• by Jess Nelson , August 24, 2016

An email add-on can now help email marketers craft messages that are maximized for engagement.

Boomerang Respondable, released on Tuesday, is an AI-powered email development tool that helps marketers construct messages built for responses.

Boomerang is an email extension available on both Gmail and Outlook, and provides a suite of email-based productivity tools including an email-based calendar assistant, Boomerang Calendar, and Inbox Pause, a product that halts incoming messages for a specified period of time.

Its suite of products has given the company access to a database of information on which emails are responded to and which ones are saved for later. Geared with that information, as well as a variety of third-party and public data sets, Respondable provides Boomerang users with a real-time analysis of an email’s quality and likelihood of response.

It's important to note that the feature is currently only available for emails written on a desktop computer. 

The new application is immediately available on both Boomerang for Gmail and Boomerang for Outlook, but advanced features, such as sentiment and/or personalized analysis, are reserved for users of Boomerang’s Pro and Premium plans.  

Boomerang considers a number of factors that are likely to effect the likelihood of an email response, including subject length, word count, reading level, email etiquette, subjectivity and overall sentiment.

By analyzing these factors and applying machine-learning algorithms, Respondable predicts the likelihood that a message will receive a response as the email is being written in real-time. The program also recommends email improvements so that marketers can create an email optimized to engage with readers.

Since Boomerang is an email add-on, Respondable can work entirely within a user’s mail client and does not transmit any message data elsewhere.  For more advanced machine-learning features, however, message data is transmitted to a secure server and is encrypted, according to the company.

In addition, Boomerang discards all data after performing its analysis to further safeguard business intelligence from prying sources.