• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, July 11, 2023

AI is not to be feared—in fact, it may lead to a new era in email marketing. One of the major email providers, Movable Ink, argues just that in its new ebook: “The Marketer And The Machine: Unlearn and Rethink. The Future of AI is here.” 

The document serves to introduce a new AI product from Movable Ink: Movable Ink Da Vinci. Aside from that, its main premise is that you have to change the way you think about AI (and almost everything else). 

Now you may already agree with these premises—it’s not as if email senders suddenly discovered personalization with the emergence of AI. But in introducing this product, Movable Ink offers the following tips (and we quote): 

Marketing Campaigns Should Be One-Size Fits All

Create campaigns that speak directly to the unique needs and interests of each individual customer. 

The Role Of Human Marketers in the Marketing Process

Rather than being replaced by AI, marketers should work alongside the technology to leverage its insights and capabilities, while also bringing their unique creative and empathy to the table.  

Automating Your Workflow

Say goodbye to batch-and-blasts, but don’t sacrifice simplicity. AI allows you to consistently send timely, personalized, and effective campaigns quickly. 

OK—now here are some of the do-not dos. 

Traditional Marketing Practices 

Stop relying on intuition and guesswork. Instead, incorporate data-driven insights to guide decision-making. 

Prioritizing Short-Term Gains 

Marketing is a long-term investment that requires building relationships with customers over time through consistent and personalized interactions. 

Segmenting Audiences 

Don’t place your customers within rigid categories. Remember they are complex individuals with unique preferences, behaviors, and attitudes that cannot be simplified into broad segments. 

At the risk of sounding like a sales pitch, Da Vinci allegedly does the following: “The tool integrates with your ESP and uses the data sources from your existing tech stack. The algorithm anticipates not only what a customer will likely want to purchase, next, but also guides each individual to new products and categories they will love.” 

The paper adds that the tool is “enterprise-ready, offering partitioning, compliance, and transparency to ensure the AI is responsible and scalable.” 

For instance, you should be employing these capabilities:

• Image Classification
• Analyzes creative metadata with computer vision
• Scores every piece of content by tagging metadata
• Understands promotional versus brand content. 

 Language Classification

• Reads and understands copy using natural language processing (NLP) 
• Looks for patterns in text and optimizes content accordingly. 

How does it work? For one thing, it provides a creative library,, templates and business rules for selecting eligible creative. "AI selects individual content for each individual customers. It also provides personalized content, frequency and send times for every subscriber.”

Again, this is not an endorsement—we repeat it to show how AI may be leveraged for email specifically. We haven’t seen many reports discussing email in particular. And there may be other equally effective tools out there.  

Go to it.