The Limits of Email Marketing Automation

Two-thirds of marketers expect machine learning, AI, and predictive software to determine the majority of the content (subject lines, images, copy, etc.) in marketing emails at some point, according to research published in our Email Marketing in 2020 report. And that’s very understandable considering the massive scale of email marketing and the increasing need to create relevance on the individual subscriber level. Humans simply cannot achieve that on their own. Email marketing automation will undoubtedly become more vital to success.

That said, people will still have a major role to play in email marketing for several critical reasons:

1. Machines are pretty horrible at creativity.
2. Marketers will need to supply AIs with the right data.
3. People will need to set the goals and parameters for their automation.
4. Machines excel at logic, but human beings excel at being illogical.
5. Because machines rely on historic performance for a lot of their “intuition,” they don’t handle shocks well.

For a full discussion of each of these points, plus more on the role of machine intelligence in email marketing,…

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