• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, 5 hours ago

Consumers are not quite rebelling against the AI summaries being foisted on them in emails. A recent study by Validity found that 55% are making inbox decisions based on those summaries alone, although few fully trust them. 

This poses a challenge for email marketers: How do you integrate AI summaries into your campaigns in the face of that suspicion?  

With 40% of consumers saying that they are less likely to trust AI-generated content, marketers must put guardrails around AI use, panelists said during a Validity webinar on Wednesday, hosted by  Guy Hanson, vice president of customer engagement at Validity.

Take Hickory Farms, the venerable gift brand. It does not use AI to develop email creative. Why would it? Its gifting business has long relied on the beautiful imagery created by in-house creative teams, said Jan Partin, director of retention marketing & social media at Hickory Farms, speaking during the webinar.  

But Hickory Farms has used ChatGPT for subject line creation. “We send a lot, and having to come up with seven or eight subject lines is difficult,” Partin noted.  

Some companies ask AI to originate ideas for content, but then create it themselves, adding a human touch, said Julie Stack, senior email strategist at Validity.  

Proofing of email copy should thus be focused on more than typos: Check that core message so it matches your tone and feel, Stack advised. 

How do you ensure that AI summaries tell your story correctly? In a sense, you have to train them.  

Hickory Farms has done this by adding live text entries to its image-heavy template. “The live text has helped to make the summaries a little more accurate,” Partin said. 

Repetition of ideas is essential, but that is a literary challenge—you need to find different ways of saying the same thing.

Mistakes can occur. Stark has seen an email implying that shoppers need to have credit approval to make a purchase. But this is true only of the company’s credit card.  

Here's another tip: Throw some marketing copy into the footer area to support accuracy in the summaries. 

And live texts have to be correctly styled. Use a web-safe font and live HTML text.  

Next, it’s prudent to make sure that Gmail or another provider doesn’t throw off your testing by placing the wrong message at the top of your inbox. 

Hickory Farms tests time of day a lot. The company has “a lot of urgency around our sales,” Partin said. But Gmail could place a sale email at the top of the inbox, although the sale ended the day before.  

Finally, brands using AI in any way also need to update their privacy policies, given the fact that many consumers are worried about misuse of their data, Validity’s recent survey showed.  For starters, they need to distinguish different AI models. And they must  practice data minimization. That means they shouldn’t collect personal information like birthdays if they are not going to use it.  

The survey showed that only 17% of shoppers are completely comfortable with an AI tool reading all their emails to surface recommendations and deals. And 40% will not use an AI assistant.