using generative algorithms, but all AI output still requires human oversight and editing.

Contemporary technology can’t replace human creativity and innovative problem-solving. The data that AI can use to draw conclusions from is restricted.

Expect nothing from it in terms of editing pictures and videos, creating new music, writing new lyrics, coming up with novel ideas, or creating anything.

So, yes, even though AI is a useful tool for campaign optimization and freeing up time for more labor-intensive duties rather than becoming bogged down in the mundane, no algorithm yet exists that can completely replace the email marketing department.

How Can AI Benefit Email Marketing?

It’s challenging to estimate the possible uses of AI in email marketing.

Since the technology remains in its early stages, marketers are inventing fresh approaches for utilizing the technology to improve (and profit from) the email experience.

There are a few major areas where we can notice the usage of AI in email marketing currently.

Although not comprehensive, these groups can include the key benefits of AI that you might experience today or in the future.

1. Personalization

Several email marketers still believe customization meant including the recipient’s first name in emails, even a decade ago.

Today, there are several useful email personalization tools like Mailshake, Woodpecker, Snov.io, and others that most seasoned marketers utilize or think about.

However, AI promises to expand the potential for personalization. The technology is changing email marketing campaigns due to its capacity to analyze enormous amounts of client data.

Before AI, the ability to segment was constrained by the available data and the marketer’s capacity to make and carry out judgments based on the data. 

In the meantime, AI can perform a more thorough data analysis and consider numerous aspects, like auto-follow-ups and merge tags, to offer customized email content than a human can.

In fact, I suggest you check out my article on AI Chat Funnels and deploy those alongside your email marketing campaigns for maximum personalization benefits.

2. Automated Processes

It’s evident that automation is one of the specialized areas of AI application. Apart from personalization, AI eliminates the human labor businesses require to create email marketing campaigns.

For instance, AI can automatically modify your campaign model and its strategies, making important suggestions for improvisation.

Given how fast it optimizes and boosts the campaign performance at scale, it can be challenging for marketers to cope with this pace when it comes to cold-emailing thousands of clients.

Automated Processes

3. Optimization

AI plays a key role in email marketing in optimizing performance. But how? Let’s back up! It segments data and makes small, continuous improvements to optimize the campaign.

For instance, AI tests out the marketing strategies you implement. Then, it evaluates and analyzes the data and monitors the different campaign parameters to determine what drives the most outcomes.

To ensure improvisation, AI optimizes the subject lines, tests out new offerings, or identifies the ideal time to deliver emails to the segmented group of target audiences.

Future of Email Marketing in Harmony with AI

Email marketing increasingly uses machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Developments in these fields are making marketing automation a dependable choice for businesses.

Following the launch of AMP email technology, the industry is already experiencing a major change. Modern tools enable you to convert static emails into engaging, dynamic user experiences.

Given the history of email innovation, AI-powered email marketing may lead to this change. Most businesses will benefit from AI in email marketing by crafting targeted email campaigns.

You can customize email communications for a particular audience based on client information.

Increased CTRs, conversion, response, and open rates can be achieved with AI-driven approaches, including email automation workflow, smart segmentation, and improved email subject lines.

Therefore, small and large organizations will rely on AI to function effectively on a system that quickly analyzes massive data and presents targeted information.

Future of Email Marketing in Harmony with AI

Don’t See AI as Your Enemy, Use it as a Tool

Email marketers will have more time to concentrate on strategy and the customer experience as AI will take care of personalization and contact segmentation.

Marketers can segment their subscribers using AI tools based on behavioral signals and demographic data like age, geography, and past purchases.

The bottom line is integrating AI into email marketing and leveraging personalization and automation.

Shailen Vandeyar

A proud Indian origin Kiwi who loves to do BJJ and play with his pet bunny when not taking a plunge into the vast ocean of funnel design, email marketing, copywriting, conversions, and customer retention.

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