Email Marketers’ Groundhog Day: End Repetitive Content with AI

Email Is Stuck in a Never-Ending Cycle

“Life has a funny way of repeating itself,” and so does email. Similar to Bill Murray’s endless loop in Groundhog Day, email marketers can find themselves stuck in a rut with repetitive messaging. Campaign calendars are held onto with an iron grip, and marketers end up checking off the same stale emails every quarter.

But as every marketer knows, breaking this cycle is easier said than done. Emails can be time-consuming, and time is the one resource that’s always scarce. On top of that, stakeholders that support new and fresh emails will still need to prioritize long-standing campaigns that have a strong track record, even if customers have seen them multiple times.

The good news? The cycle can be broken if marketers decide to go against the grain of business-as-usual and embrace a truly innovative and AI-powered approach.

Use the Situation to Your Advantage

At the end of the day, there are some campaigns that marketers will always have to deploy. No retail marketer will ever let Cyber Week pass them by without letting customers know about their door-crasher sales, for example.

However, the problem of repetition does not lie in celebrating meaningful calendar moments. In fact, marketers can and should use these dates to drive additional engagement and take the opportunity to make customers feel extra special. Use this proven approach to create new marketing moments that make every day on the calendar a special one. Guess what: you can even make Groundhog Day fun and relatable, if you try hard enough.

Lean Into Empathy

Marketers are natural creatives, but that’s not the only reason why they need to disrupt repetitive campaigns. It boils down to focusing on what customers want. Sometimes, customers do action on reinforcement and repetition—who doesn’t love a deal or a chance to rack up the loyalty points? Other times, they need fresh content to catch their attention and keep them connected even when they’re not actively purchasing. A customer-centric, empathetic focus is critical to changing up email campaigns. Not only is customer engagement every marketer’s north star, their preferences are always rapidly evolving anyway. By following their lead, marketers can naturally innovate and change their content as well.

This empathetic approach is what ultimately gets Bill Murray out of Groundhog Day. It’s only when he starts prioritizing other people that he can finally see the next day—he goes from making fun of people “freezing their butts off waiting for a rat” to quoting Chekhov during his Groundhog Day news coverage. Empathy was the catalyst for his massive change.

Break the Cycle with AI

Making the most of calendar moments and keeping a customer-centric perspective sounds good—but how can marketers put it into action, all while innovating their content within each email? The practical, rubber-hits-the-road answer is AI-powered personalization.

With AI, marketers can check all the boxes: they can use an ensemble of AI models to automatically select and generate content that is personalized at scale, take goals and guidelines into account—anything from key promotions to brand voice—and constantly adapt to customers’ evolving preferences.

Not only can AI successfully carry marketers into the next phase of messaging, the solution can help them stay future-oriented by sending customers never-before-seen content that is predicted to resonate. Talk about conquering Groundhog Day problems.

See it in action with these two emails. For the hero image, Da Vinci AI analyzes customers’ previous purchases and email engagement behavior to predict their next interests: here, one customer is drawn to handbags while the other gravitates to kitchenware. Underneath, product recommendations in this new category are displayed. While both email’s recommendations are personalized, one is reinforced with pricing while the other uses social-proofing. Both decisions are made through the AI’s machine learning capabilities. Exclusive deals with varying, personalized copy finishes off both emails.

How does this work? First, a combination of AI and machine learning techniques select eligible creatives and templates from the brand’s library. From there, the AI generates the content combination that is most likely to resonate with that particular customer, and then deploys it at the time and frequency they’re most likely to engage. Using a creative feedback loop—insight into what creative is performing best and why—the AI gets more accurate with every send, meaning that not only will emails never stay the same: they’ll get infinitely better. 

Say Goodbye to the Same Old Email

Exit the beaten path of marketing and try something truly innovative to break the spell of stale, repetitive emails. AI-powered techniques are your chance to end your email Groundhog Day forever!