But it would be a mistake to conflate email’s reliability with stodginess. As marketers encounter technological changes and evolving customer expectations, email marketing can adapt, becoming more personalized, timely and reflective of consumer desires.

Throughout 2023, no technological development has rocketed into prominence more than artificial intelligence (AI). As generative AI platforms for public use rolled out last year, marketers and customers alike have expressed interest in the technology’s capacity to improve buying experiences.

Buyers are particularly interested in AI’s ability to help them navigate purchase and return experiences, gain insight into products and take advantage of personalized recommendations and promotions. What better channel to showcase AI’s benefits while building on the consistency and accessibility email already provides?

AI’s Power To Optimize Messages

AI’s transformative power in email marketing is undeniable. In this digital age, capturing attention and fostering engagement demands resonant emails. That’s where AI steps in, revolutionizing how we connect with customers.

Today’s consumers crave personalization and richer experiences. In fact, more than 70% of global consumers believe AI can elevate their customer journey, with Millennials and Gen Z waxing even more enthusiastic (80% and 83%, respectively). Generative AI is the answer, empowering marketers to craft emails that hit the mark for every individual. And the results speak for themselves: Nearly all (95%) marketers who’ve embraced Gen AI find it “effective,” with more than half declaring it “very effective.”

{loadposition GIAA}The magic of AI lies in hyper-personalization and relevance. Imagine emails that whisper directly to each subscriber, speaking to their unique needs and interests. This laser focus translates to higher open and click-through rates.

Gen AI assists marketing teams by:

• Producing first drafts of headlines and email copy for marketers to edit and refine;
• Facilitating better engagement testing with rapidly generated subject line variants;
• Providing alternative copy in various tones to more closely match brand voice and campaign goals;
• Offering suggestions to improve a marketer’s copy for greater effectiveness with customers; and
• Translating copy into multiple languages for greater messaging inclusivity.

While free, accessible consumer-facing models have catapulted Gen AI into the spotlight, its potential to transform the email experience for marketers and consumers extends far beyond content generation. Predictive models will evolve beyond merely crunching marketing data to generate insights — they’ll actively suggest ways to elevate your email marketing strategy and tactics. AI’s near-future uses include:

• Customized email templates for specific audiences and campaigns, with the power to suggest images, layouts and calls-to-action for the best possible performance;
• Activity and attribute-based subscriber clusters, facilitating dynamic subscriber segmentation to improve the impact of email campaigns;
• Customer feedback analysis identifying pain points and surfacing subscriber sentiment to make messages more relevant; and
• Predictive insights based on past email performance and subscriber rates to help marketers pinpoint send times and frequency.

Other Emerging Technologies

While AI is undoubtedly making waves in improving marketing emails, it’s not the only player in the game. Email clients, for example, constantly evolve, often with little warning. These updates can wreak havoc on carefully crafted emails and templates, leading to a frustrating user experience.

Think about it: With email volume tripling in recent years, marketers are spending more and more time testing emails to identify issues and manage (often costly) fixes. Meanwhile, email remains a vital channel for delivering positive brand experiences, and customer expectations are higher than ever.

A whopping 85% of customers have said that just two negative experiences can make them ditch a brand, even one they love. The potential loss of subscribers (and missed revenue) resulting from broken emails or ineffective personalization is no small matter.

The right technology automatically monitors email to notify marketers about unforeseen changes. By reviewing frequently used templated and automated sends, marketers can mitigate problems and retest emails quickly and efficiently to maintain a high-quality user experience.

Brands must invigorate their approach to email marketing, acknowledging email as a leading omnichannel force to offer a unified brand experience bolstered by ever-improving personalization and interactivity. Brands that ignore these technological advancements — and the critical customer experience enhancements they provide — do so at their own peril.

Cynthia Price is the SVP of Marketing at email marketing platform Litmus. Her team grows and supports the Litmus and email community through content marketing, demand generation and events. She has been in the email marketing industry for more than 10 years, and was previously VP of Marketing at Emma, an email service provider. She’s passionate about creating authentic communications and harnessing the power of email — the heart of the marketing mix.

The post How Email Marketing Innovations Will Impact Brand Strategies appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

The AI Assistant reportedly can:

• Change the tone and voice of emails;
• Write emails faster and without error;
• Lengthen any message instantly;
• Work across multiple languages;
• Support talk-to-text functionality; and
• Summarize a user’s dictation as a paragraph or bullet point.

“Pipeliner CRM is about the perception and performance of the salesperson,” said Nikolaus Kimla, Pipeliner’s CEO, in a statement. “With the recent rise of AI, we saw an immediate opportunity to apply the technology to our platform in a way that makes the sales process more efficient and engaging for salespeople. With the current economic climate, it feels right to offer our Voyager AI Email Assistant to our customers for free, allowing them access to this revolutionary tool to improve their day-to-day communications with no added cost.”

In addition to AI Assistant, other free applications include Pipeliner’s Appointment Scheduler, Appointment Planner, Relationship Mapping Tool, Account Management Tools and Email Sequences Tool.

The post Pipeliner CRM Makes Voyager AI Email Assistant Free for All Users appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Specifically, the companies are requiring senders who send significant volumes to:

• Strongly authenticate their emails following these best practices;
• Provide a one-click unsubscribe option and processes those requests within two days; and
• Stay under a .3% spam complaint rate threshold.

“These changes are like a tune-up for the email world, and by fixing a few things under the hood, we can keep email running smoothly,” wrote Neil Kumaran, Group Product Manager, Gmail Security & Trust, in a blog post. “But just like a tune-up, this is not a one-time exercise. Keeping email more secure, user friendly and spam-free requires constant collaboration and vigilance from the entire email community, and we’ll keep working together to make sure your inbox stays safe.”

In the same blog post, Marcel Becker, Yahoo’s Sr. Director of Product, shared a statement that noted, “Yahoo looks forward to working with Google and the rest of the email community to make these common sense, high-impact changes the new industry standard.”

The post Google & Yahoo Implement New Bulk Sending Rules appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

The Lowdown

Litmus Email Guardian proactively monitors all emails — such as templates and transactional sends — to help users fix costly, brand-damaging errors before every send.

Back-Of-The-Box Details

Email Guardian is designed to help marketers keep a constant pulse on how external factors, like email client changes or image hosting issues, impact how their emails display. It is said to be the only solution that proactively monitors how emails render across key email clients, alerting users to any changes before they reach subscribers.

Who It’s For

Email developers face tight deadlines and lack insight into post-testing client changes. Marketing managers need flawless delivery to maintain subscriber growth, engagement and overall campaign success. Marketing leaders need to protect their brand reputation across all channels. Email Guardian seeks to solve these challenges and ensure successful email campaigns.

What It Solves

Email clients change every day without notice, and each change puts emails at risk of breaking, resulting in a poor subscriber experience. The impact on brand trust can be costly to a company’s bottom line, decreasing engagement across channels.

What Makes It Special

According to the company, it is the only solution that monitors emails 24/7, giving marketers peace of mind that their emails are constantly protected and ready to drive revenue.

Contact

Litmus
675 Massachusetts Avenue, 10th Floor
Xambridge, Mass. 02139
1 (866) 787-7030
hello@litmus.com

The post Litmus Launches New Email Testing Solution: Email Guardian appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

The new Social Feeds feature seeks to help organizations:

• Expand social media marketing reach for existing campaigns by automatically inserting social media posts within email signatures;
• Create more interactive and visually appealing email signatures; and
• Measure performance by analyzing how effectively email signatures convert recipients to click-through and read posts.

“While organizations are continuing to look for ways to increase engagement with customers and offer them a more human and personalized experience, it remains crucial to work smarter and do more with less,” said Vicky Wills, Chief Technology Officer at Exclaimer, in a statement. “Business tools need to evolve and adapt to meet these needs, and email signature solutions are no exception. Our Social Feeds feature helps companies maximize every 1:1 engagement opportunity by giving them a way to marry up social and email communications. We’re thrilled to launch our Social Feeds feature with Facebook and look forward to including additional social media platforms in the future. This is just one example of how Exclaimer has listened to its customers and evaluated the market to enhance our solution.” 

The post Exclaimer Adds ‘Social Feeds’ Feature To Email Signatures appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

The Lowdown

Lavender’s AI-powered sales email coaching platform is designed to blend deep learning and communication psychology to help sales reps 2X-3X their cold email reply rates. It does this by providing real-time suggestions to optimize the email — such as making sentences shorter, balancing the ratio of I’s and you’s and mobile friendliness — so that reps can focus on building relationships and selling products.

Lavender users can write fully personalized emails in less than five minutes, instead of the 15 minutes it would otherwise take — and they average a 20.5% reply rate, according to the company.

Back-Of-The-Box Details

Lavender aims to provide an in-inbox email writing coach, research and personalization tools and a coaching dashboard, offering the following capabilities:

Email Scoring

Lavender assesses and scores emails in real time based on their likelihood of eliciting a response. This guides users in enhancing their email communication and raises the probability of a successful sales conversation.

Data-Driven Personalization

Lavender’s AI extracts data on the recipient and their company to generate personalized email content. This allows users to connect with recipients on a personal level and increases the relevance and impact of their outreach.

Writing Assistance

Lavender’s AI identifies specific moments in an email where a user can be hurting their chance of a reply. In those moments, Lavender offers intelligent writing suggestions, helping users craft clearer, more persuasive messages based on data. Each suggestion includes an explanation, so the user can make them their own if they want or they can use the suggestion as given.

Aggregated Coaching Insights and Analytics

Unlike traditional sales enablement platforms, Lavender offers a unique, highly granular view of sales email performance. This capability not only provides a comprehensive understanding of email performance but also helps pinpoint precise areas for improvement.

Template Ranking

Lavender ranks templates according to their performance, assisting users in identifying the most effective strategies. This provides a critical advantage in selecting the most successful email formats and content, and in understanding scenarios where particular types of email messaging have success.

Lavender integrates natively with Gmail, HubSpot, Outlook, Outreach and Salesloft, and it offers integrations for Google Docs, LinkedIn and more through Lavender Anywhere.

Who It’s For

The primary Lavender users are sales professionals, including sales representatives, sales managers and sales enablement specialists.

Lavender technology isn’t just helping salespeople, however — Lavender was offered for free to job seekers during the pandemic, and it still is today. Lavender’s email coaching has helped countless job seekers improve their outreach and more quickly land a new job.

What It Solves

The average email reply rate is 1%-2%, which burns 99% of leads. But sales management often has no visibility into why email isn’t working. Lavender is built to increase reply rates by coaching salespeople and helping them write more effective emails faster. It blends content intelligence with performance data, so managers finally know how to help.

What Makes It Special

Lavender is trained on nearly 200 million sales emails (and growing) and can measure and understand, down to the individual level, what is driving email performance.

Lavender provides specific recommendations that reps can review and resolve in real time as they draft their email and coaches them to be better writers. Lavender can draft emails in various tones and styles using just a few bullet points, and the platform continuously improves its suggestions as reps and teams use it more often.

Contact

Lavender

Book a demo.

The post Lavender Aims To Elevate Sales Emails With AI-Powered Coaching appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

The solution’s interface provides intelligent suggestions and recommendations, allowing salespeople to write higher-performing emails. The system includes:

• Several pre-made templates designed for various types of email campaigns;
• The power to create and save context outlines; and
• The ability to apply those context outlines to address various verticals, geographies, buyer personals, campaign priorities or any other user-specific contexts.

“Our customers have told us time and time again that they don’t just want AI capabilities for the sake of AI — they want to be able to see definite ROI from the technology,” said David Hood, CEO of omnichannel sales engagement platform and Autoklose’s parent company VanillaSoft, in a statement. “That is exactly what we are giving them with Autoklose Komposer. Because organizations don’t always have the resources or skills to develop engaging email content, we have developed an easy-to-use, cutting-edge tool to help them free up salespeople to focus on selling. This launch is very exciting as it paves the way for other AI-powered features currently in the works for both Autoklose and VanillaSoft.”

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EasySender combines predictive inbox placement, sender reputation monitoring and deliverability optimizations into a cloud platform. These tools reportedly help businesses authenticate email domains, verify email address lists, raise sender reputation and monitor domain reputation. Key features include real-time email diagnostics, actionable deliverability insights and inbox placement scoring, while the two primary services include:

• Email Verification, which seeks to eliminate problematic addresses from email lists to minimize hard bounces;
• Inbox Placement, which helps provide insights into whether emails will land in an inbox or spam folder.

“For many organizations, the primary function of DMARC and email authentication is security — and it’s an important one,” said Gerasim Hovhannisyan, EasyDMARC CEO and Co-founder, in a statement. “However, as more and more email providers rightly enforce email protections, marketers must raise their standards to maintain results. Simply put, those who are more rigorous with their deliverability will see more emails hitting inboxes, more engagement and more success.” 

The post EasyDMARC Unveils Email Deliverability Platform To Help Improve Email Marketing Campaigns appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

DemandTools offers four editions: Free, Elements, File and the recently updated V Release. The enhanced V Release includes:

• A closer integration between DupeBlocker, a native Salesforce app from Validity, and DemandTools to help users merge reported duplicates automatically and in bulk;

• Content Documents and Attachments from Salesforce can now be exported directly from Salesforce through an automated path;

• New features for theTune module that focus on providing elevated data visualization when interacting with records in any standard or custom objects; and

• The return of DemandTools Certifications with multiple badges across all modules of the platform, including a “DemandTools Certified” badge for social profiles and DemandTools Certified swag.

The post Validity Reveals New Product Enhancements For DemandTools Solution appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Validity

Hassemer brings more than two decades of experience in senior level marketing roles with leadership, management and operations experience. Most recently, he served as CMO at Adaptigent and Advisera Expert Solutions. In the coming months, Hassemer will focus on building out a comprehensive strategy to align marketing with sales, product and other areas of the organization to create a sustainable, high-quality marketing function.

“Adding Jeff to the Validity leadership team will further champion our goals of high-level growth in the year ahead,” said Mark Briggs, CEO of Validity, in a statement. “We are confident in his ability to strategically build out a sustainable plan for expansion. I can’t wait to see the new energy Jeff brings to the team, especially during this time when marketing technology is evolving and the need to help our customers adapt is more urgent than ever.”

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