Email marketing remains a powerful tool for businesses despite the growing prominence of social media. While platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook are essential for reaching audiences, email marketing offers a direct line of communication with customers without the interference of ever-changing algorithms. Unlike social media, where organic reach is limited and platform changes can disrupt connections, email provides businesses with complete ownership of their audience.
Email marketing platforms, such as Brevo and HubSpot, allow businesses to automate, segment, and personalize messages, creating highly targeted campaigns that resonate with customers. By delivering content directly to inboxes, companies can nurture relationships, drive conversions, and provide consistent value, making email a top choice for building long-term customer loyalty. Additionally, with the ability to personalize at scale and automate complex customer journeys, email marketing outperforms social media when it comes to driving conversions and generating sales, particularly during high-demand seasons like Back-to-School, Black Friday, and Christmas.
Based on my experience with various platforms, here are some of the best email marketing tools that use AI technology to improve the results of your campaigns.
MailChimp
MailChimp has long been a market leader in email marketing, and its integration of AI features makes it even more powerful. MailChimp's AI helps optimize send times, automate audience segmentation, and analyze the effectiveness of campaigns through predictive analytics. One of its standout features is the ability to recommend subject lines and content variations based on previous campaign performance.
Who It's For: Beginners and small businesses looking for a user-friendly platform.
Price: Free version available; Essentials plan starts at $13/month; Premium plan starts at $350/month.
Best For: Small businesses just starting with email marketing or those with smaller lists and simpler needs.
What Makes It Unique: MailChimp offers an easy-to-use interface, even for those new to email marketing. Its AI features are intuitive, making it accessible for users with minimal technical expertise.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign's AI capabilities focus heavily on automation and customer journeys. With predictive sending and predictive content, it helps determine the best time to reach your audience and automatically personalizes email content. ActiveCampaign's AI also powers multi-channel automation, providing a deeper level of customer interaction through email, SMS, and CRM tools.
Who It's For: Businesses with advanced marketing needs and large email lists.
Price: Plans start at $15/month for basic; Enterprise plans start at $145/month.
Best For: Medium-sized businesses looking for advanced automation and comprehensive reporting.
What Makes It Unique: The platform's focus on deep automation and behaviour-based actions sets it apart. It's ideal for companies with established email lists looking to scale their operations and automate more complex workflows.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact has been a go-to platform for many years, and its AI tools now offer features such as predictive analytics for email performance, send-time optimization, and engagement scoring. These AI capabilities help smaller businesses focus their marketing efforts on the most responsive customers while refining content to boost open and click rates.
Who It's For: Small businesses and nonprofits.
Price: Plans start at $12/month for Lite; the Premium plan starts at $80/month.
Best For: Small businesses and organizations that need a user-friendly platform with basic AI enhancements.
What Makes It Unique: Constant Contact excels in customer support and provides thousands of integrations, making it easier for businesses to connect with other tools they already use.
Brevo
Brevo's AI tools primarily focus on personalization and multi-channel campaigns. It uses AI to recommend the best email content for different audience segments, optimizing send times based on user behaviours. Brevo also incorporates SMS and WhatsApp into its automation workflows, offering a more holistic approach to customer engagement.
Who It's For: Small to mid-sized businesses on a budget.
Price: Free version available; paid plans start at $9/month for Starter; Business plan at $18/month.
Best For: Small to medium businesses looking for an affordable and feature-rich email marketing platform.
What Makes It Unique: Brevo allows unlimited email sends with paid plans and provides multi-channel communication, making it great for businesses that want to integrate more than just email into their campaigns.
HubSpot
HubSpot goes beyond email marketing by integrating AI into the entire marketing ecosystem, including CRM and sales tools. HubSpot's AI-driven features help with everything from content creation to optimizing the entire customer journey, not just email campaigns. Predictive lead scoring and real-time personalization are key features that can significantly boost engagement rates.
Who It's For: Medium to large businesses looking for a comprehensive marketing solution.
Price: Free version available; Marketing Hub Professional starts at $1,034/month; Enterprise at $4,700/month.
Best For: Growing companies that need a unified platform combining CRM, sales, and marketing functions.
What Makes It Unique: HubSpot is a full-fledged marketing ecosystem, making it ideal for businesses with the resources and maturity to leverage complex AI-driven marketing strategies.
6 Ways On How To Use AI in Email Marketing
Now that you're familiar with some of the top AI-powered tools for enhancing your email marketing efforts, it’s important to follow a set of best practices that will help you maximize your potential. Leveraging AI in your campaigns can significantly improve personalization, optimize timing, and drive more meaningful engagement—but to truly succeed, you need to take strategic steps.
Here are some essential practices that I recommend based on my experience to ensure your email marketing campaigns deliver maximum results.
Start with Clear Goals and Ethical AI Usage
Before diving into AI-powered email marketing, you need a roadmap with clear objectives. AI is powerful, but its full potential can only be realized with a strategy. Whether you aim to increase open rates, improve engagement, or automate segmentation, aligning AI with your overall marketing goals is essential.
Beyond your goals, ensure that you're practicing ethical AI usage. This means ensuring your data collection, segmentation, and automation processes are transparent and comply with data privacy laws, such as GDPR and CASL. As your customers trust you with their data, AI helps you create more relevant, personalized experiences, but this must be balanced with ethical responsibility.
Leverage AI for Advanced Personalization
AI is a game-changer when it comes to personalization. You can go beyond just using a customer's first name; AI allows for real-time personalization based on user behaviour and preferences. AI-powered platforms like ActiveCampaign and HubSpot can analyze browsing patterns, past purchases, and even the time of engagement to serve hyper-personalized emails.
I once worked with a retail client who wanted to re-engage customers who had shown interest in certain products but hadn't completed a purchase. By using Brevo's AI-driven recommendations, we sent personalized product suggestions based on each customer's previous interactions. This resulted in a 23% increase in conversions within two weeks, as the content was tailored to their browsing and buying patterns.
The key to success with personalization is to keep it relevant and engaging. Using dynamic content blocks, you can switch out product recommendations, promotions, and messaging based on the individual recipient's preferences.
Optimize Send Times with AI
One of the simplest yet most effective ways to improve email performance is by optimizing send times. AI tools analyze historical engagement data (open rates, click-throughs, conversions) to predict the best time to send emails to each user. This ensures your emails land in inboxes when recipients are most likely to engage, minimizing the chance of your message being lost in a crowded inbox.
For instance, MailChimp uses AI-powered predictive send-time optimization to ensure your emails reach users when they're most active. Over time, this can significantly improve both open and click rates.
I used this feature for a SaaS client whose target audience was spread across multiple time zones. By optimizing the send times based on historical engagement, we improved the email open rates by 18%, as the emails arrived at times that aligned with the audience's peak activity.
Use AI to Enhance A/B Testing and Multivariate Testing
AI transforms A/B testing by automating and expanding the process, allowing marketers to test more than just subject lines. You can now run multivariate tests on email content, designs, CTAs, and even send times. Platforms like ActiveCampaign allow you to run continuous A/B tests, learning from each campaign to improve future results.
When using AI for A/B testing, it's important to let the AI test one variable at a time. Whether you're testing subject lines or specific images, segment your audience to get the most reliable data.
In one of my client projects, we used AI to test various CTAs and email layouts to determine what resonated best with different audience segments. This approach increased overall conversions by 15%, as we could continuously optimize the emails in real time.
Segment Smarter with AI
Segmenting your audience manually can be labour-intensive and prone to error. AI simplifies this process by using machine learning to analyze customer behaviour and automatically create segments. Whether it's based on purchase history, website behaviour, or demographic data, AI ensures that your email lists are accurately segmented for more targeted campaigns.
One way AI enhances segmentation is by analyzing the nuances of customer behaviours. For example, suppose certain customers are only responsive to promotional offers. In that case, AI will group them separately from those who are more interested in brand content, allowing you to tailor emails accordingly.
Personalized Content Generation Using AI
AI has revolutionized content creation, allowing marketers to generate personalized email copy faster than ever. Tools like HubSpot's AI engine and Brevo can craft tailored email copy, including product recommendations, dynamic CTAs, and customized subject lines based on customer preferences and behaviour.
One of my tips is to use AI to help with ideation. If you're stuck with what to write, prompt an AI tool with a specific question about your product or audience. You'll get suggestions for email copy that are relevant and aligned with your campaign objectives.
The Future of Email Marketing with AI
AI is rapidly transforming email marketing by automating repetitive tasks and enabling marketers to create hyper-personalized, data-driven campaigns. As AI evolves, it will likely lead to further advancements in predictive content, real-time personalization, and integrated multi-channel marketing.
We can also expect AI to significantly shorten the content creation process, allowing marketers to push out campaigns faster while maintaining quality. As AI becomes more integrated with Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), the future will see even more precise audience segmentation and personalized experiences beyond email to encompass the entire digital journey.
AI has revolutionized email marketing by making it more strategic, personalized, and efficient. Whether you're just starting out with a platform like MailChimp or managing complex campaigns with HubSpot, AI tools can help optimize your efforts and drive better results. Brevo is an excellent choice for smaller businesses, while ActiveCampaign and HubSpot are better suited for companies with more advanced needs. The key is to start small, experiment, and scale as your business and marketing strategies grow.