Practical Guidance For Your AI Email Experience

Matt Starita

As demand for AI Email grows and customers discover the most effective ways to use it, I’d like to share some key insights and learnings from our recent customer conversations. 

Before I get started, I want to reemphasize a point that often gets forgotten: AI Email is NOT email marketing. Traditional B2B email marketing tends to be a one-size-fits-many approach, favoring programs like early-stage nurture and event promotion. The purpose of AI Email is to help scale more personalized, 1:1 type of engagements (in the same meaningful way a human would do it!). Never lose sight of this – in the long run it will end up costing you time, money, and effort.  

While this is not an exhaustive list of best practices, my hope is to provide some guidance to those who don’t know where to start with AI Email or who feel they are not getting enough out of the product. While these challenges won’t resolve themselves, they’re entirely manageable with some proactive action. Once you establish initial momentum, focus on making incremental adjustments and regularly monitoring performance. 

Low open rates? 

• If open rates are a challenge, explore testing different subject lines.  
• Avoid “spammy” language. Instead, consider language that would make you want to engage.  
• Take inspiration from what already works by talking with your BDR and Ops teams. See what subject lines are performing well in their programs (using Sales Engagement Platforms like Salesloft, Outreach, and Gong).  

Low engagement rates? 

• Don’t treat AI Email campaigns the same as MAP campaigns. 
  • Buyers don’t want novellas or boilerplate company information – keep it simple and personable:
    •  Include an opening salutation 
    • Introduce the sender (your Email Agent persona) 
    • Acknowledge the buyer’s paint points/challenges  
    • Share key web pages, case studies, research reports, etc. 
    • Explain how your product/service can provide value to their role/help them overcome challenges  
    • Offer time to connect 
    • Include a closing salutation 
  • Like subject lines, solicit feedback from your BDR and Ops teams. Pull content from email approaches that have worked well for them.  
  • Remember: The core differentiator with AI Email compared to SEPs and MAPs is the AI Reply functionality. Your Email Agents can handle highly personalized responses. 
  • Consider your objective and the historic conversion rates when a human resource has been responsible for that same task: 
    • For example: If your objective is event follow-up and your historical Human Conversion Rate (HCR) is 1% - you should apply this same benchmark to AI Email. 
  • AI Email automates manual tasks to free up human talent, but you shouldn’t expect a dramatic increase in conversion rates. If you historically saw 1% conversions, don’t expect AI to boost that to 10%. 

HCR is a made-up metric, but perhaps it’s one we should collectively consider! 

High Bounces? 

• Simply put, this is a data hygiene issue. When your CRM contains outdated contact lists or contacts you haven’t communicated with recently, many recipients will likely no longer be at their companies. This stale data increases bounce rates and reduces your daily sending capacity.   
• To mitigate this challenge, here are some suggestions: 
  • If possible, leverage the “No Longer w/ Company” field in CRM to ensure that contacts/leads marked as no longer with the company are not included in the report (hopefully this field is maintained in your CRM). 
  • Select your recipients based on the age of their record in CRM. 
  • Enrich or acquire new contacts based on the personas you are planning to target with your messaging. 

Fundamental Use Cases 

• In-person event invitations/follow up 
• Webinar invitations/follow up  
• Non-ICP inbound 
• Non-6QA inbound 
• Awaken the Dead (lost opps within the last 6-12 months) 
• Website request fulfillment (i.e. research reports) 

Metrics & Measurement 

• While qualifications are a leading indicator of success, it is not the only metric that should be used to measure the success of AI Email! 
  • Consider analyzing the data in your CRM to determine how many human touches are needed to illicit a response from your audience:  
    • If the average number of touches from a BDR or AE is 7, consider that your benchmark. Don’t give up if the first touchpoint fails to deliver a qualified conversation. 
    • If engagement begins to exceed the benchmark, consider adjusting the messaging. 
  • Look at your website engagement to identify visits from your accounts who were part of a particular AI Email campaign: 
    • Like clicks and CTRs in Paid Media, you can’t just rely on the easy surface-level metrics as a function of measuring performance. 
    • Your message may be resonated enough to drive recipients to research your organization online before responding. 
    • Consider some custom landing pages through your web personalization provider to tee up the right content. 
    • Take these actions as an opportunity to further reinforce your messaging across marketing driven channels. 
    • Also, did you know that 6sense segments now have AI Email based filters? Use these to create a segment as part of your cross-channel strategy, as well as for analysis in Segment Performance Reports. 

Please remember when email marketing emerged in the early 2000s (shoutout Bigfoot Interactive), we didn’t succeed out the gate – we had to iterate as we went. This is no different. Try new things, experiment, make mistakes, embrace the wins. Today’s world operates with instant gratification as a core KPI, but the reality is it takes time, and we must adapt as we learn.  

Check out some additional content for AI Email (formerly known as Conversational Email) in RevCity!