Artificial Intelligence has enhanced the way we use technology. It makes things easy for us and removes a lot of subjectivity in making decisions. And now, the power of AI has been added to our age-old email marketing. Haven’t you ever wanted to answer questions like “When would be the right time to send an email out today?”. The answer to this and many other questions is an email strategy cognified with AI.
In 2020, a cognified email marketing strategy will help you stay ahead of the competition. Cognification of email marketing can help you reach customers at the right time with the right message. And because this can be achieved with little to no manual effort, it saves a lot of time and resources in the long run.
But what exactly is cognitive email marketing, and how does it help you devise better emails?
What is Cognitive Email Marketing?
Cognitive Marketing is about using technology and behavioral science to help your customer make better buying decisions. It’s a way to form a connection with a customer and create brand loyalty and conversions.
To translate cognitive marketing into email marketing, there are 4 different aspects:
1. Knowing your customers
This starts with knowing exactly what your customers like. Understanding and creating a buyer persona that resonates with your buyer is the best way to create personalized offers that convert best.
There are multiple ways you can make this happen:
- With the use of user tracking with cookies
- Looking at shopping cart items
- Login history and frequency
- and many more…
For example, instead of saying “70% off on the entire store, only for you”, use the data that you track and send an offer “70% of on <product> that you have in your wishlist!”.
This is possible with the use of smart AI systems and powerful data tracking.
2. Anticipate and Solve Delivery Issues
When you work on delivering a campaign, you need to understand the other side of the picture. How is the mailbox provider reacting when you send out an email. Are they accepting the complete load at the same time?
Or are they blocking a certain part of your email volume for later?
Identifying the right throughput manually can be difficult. But using the AI-powered dynamic throughput feature, you can send out the right number of emails that the Mailbox Service Provider accepts at a time.
However, before the email is sent out, anticipating delivery issues has helped a lot of clients boost their inboxing rates by over 10-15%.
3. Help customers make the right decisions
Customers look at the first price they see online, which sets a bar for them for all the other prices.
This Is Called Anchoring.
For example, on Amazon, if you see the first product is priced at $400, that’s the price that you’re willing to accept as a customer for the product.
If there are products that are priced cheaper, you’ll try to find the limitations that accompany the cost savings, or if the product is priced higher, you’ll try and find if there are any additional benefits with the higher price.
So always ensure that your first portion is impactful! But what about the rest of your email? According to research, people remember the first and the last parts of what they see.
This Is The Serial Position Effect
When a person is reading an email, they need to be impacted by the first part of the email and then compelled by the last part of the email.
It’s easier said than done, no doubt. However, it isn’t impossible to achieve.
This type of email’s fundamental aspect is to ensure that the first part connects with your reader enough for them to read through the middle.
The middle part is simply an explainer that’s transitioning the reader from what got them hooked to what you want them to do. (Your CTA)
If your goal is to sell a product, you have to develop an attractive enough offer to get them hooked. You can then continue about how the offer is beneficial to a person of their type and why they need to take action now.
The Second Phenomenon Is Social Proof
When you’re browsing through the products, you check out the number of reviews and what the reviewers are stating in their reviews.
People want to see others accepting and trying out a specific product before they make the purchase. Very few users are okay with taking the risk of being the first few buyers.
So it’s of utmost importance to have easily visible star ratings, reviews, and other forms of social proof, including certificates and other relevant ones.
But that doesn’t need to be limited to what you say on your website or your social channels.
You also need to ensure the same is said by people too.
Social proof also accounts for Influencer marketing, branding, referrals, affiliates, and word-of-mouth publicity.
With Social proof, we want the users to see our brand through someone else who has used our product or services.
Cognitive Email Marketing to Enhance ROI
Cognitive email marketing is designed to reach your customers with the information and offers that they would love to see at the moment.
Some examples that are commonly seen with eCommerce companies are sending out discounts over email for the products that a customer has in their cart. Here’s an example campaign:
The above campaign was sent out by HayNeedle.com, a furniture company. This is a great example of how personalization can work for your emails.
A customer abandoned their cart midway and did not come back to the website after an expected amount of time. The time it takes for customers to come back to a brand’s cart and complete their transaction differs between brands and you can identify the same by looking at past data.
Hayneedle sent out an email to the customer with a discount code that was specific to their cart and their cart items and a randomly generated discount code.
When a user sees a personalized email like the one above, they know that the discount is offered only for them. They are now more likely to get back to the cart, than an email that simply reminds them that they still have items in the cart.
This is all the power of adding cognition to email. Great email campaigns designed with a cognitive email marketing approach don’t just put the message across to the user.
These emails are designed to guide the user through the complete process and get them to reach the destination that we wish for them to see.
It’s about understanding what the customer is thinking about and understanding how a customer’s mind works.
The holistic understanding of your customer’s persona drives you to send out emails and marketing offers that grab their attention and put them into the mindset of a buyer.
Conclusion
The new world of email marketing has transformed and will continue to change as things evolve in the machine learning space. Adding a layer of cognition to your marketing effort is just the first step to ensuring you stay a step ahead of your competitors.
