AI-Generated Personalisation

There has been a fair amount of talk about the decline of email nurture this year. Many people have stopped believing in email as a channel and nurture as a strategy. Yet, we're not seeing a consistent decline in nurture campaign results across the board. Some marketers are still getting great results from their nurtures.

As with any other marketing tactic, email nurtures are successful if they deliver the fundamentals: the right time, the right content, and the right place. Poor-performing nurtures are often the result of unsuitable content sent to uninterested contacts at the wrong point of the buying cycle. The difference between a successful nurture and an unsuccessful one is personalisation.

The Bare Minimum

In 2023, AI generated content added to already overwhelmed inboxes and social feeds. People have become more discerning about the content they read. Poor quality and unoriginal content is ignored, while content personalised to buyer interests and persona has become non-negotiable. Targeted content has stopped being a nice-to-have and is now an essential component of customer engagement across all stages of the funnel.

Improved personalisation has been central to every major B2B marketing trend of the past few years. ABM is explicitly a strategy for achieving 1:1 personalisation, based on account attributes. However, not every product or campaign is necessarily suited to an account-based targeting strategy. Many businesses still see greater success with persona or vertical-based strategies, particularly for products or services that are of interest to a broad audience.

ABM has tended to result in a shift towards micro-targeted social campaigns and programmatic media, with the result that email campaigns have been left behind because they are seen as too difficult and time-consuming to personalise properly. Creating dynamic emails in platforms such as Marketo or HubSpot is still a very long-winded process, requiring both copy and audiences to be manually created for every content version. That's even before concerns around first-party data quality are considered.

The Next Step

Automating dynamic content creation is the next major milestone for generative AI in B2B marketing. Generative AI already does an excellent job of taking existing brand-approved content and then rewriting it for different personas. Meanwhile, data analysts have been using machine learning to calculate buyer interests and marketing personas for years. Combining these two different elements of AI will allow marketers to scale email personalisation in a way that hasn't been possible in the past.

All that's missing today is the integration between AI and marketing automation, required to remove the manual editing currently needed to create dynamic email content. Once those integrations are in place, marketers will finally be able to create 1:1 personalised marketing automation campaigns that match the targeting capabilities found in ABM advertising platforms.

Interest in email nurture has always been cyclical, rising and falling as new marketing automation capabilities are unlocked. Email marketing is definitely in a slump at the moment. However, AI-based personalisation will be the next revolutionary capability to drive the adoption of one of the oldest and most enduring of digital marketing channels.