E-mail marketing strategist and co-founder of Palabra, the first Italian agency entirely dedicated to e-mail marketing and automation, Alessandra Farabegoli has been working in the digital sector since the late 1990s, helping companies, organisations and professionals use the Internet to provide a better service, earn more and work better. As a biologist first turned to computer science and then to online marketing, she analyses communities and their forms of interaction, competition and mutualism, to build balanced and sustainable growth strategies.
We asked her for a preview of her speech at BTO, on how she sees the evolution of e-mail marketing in the coming years, considering the growing impact of AI.
Hello Alessandra, in your opinion, which AI functions featured could really make a difference for a marketer?
As has happened with every buzzword – and I have seen many of them in digital marketing – with AI there is also currently an inflation of applications, generally considered necessary and on the whole sensible. So there is no e-mail marketing platform that has not announced new AI-driven features and here it is essential to keep our feet on the ground and distinguish what really helps us work better from the features we can happily dispense with.
Personally, I am experimenting with interest with a number of AI features applied to automation, which can be used, for example, to set up A/B tests on versions of messages or the duration of the time intervals between one message and the next, leaving it to machine learning to gradually refine the test and select the best option. I also find interesting features that accelerate the creation of complex segments or the development of flow logic: we describe our goal in words and the platform sets the selection criteria or the automation scheme. All well and good, provided we are then able to critically evaluate the result and perfect it, because as is the case when generative AI is used to write, the works produced by the machine always need to be revised, if not rewritten from scratch.
Instead, I would like to highlight another type of impact that AI will have on e-mail marketing, not so much on the process of producing messages, but on how they are viewed by those who receive them. The Inbox is no longer an anti-chronological stack in which all messages, from the most recent to the oldest, are presented in the same way: now we find them divided into folders: GMail was the first. From the next version of iOS, Apple Mail will also organise them by sender and type. Every now and then the algorithm decides to bring to our attention messages that we have not opened but that, according to its inscrutable logic, we should read; and increasingly often we see AI-generated message previews in our Inbox. We senders no longer have total control over what will be displayed and we must ensure as far as possible that the content of our e-mails is unequivocally understandable, not only by people but also by algorithms, to avoid a situation whereby the preview shown in the Inbox gives a different message than the one we intend to convey.
In an age where AI seems to want to standardise and automate everything, what strategies would you recommend to keep e-mail marketing authentic, personal, and relevant to recipients?
Unfortunately – or fortunately – there are no magic formulas or silver bullets, but only doing your homework and remembering that if the messages we send do not contain some utility for those who receive them, they will also be completely useless for those who send them.
Not everyone does it, not everyone will do it, after all even today our Inboxes are full of self-referential campaigns whose editorial plan rests on a single pillar: “buy buy buy”.
The good news is that we can use AI to generate contextual analyses, working hypotheses and brainstorm creative ideas faster and at lower costs, thus saving energy on the boring and time-consuming part of the work and putting more energy into listening to people.
Segmentation and personalisation are key, but how can we avoid the risk of creating carbon-copy campaigns that end up being predictable or unengaging?
As I always say, often the best thing we can do is… a little less: send fewer messages, send “that” message to fewer people, include a little less content – clearly focusing on the main objective of the e-mail and avoiding filling it with secondary CTAs – and perhaps lighten the code, as lighter messages use fewer resources to travel and be stored.
We are already full of copycat campaigns and content sold by the pound: the bad news is that to produce them with AI we consume much more energy and water and CO2 emissions budget. AI is also an easy temptation: if you don’t care much about the relationship but only about short-term profit, you will probably use it to send the same copycat campaigns as before, but for less money.
The net result is to maximise private profits and generate ever higher collective costs, which cannot last long: we can get out of it by accelerating the race towards catastrophe, or finally take note of the necessity and urgency of finding healthier, fairer and more humane balances. Have I gone beyond the scope of e-mail marketing with this response? Undoubtedly yes, but I think that part of the solution is to try to look a little beyond the narrow confines of our scope of action and to think that the impact of what we do resonates beyond measuring opening and click-through rates.
Don’t miss the appointment with Alessandra Farabegoli in the toolbox ”Balancing AI in E-mail Marketing”, at BTO 2024.
The interview was conducted by Giulia Eremita, coordinator of the topic “Digital Strategy”. We look forward to seeing you in Florence on 27 and 28 November 2024!
