AI Email Marketing: What It Is and How To Do It [Research + Tools]

Email marketing is integral to any marketing strategy because it’s a great way to generate leads and convert audiences.

Email marketing is integral to any marketing strategy because it’s a great way to generate leads and convert audiences.

Whether you’re creating your first strategy or looking to modify your process, AI email marketing tools can help you save time, optimize your strategy, and meet your email goals.

In this piece, we’ll go over how AI email marketing tools work, new data about how marketers currently use AI for email marketing, and a list of tools you can leverage in your role.

Table of Contents

• What is AI email marketing?
• Why should you use AI email marketing?
• How Marketers Are Using AI in Email Marketing [New Research]
• 15 AI Email Marketing Tools

What is AI email marketing?

AI email marketing is a machine-learning powered process that helps marketers create email campaigns that reach the right audiences at the right time with the right messages. 

AI email marketing tools tools use data to help you optimize your email strategy (like your historical performance data), automation to help you save time on repetitive tasks (like triggering an email workflow), and generative AI to help you create email content.

You can do things like:

• Analyze past email performance to identify how to optimize your email strategies, like the best time to send your emails or the subject lines that get the most clicks.
• Compile email analytics so you understand the health of your campaigns.
• Trigger email workflows after people take a specific action.
• Clean up your email lists to improve deliverability.
• Write compelling copy that speaks to your audience
• Personalize email content to specific audience segments

Some tools have one specific function, like a generative AI email tool, while others offer multiple features.

Why should you use AI in email marketing?

The most significant benefit of using AI in email marketing is that it saves time while improving performance. The routine processes you spend time on can happen instantly, and you can launch your optimized campaigns faster.

Most AI email marketing tools are also powered by machine learning, meaning that they use data points (from your business and sometimes your industry) to help you optimize your email strategy. You won’t be left to guess what works best because the AI can look at your past emails, and you can benchmark your performance against competitors to see where you can improve.

If you’re interested in learning more about the impact of AI on marketing, check out this Marketing Against The Grain episode about marketing opportunities that AI unlocks for business.

Click here to listen to the full episode

How Marketers Are Using AI in Email Marketing [New Research]

Our State of Generative AI report surveyed 1,350 U.S. business professionals about how they’re currently using AI.

Right now, 1 in 5 business professionals use AI/automation in their role.

82% of marketers who responded to the survey said that generative AI has impacted how they plan to create content in 2023 and that the top benefits are that it saves time, improves the quality of content, and makes content more personalized.

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In addition, 28% of marketers use generative AI to create emails.

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43% of marketers who already use generative AI in their roles say it’s helpful when creating emails, and 54% say it’s very effective.

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Finally, marketers using generative AI save an average of 3+ hours on each piece of content they make, which helps them spend less time on manual tasks and more time on the most important parts of their role and the aspects of their job they enjoy most.

15 AI Email Marketing Tools

1. HubSpot AI Tools

Price: Free tools; $20/mo (Starter), $890/mo (Professional), $3,600/mo (Enterprise)

Click here to learn more about HubSpot AI tools

HubSpot has multiple email marketing tools and features to leverage to drive clicks and conversions.

AI Features

• Email Marketing Software that helps you easily create email workflows and triggers to reach your target audiences with the right messages at all stages of their journey.
• Inbox automation tool that scans your emails and recommends tasks based on email content and can auto-populate contact properties (like name and phone number) from every first-time email to create a customer profile.
• Content assistant uses generative AI to help you write high-quality email content, and you can ask ChatSpot to quickly write things like professional follow-up emails or thank you notes to a prospect.

2. Mailchimp

Price: Free forever plan; $13/mo (Essentials), $20/month (Standard), $350/mo (Premium)

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Mailchimp’s email automation software helps ecommerce businesses create automated email workflows that reach audiences at the best possible time.

AI Features

• Its Content Optimizer compares your email data to industry benchmarks to give you recommendations for optimizing your campaigns and email content.
• You can choose from different versions of AI-generated content that match your intent and brand tone.
• Its Creative Assistant leverages your brand assets to create unique email designs you can personalize to different contacts.

3. Sendgrid

Price: Free trial; $15/mo (Basic), $60/mo (Advanced)

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Sendgrid helps you create an automated email marketing process with custom workflows and triggers.

AI Features

• Its real-time API scans your email lists and removes junk or undeliverable email addresses to lower your bounce rate and ensure you reach more people.
• Get data-driven insights and recommendations for improvement based on your historical metrics and email performance.
• AI paces your email send and monitors your reputation with ISPs.

4. Phrasee

Price: Contact for pricing

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Phrasee uses AI to help you create effective email campaigns and content to share with your audience.

AI Features

• Its deep learning model and language insights leverage your historical data to tell you what works best with your audience and what inspires clicks for an optimized campaign.
• The Magic Button helps you generate email content (like subject lines or in-email CTAs) that will resonate with your audience.
• It always uses your custom guidelines and messaging to ensure everything you create is on-brand.

5. Drift

Price: $2,500/mo

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Drift offers an AI-powered inbox management tool that helps you clean up your email lists and improve deliverability.

AI Features

• Its Email Bots leverage machine learning to interpret emails and help you reply with engaging, conversational emails that inspire responses.
• AI can qualify a lead as ready for sales and automatically introduce the prospect to the right salesperson for seamless marketing to sales handoff.
• Use different Email Bots for your unique business need, like the follow-up email bot, abandoned chat email bot, and webinar email bot.

6. Get Response

Price: Free forever plan; $19/mo (Email Marketing)

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Use Get Response to design behavior-based email workflows to engage with audiences at key moments with content personalized to their needs.

AI Features

• Share keywords or phrases, email goals, and tone with the GPT-powered email generator that leverages industry data to produce emails most likely to increase your conversions.
• Display different images, text, or AI-driven product recommendations in each email.
• The AI subject line generator helps you test subject lines and learn what stands out in your subscriber’s inboxes.

7. Levity

Price: 30-day free trial; $49/mo (Startup), $139/mo (Business)

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Levity’s software helps you manage your inbox, understand your email health, and save time.

AI Features:

• Build an AI tool unique to your business by uploading your data that it will learn from and use to make human-level decisions.
• Create different AI blocks for every email workflow you want to run (like a workflow for responding to emails).
• Share unique categorization criteria with your AI to automatically sort emails as soon as you receive them.

8. Superhuman

Price: $30/mo (Starter), $45/mo (Growth), enterprise pricing available

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Superhuman is an AI-powered inbox management tool that helps you streamline your processes. Best for teams that use Gmail or Outlook.

AI Features

• Immediately sort incoming emails into a split inbox based on your custom rules so you can sort spam from genuine humans and focus on what needs attention.
• Use its Snippets tool to create pre-built templates for phrases, paragraphs or entire emails that you can quickly add to emails to automate responses.
• Set reminders for email tasks, like following up on unanswered emails or a reminder to respond to a message you snoozed for later.

Most of the tools listed above have multiple AI features, like email writing help to automated inbox sorting. Below we’ll go over AI email marketing tools that only offer generative features.

9. HiveMind

Price: Free forever plan; $18/mo per user (Teams), enterprise pricing available

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HiveMind offers an easy-to-use and time-saving tool for your email marketing. Simply share a brief prompt of what you’re looking for with its Notes AI, and it’ll help you generate a perfect response.

10. ChatGPT

Price: Free research preview; ChatGPT Plus $20/month

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ChatGPT is a generative AI tool that you can use to write your marketing emails, and all you have to do is enter a descriptive prompt into the chat. It’s a conversational tool, so you can ask it to rewrite the email until you’re satisfied.

11. Zapier

Price: Free forever plan; $29.99/mo (Starter), $73.50/mo (Professional), $598.50/mo (Team)

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Zapier runs on Zaps, automated workflows you can customize to your needs. You can create an email-based Zap to generate email copy with an API key from OpenAI. Whenever you receive an email matching your Zaps rules, it’ll prompt GPT-3 to write an appropriate response.

12. Copy.ai

Price: Free forever plan; $49/mo (Pro), enterprise pricing available

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Copy.ai is an email copywriting tool you can use to create high-converting emails. It can write email content for you, suggest subject lines, and help you stay on track with suggestions to improve email quality.

13. Compose.ai

Price: Free

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Compose.ai is powered by GPT-3 and helps you write personalized and on-brand emails. Its autocomplete feature suggests how you can finish what you’re writing, and its suggestions and generations are always tone and brand-relevant because it learns your unique brand voice. It’s an always free Chrome extension, so you can easily use it on your favorite sites.

14. Grammarly

Price: Free forever plan; $12/mo (Premium), $15/mo (Business)

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Grammarly’s machine-learning copy-editing tool recognizes in-text errors and suggests how to fix them. GrammarlyGo extracts the context from short prompts and helps you instantly generate appropriate email replies. Leverage the tools on its website, as a Chrome extension, or within your favorite email client.

15. Jasper

Price: Free trial; $49/mo (Creator), $125/mo (Teams), custom business pricing available

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Jasper Commands helps you create effective marketing emails quickly with machine learning algorithms. Use it to write entire emails or email subject lines, and its outputs always match your business’ unique writing style and tone for brand consistency.