Sales are challenging, cold email was once a nightmare task, with marketing teams having to sort through invalid emails, incorrect details, mountains of conversation points – and still have a successful outreach campaign.
Thankfully, AI can now automate most of those tasks. Let’s look at why cold emails campaigns need AI automation. Then, we’ll explore 3 reasons that cold email and AI are a match made in heaven.
Cold email before AI involved much manual work.
Cold emailing can be the most challenging part of a marketer’s job. Without personalization, cold email outreach is not effective. No personalization translates into potential clients checking their emails and sending yours to spam.
Companies discovered this hard truth and set their marketers to the task of personalizing tens of thousands of emails. This led to difficulties with scaling up because of the level of human labor required to complete this insanely large volume of personalized emails.
Why manual prospecting and cold emailing needs better processes
The first step in any cold email campaign is collecting cold leads. Then, marketers need to clean the data of any unnecessary, misspelled, or incorrect information.
Cleaning and discovering data is followed by writing the perfect email template that sounds genuine but is easy to replicate using merge tags. And let’s remember, each person is different, so the marketer needs to have a full memory bank of each cold lead’s company details or any valuable conversation points.
If this sounds exhausting, keep in mind that they haven’t yet pressed the send button. Cue the anxiety of waiting to see whether their hard work on thousands of emails will bounce back or be sent to purgatory by the almighty spam filter.
The mental pressure combined with this amount of work is not sustainable, especially with the added risk of no response. You can see why this made it hard for marketers and companies to get the results they needed from creating cold email personalization campaigns.
This is where AI technology can play a pivotal role in helping any marketing team send out cold emails.
How AI can be used with cold emails
Let’s take a look at some powerful use cases where AI can save cold emails – and your time – from being sent into a black hole.
Personalize your cold email intros with AI
No one really has time to personalize thousands of emails. Now you can use Lyne to find info on your prospects and write personalized cold emails.
Lyne scans the Internet in places like Crunchbase and LinkedIn Sales Navigator to create personalized email intros. Once the Lyne AI finds a wealth of information on your prospects, it uses GPT-3 to write a personalized email intro. All users have to do is add the Lyne merge tag after your greeting.
Seeing a personalized intro will let your lead know that this email is from a real person. And it is more likely to land safely in your potential customer’s inbox.
Personalizing the first few lines of a cold email also leaves you room to test which pitches and CTAs are working. This is data you wouldn’t usually have if each email was entirely different.
Lyne frees you from manually personalizing individual emails so you can spend time doing something much more important.
Let AI handle everyday tasks
A marketing and sales AI like Tact can increase your sales performance. Tact helps you book meetings, schedule follow-ups, and have a bird’s eye view of your relationship with the client.
Tact uses voice recognition and other device integrations to build your marketing hub. You can talk directly into your phone or your smartwatch to set custom reminders for all kinds of marketing tasks. Writing a cold email is as simple as speaking for 10 – 30 seconds.
The database of information Tact creates marketing and sales teams to accelerate sales processes. The Tact AI learns from each interaction, optimizing actions and workflow for day-to-day activities. This means less time spent in anxiety over cold emails and more powerful interactions with clients and prospects.
Predict bounce rates with AI
Raise your open rates and click rates with Bouncer. Emails sent to invalid emails hurt your open rate because they never arrive at a natural person.
Using the Bouncer AI to validate your cold email list will ensure you’re sending emails to a natural person. When you’re done running a quick test, you’ll be able to download your customer file filtered to valid email addresses.
Bouncer doesn’t need all of your emails to predict your bounce rate. For example, if you have 10K emails, Bouncer will only go through 2K of them to provide you with an accurate bounce rate estimate.
How you can get started with AI for your cold email campaigns
Don’t try to automate everything all at once
Evaluate the most pressing and challenging tasks for your sales and marketing team. Directly ask them which campaign tasks they would instead offset to AI. Those are the first tasks that should be automated. If they aren’t sure, automating cold emailing campaigns might be an excellent place to start.
Plan a smooth rollout by staggering the integration process. Onboard everyone, and make sure the whole team is trained in the new AI software. This will help later on in recruiting new members of the sales team.
Maintain the human touch and control
People like to know there is a human behind the content they get in their email. When your team is familiar with the software, they can use it to enhance their personal touch. AI is an incredible tool, but it cannot provide a fully human response in the same way a human being can.
Your team provides a personalized experience when they invite new prospects to your brand. AI does not replace that human touch, but it can augment it — and be used as part of your cold email strategy for appealing to customers and clients.
Aim to stay up to date with the latest trends
You or your tech team can subscribe to AI newsletters to give your sales and marketing team the best shot at staying ahead of the game. Once the first integration of AI is complete, you can schedule regular rollouts for updates.
Sales and marketing AI development are quickly evolving. Integrating AI into your cold email strategy is an effective and valuable tactic to increase your sales performance.
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