When most think of “AI for email marketing,” they think of drafting emails. But that’s only the beginning.
Customer acquisition costs continue to climb, and AI has made it possible for any competitor to produce content at a volume that would have required a full team just a few years ago.
This is why email is (and newsletters are) having a moment in B2B. The most powerful change AI can bring is in the targeting and analysis by addressing long sales cycles and multiple decision-makers.
Attribution is hard enough to do for B2C brands and has been a near-impossible task for long sales cycles in B2B. Understanding every touchpoint and impression in a 12-month buyer journey is an undertaking few organizations even attempt.
The average B2B buyer sees or interacts with a brand 12 to 21 times before taking any action, whether that be booking a call, downloading an e-book, replying to a message or attending a virtual event. Depending on how many channels a company runs, 12–21 real touchpoints against the same prospects can take anywhere from one month to a year.
But email remains the least expensive way to stay in front of a buyer for that long and the only channel where the business owns the list, sees who is reading and controls delivery. Algorithms change, and a supplement brand’s Q4 advertising budget can throw a wrench into a business’s CPMs, but email remains the most consistent.
The Role of AI in Email Marketing
Where AI earns its place is in providing context and insights that would take a marketing actuary hours or days.
Traditional segmentation starts with demographics — industry, company size, job title (it’s useful, but crude) — whereas AI can read behavioral signals, estimate intent and develop relevant messaging based on that intent.
A subscriber who opens an email is like the outer ring of the bullseye. A subscriber who clicks a pricing link is closer. And a subscriber who clicks the demo link but never books is nearly at the center and should hear from a salesperson the same day.
The closer the signal is to a sale, the more direct the message can be.
Here are three worth putting to an AI model this week, with the subscriber list and customer list attached:
- “How long does the average subscriber stay on this list before converting, and how many newsletters do they open first?”
- “Which subscribers match the profile of our best clients/customers?”
- “Which subscribers clicked an offer or pricing link in the last seven days without taking the next step?”
The answers can reshape the marketing budget. Most companies discover their ideal customer profile is narrower than they assumed, that their best buyers read far more emails than expected before purchasing, and that a handful of high-intent readers were never handed to sales.
But Getting Started, Two Words of Caution
AI is a regression to the mean. It was trained on an average, and its default output is average. Someone on the team (e.g., an expert marketer) has to know what a good answer looks like and push the tools in the right direction.
And lastly, most B2B companies quit newsletters far too early (sometimes right before it starts working). Content that is at least 80% useful and 20% sales, sent consistently to the right people, tends to produce inbound demand somewhere between month six and month 12.
Ben Billups is founder of newsletter platform Breaker.
Did You Know: Email marketing has emerged as the most effective channel for 73% of B2B marketers to contact prospects.
