B2B email marketing is a delicate balance of results, time, and effort:
- The best results come from meticulously personalizing each email’s content and arrival time for the greatest potential impact
- But the best use of time is “blasting” at scale to reach everyone on your email list
Here’s the rub: Neither extreme reaches the right balance of effort to results. One takes too much time, and one provides too little consideration for your leads. But by smartly leveraging AI to craft your emails, it’s possible to grasp the best-possible benefits of both worlds: a highly automated and a strategically personal approach.
6sense is introducing a new way to manage your B2B email, thanks to enhancements via AI. When your leads have more complex interests than a tire-kicker but your email list is too long to handcraft every email, AI is a good go-to to create relevant engagement at scale.
With AI, you can create predictive, personalized, and automated email campaigns that are data-backed to seek the greatest response and conversion results. And sales reps can use AI personalization to quickly generate less robotic email pitches. Here’s how.
1. Know Your Leads — Programmatically
Traditional email automation has fairly rudimentary personalization capabilities; it’s often used to insert the name, company, and perhaps role/business function into emails… and little else. The email content and design, however, would be identical to the template.
This approach simply isn’t specific or resonant enough for today’s buyers. As business intelligence has developed, so too have buyers’ expectations regarding personalized outreach. To reach them in ways that authentically speak to their concerns, you need tools with predictive and intuitive algorithms that can read a CRM and generate a comprehensive understanding of each lead.
AI-enhanced email pitches can recognize a lead’s industry, niche, preferences, and behavior patterns through already archived data. Combined with a world-class ABX platform, this data can be extensive, ranging across a robust spectrum of technographic, firmographic, and psychographic information, and much more.
(Check out our A Deep Dive Into the Dark Funnel™ interactive ebook to discover even more data-points that can be identified, collected, and analyzed by industry-leading ABX technologies.)
AI-powered email software leverages these disparate, valuable insights and instantly creates personalized email campaigns that take all known factors into account, along with a few pre-established strategies created by your revenue team.
This enables your B2B AI to predict the types of content, products, and subject lines that would be the most interesting to each individual lead. Better still, your business can do all this without requiring time-consuming analysis from a human sales rep.
2. Personalized Subject Lines Improve Open Rates
We all know that subject lines inform a buyer’s near-instant decision to read or delete an email. And we also know that most are deleted without a second thought (and certainly without mercy).
But personalized subject lines, which are honed to inspire interest and trust in targeted leads, are far more effective than generic subject lines — even well-written ones.
According to an Oberlo study, personalized email subject lines generate an average of 50% higher open rates. But who has time to personalize every email subject line without starting to feel and sound robotic themselves? An AI.
AI-powered subject line personalization analyzes industry and keyword interests to design engaging subject lines for every lead on the email list. The subject lines won’t be the same and won’t necessarily even follow the same format.
This provides a near-infinite well of personalized subject lines that can be crafted in a snap without hours of attention and creativity from your team.
3. Personalized Content Increases Interest and Engagement
The real kicker, however, is personalized content in each outreach email.
Your customers are not cookie-cutter copies of each other. They work in different industries, niches, and levels of the supply chain. And their buyers hail from within different divisions of those companies, each with their respective concerns and goals.
The regions, processes, products, and even buying calendars of each customer are also unique.
This means what a buyer might want to see often differs wildly from account to account … and even within each account, individual buyers can rapidly leap from one buying stage to another.
So why send the same email pitch when you can personalize it?
AI-enhanced email pitches can analyze everything that is known about a lead and tailor content based on what will likely be the most interesting to them. When buyers open your emails, they should find content that:
- Relates to them
- Is relevant to their current internal workings
- Offers solutions to timely challenges
An AI can select the right mix of content and topics to keep leads engaged and show that your brand is attentive to their unique business concerns.
Personalized Images Also Increase Positive Response
You can even personalize the images within each email to reflect the interests and goals of individual buyers. Most readers will assume that the images are static or related directly to the content. But AI-powered email marketing can select images that relate directly to the customer.
For instance, instead of generic stock photos, you can show images of manufacturing teams to your manufacturing accounts, transport and fleet images to your transportation accounts, and B2B retail images to your retail accounts.
When leads see that the images in your email reflect their business and interests, they’ll intuitively feel a stronger connection to your brand. Relating to your images will engender a sense that you understand their industry and what it will take to become a great B2B provider.
