Leveraging AI in B2B Email Marketing and Beyond: 5 Lessons Learned

Just when you think you’ve heard it all about how AI can transform B2B marketing – from speed and efficiency to scale, personalization, and so much more – business leaders are starting to get a taste of reality. According to ANA’s recent article, “Can AI Deliver Better Returns for B2B Email Marketing?,” AI is transformational but skeptics are everywhere and the growing pains are beginning to show. For example, using AI to create personalized emails can backfire – and quite glaringly, too.

Authenticity is the biggest downside. Messages that are irrelevant, badly timed, and so generic that it’s clear they weren’t written by a human is a big turnoff that can negatively impact campaign performance. ANA says these types of misfires can be attributed to insufficient data and failure to effectively integrate voice, brand identity, and understanding of the end user into your AI systems and models.

The article goes on to say that “the paramount question for B2B marketers is this: How to begin using AI effectively and make progress toward the holy grail of one-to-one, personalized emails delivered automatically, and at scale?”

At OMI, AI has had a strategic impact on our performance marketing services for the past several years. I’m proud to say our team has used it to conquer the holy grail of personalization at scale (see below for more details). In fact, we integrate AI across the entire marketing funnel, from uncovering and filtering audience insights to optimizing content and execution. Here are a few examples of how we put it to work:

• Personalization at Scale: With AI and machine learning, we automate and optimize email personalization using the firmographics and contact-level data contained in our Living File® database of 162+ million freshly updated professional-level and above contacts. This enables dynamic adjustments to messaging, subject lines, calls to action, and even images—at scale—so our clients can deliver truly relevant experiences.
• Content Development Kickstart: Tools like ChatGPT act as starting points for content creation across channels, including email and landing pages. We view this AI-generated content as a first draft. Our team fine-tunes the first draft content to align with brand voice, compliance standards, and audience needs.
• Filtering Intent Data for Smarter Targeting: AI gives us powerful filtering capabilities to make sense of billions of weekly digital intent signals. This allows us to surface deep insights into preferences and buying behavior, helping us build more targeted programmatic advertising and email campaigns for our clients.
• Updating Our Massive B2B Database: With over 162 million professional-level and above contacts, our Living File® database doesn’t stay up to date on its own. We continually update it using AI and other methods to ensure it’s always ready for campaign activation across CTV, email, social, programmatic, and other channels. One feature clients love: it comes with a 95% email validity guarantee for 30 days.

Top Takeaways from Our AI Journey

Recent research cited in the ANA article reveals that 57% of marketers in companies with 500-plus employees are using AI in their email campaigns across areas such as personalization, retargeting, and subject line optimization.

But can AI keep up with the level of success that B2B marketers are already enjoying with email? Another report that ANA shared, based on senior-level responses spanning 10 years, found that a whopping 75% of businesses claim that email produces "good to excellent" ROI.

To ensure peak B2B email performance as you dive further into AI, here are five top takeaways we’ve learned during our own journey and from resources like ANA:

1. Continuous Learning: Be ready to constantly adapt as the AI landscape shifts with new innovations and strategies. Ongoing education and continuous usage are imperative for staying current with new tools and technologies and remaining on top of best practices. At OMI, we encourage our team to participate in learning opportunities throughout the year.

 

2. Take a Human-Centered Approach: ANA states – and we agree – that you can only unleash AI’s full value by pairing it with human creativity, emotion, and judgment. Getting email campaigns AI-ready requires an often-overlooked element, ANA says: people. For example, tagging content to “gauge what is performing well in a campaign becomes even more critical and requires human oversight. With AI, you can take that further and look at the content pieces — images, links, copy — that drive the ideal behaviors and give the best relevant content to each individual subscriber of your email program,” the article states.

 

With human oversight, you ensure you are tagging your content “in the best way for the machine to learn and develop the right formula for each individual." The key is to allocate more people toward marketing operations in order to set up an effective system. In fact, one of the business leaders quoted in the ANA article says the most effective AI strategies include human oversight. "Treat AI as a tool that supports creativity and decision-making rather than attempting to automate everything," she says.

 

3. Consider Buying Teams: We all know that B2B buying is done in groups today. B2B purchases now involve 11 decision-makers and more than 800 vendor reactions, according to one of the ANA members interviewed for the article. “Developing a formula for AI to build buyer cohorts and deliver personalized content at the appropriate time is crucial,” she says. She adds that marketers must work to  “create experiences unique to each individual buyer journey...AI email strategies should analyze intent signals across entire buying teams, identifying when accounts are researching solutions. For instance, if multiple team members from a company are exploring related technologies, generative AI can craft personalized emails informed by data about individual buyer priorities targeting different personas within a buying committee."

 

4. Start Incrementally with Pilot Programs: The most effective approach to leveraging AI for B2B email marketing is to think incrementally, the ANA article points out. "It's best to begin with a pilot project, focusing on a single AI use case, and then gradually expand based on insights and measurable outcomes.” We do this with AI and with other innovations we adopt at OMI.

 

5. Ensure Oversight: Our agency leaders champion responsible AI practices and ongoing team training to ensure we’re using AI tools ethically, transparently, and effectively. We recommend that organizations form their own internal AI councils to ensure best practices are in place and to guide teams to do their best work with the technology.

 

How is your organization leveraging AI in marketing? Reach out to our team at request@outwardmedia.com to discuss how we can assist you in elevating your campaign performance through the thoughtful use of AI and data.