A Salesforce Explained YouTube episode (host Brian Tong) introducing how generative AI improves email marketing. The video explains generative vs. predictive AI, lists benefits (time savings, personalization at scale, faster A/B testing and improved metrics), emphasizes human-in-the-loop control, and demonstrates using Salesforce Einstein in Marketing Cloud to generate subject lines, body copy, and images for a promotional campaign.
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If you're wondering how you can create more impactful email campaigns while saving a ton of time, you're in luck. Today we're talking about how generative AI can help level up your email marketing strategy. I'm Brian Tong, and this is Salesforce Explained. Now, before we dive into how email marketing and AI work together, I want to make sure that we define exactly what generative AI is. Because, you know, around here we love a good textbook definition. Now, generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that uses data to create new content, whether it's text, images, audio, or video. In a nutshell, generative AI takes the manual work out of email marketing. Now, if you want to dive deeper into it, we have a whole video about generative AI and it's a good one with someone you might recognize. So we're going to link it in the description for you to check out. Now, generative AI is kind of a new toy for marketers. Before, we had what's called predictive AI, which is used to, you guessed it, predict stuff like what a customer is likely to buy next. So to be clear about the difference, predictive AI predicts likely outcomes, while generative AI helps generate content. And that's a powerful team right there. All right, so why should you use generative AI to help with your email marketing? We'll simply put generative AI makes email marketing better, faster, and stronger. Customers expect a connected, personalized, amazing experience from your brand. And that experience plays a huge role in how they view your company. In fact, one in three customers will switch from a brand they know and love after just one bad experience. So when it comes to email marketing, it's up to you to make sure that every email they click on is a good experience. And that's a lot of pressure, right? Well, don't worry. Generative AI can make trading those experiences a lot easier. Now, here are some of the biggest ways AI is completely transforming email marketing. Number one, you might have already guessed this by now, but it'll save you time. Simple as that. Generative AI creates content fast, like warp speed fast. Need to create an email series? Generative AI can help generate subject lines, write body copy and and create images in no time. All right. Number two, email marketing is most impactful when you deliver one on one personalized messages to your audience. And AI gives you the power to personalize those messages at scale, meaning you can customize a large volume of emails at once using your customer data. So not only can AI quickly create content on various topics, but it adds that personalized touch too. And that brings us to number three. All that speed and personalization helps you optimize email performance. Need to A B test the subject line or 10 well, generative AI can speed up this process and give you suggestions based on emails you've sent in the past. You could go through the whole Alphabet and az test it if you really want to. And when you use generative AI to optimize your email campaigns, you might notice some of your key metrics are go up. We're talking higher open rates. Click through rates and conversion rates. Now you probably put 1, 2 and 3 together by now. But since this is Salesforce Explained, here's the long story. Short, Generative AI can help you reduce costs and improve ROI while providing high quality personalized customer experiences. Now, even though AI does all these things so fast, you don't have to sacrifice quality or accuracy. That's because you are always in the driver's seat to make sure that the content is accurate, thoughtful and impactful. This is called a human in the loop approach and it's crucial for marketers who want to be successful with generative AI and their email strategy. Now let's talk about how you can combine the powers of AI email marketing and wait for it, Salesforce. I mean, this is a Salesforce video, right? Well, thankfully it doesn't take an Einstein to start using generative AI in your email marketing strategy. Because there's Salesforce Einstein. So yeah, I mean technically I guess it does. But Einstein is the first trusted AI for CRM. It's both predictive AI and generative AI, which means that Einstein can figure out what's worked in the past to help you make the best decisions for the future. Now, Einstein is built into all of Salesforce's CRM products, including Marketing Cloud. It uses Einstein, your data and your brand guidelines to create the best experiences for your customers. And speaking of connecting with customers, let's see how we can use Einstein to create an email for your customers in Marketing Cloud. And remember, you'll always be able to edit, approve and be in total control every step of the way. Let's say you're a company that sells outdoorsy products. We'll call it Northern Trail Outfitters. Okay, you want to create an email campaign for your new fall promotion that's going to all your loyalty members. First, you'll choose from pre built templates or create a tailored customer email from scratch. For now, we're just going to use the template and go into Content Builder to start creating our email from this window. Einstein can draft some email subject lines for us. All we need to do is write our prompt. We'll include the audience that we're targeting, the key message we want to send them, and the personality we want to convey. You can even set up to 10 different brand personalities that make Einstein's output unique to your brand's tone, voice, and audiences. So for this one, we're feeling adventurous. And there you go. Just like that. Einstein generated multiple subject line options. And here's the cool part. You can click the thumbs up and thumbs down on the right to let Einstein know what's working for you and what's not. And Einstein will learn what you like for next time. Not feeling these suggestions? Don't worry, Einstein won't get offended. Just tell it what to change and hit create again. You can do this as many times as you want until Einstein gives you the perfect subject line for your audience. Okay, so we have our subject line. Let's move on to the body copy and in the main content block of the email. And this works the same exact way. We can just pop our key message and personality into the prompt and then see our options. Which one do we like? I mean, I'm not sure why I'm asking because I'm literally talking to a camera, but okay, this one, right? This looks perfect. But remember, if you don't want to go with exactly what Einstein generated, you can always manually change it up however you want. Okay. No email is complete without some great images, right? Well, thankfully, Einstein and Marketing Cloud can easily do that for us too. With the image generation tool, we can include the product we have on sale with the background that highlights it best. So here's a preview of my subject line, body copy and image. And just like that, our footwear promo email is done all in the time that that it would have taken for you to just create a word doc if you weren't using Einstein. And that is really just scratching the surface of what you can do with Einstein. Though now Einstein and Marketing Cloud have so many more features for managing your email lists, subscribers, analytics, personalization, and more. Okay, everybody, that's going to do it for this episode of Salesforce Explained. If you want to just beef up your email marketing game, click on the link on screen to learn more about AI and Marketing Cloud. We'll also link some good resources for you in the description. Thanks so much for watching and we'll see you next time.
