AI in email marketing: benefits and best practices

Email continues to be one of the most important channels for customer engagement, with 65% of customers saying it’s their preferred way to communicate with companies.

AI is now helping teams build on the skills they already have to deliver faster, more personalised emails. Our State of Marketing Report (9th Edition) found that 32% of marketers have already fully implemented AI, and top performers are 2.5 times more likely to use it than underperformers.

This article is going to help inspire you to make the most of AI in your own email strategy. We’ll explore the five best AI email tools in 2025 and share how to choose the right one for your goals.

• What AI brings to email marketing
• The 5 best AI email tools in 2025
• How to choose the right AI email tool
• How AI improves email content and results
• ROI impact of AI in email marketing
• Best practices for using AI in email marketing
• Getting started using AI in your marketing emails

AI email tools are designed to help marketers get more results from the work they already do. Below, we’ve compiled five top options that can help teams get more from every email they send.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud (powered by Einstein) is designed for teams that run large and often complex email campaigns. It supports this by connecting AI with the customer data in your CRM, making it easier to write accurate copy, personalise messages, and send them at the right time. You can also track ROI in one place to see exactly how campaigns are performing.

What makes it stand out is predictive journeys, where the system automatically sends the next best email based on what each customer does. Plus, it’s the only option on this list that can handle large enterprise marketing.

What does this look like in practice? BizCover, one of the world’s leading Insurtech providers, used Marketing Cloud to reach 200,000 small business customers through email. With their automated and personalised campaigns, they achieved open rates of 50.28%, more than double the industry average of 24.8%.

Pros: Everything in one platform, enterprise-level security, and connected customer insights.

Cons: The platform can be too advanced for small teams and requires setup.

Microsoft Copilot is built into Outlook to help professionals manage their inbox more easily.

It can draft emails from short prompts, summarise long email threads, and suggest changes to make your tone clearer or more professional.

Plus, since it connects with other Microsoft apps like Teams, Word, and Excel, you can pull in context from across your workflow. This makes it a natural choice for teams who already work in Microsoft 365 and want to save time on everyday communication.

Pros: Works smoothly with Microsoft apps and saves time on routine email tasks.

Cons: It isn’t a purpose-built marketing tool, so it doesn’t offer features like campaign building or customer segmentation.

Google Gemini is built directly into Gmail, which makes it a handy tool if you already work out of Gmail every day.

Gemini doesn’t allow you to run full marketing campaigns; instead, you can use it to stay on top of your inbox as a marketer, whether that’s coordinating with agencies, setting up case studies, or organising customer interviews.

Its AI can suggest quick replies, create summaries of long threads, and pull in extra information from Google Search to add context. Another benefit is that, since it’s already part of Gmail, there’s no extra setup. This makes it a good choice for individuals or small teams who use Google Workspace and want to spend less time managing their inbox.

Pros: Easy to use, built into Gmail, and offers helpful AI suggestions that are connected to Google Search.

Cons: Only helpful for personal productivity; it’s not designed for marketing campaigns.

Superhuman is designed for teams that want to move faster. It offers users keyboard shortcuts, snippets, and built-in Grammarly AI to make writing and sending emails quicker (while catching most errors).

While it is not a platform designed for running full marketing campaigns, it is useful for outbound work where speed matters. Marketers can use it to manage outreach, set up partnerships, or follow up on content opportunities.

It is also popular with sales teams that can use it to craft fast, yet accurate and professional communication with prospects.

Pros: Saves time, improves writing, and is a good tool for outbound work.

Cons: It doesn’t have the ability to run marketing campaigns.

Unlike most tools, Proton uses zero-knowledge cloud processing, which means it can’t see your data, and you have the option to run the AI locally on your device. This makes it especially useful for industries where privacy is required, such as in healthcare, legal, finance, and government.

Marketers can use Proton Scribe to draft professional emails, coordinate with partners, or share updates with customers while knowing their data stays protected. It is not made for running large campaigns, but it is ideal if you need security and compliance alongside AI support.

Pros: Strong privacy protections and an option for local AI processing.

Cons: Limited to drafting individual emails and not built for large-scale campaigns.

If your challenge is keeping up with a full inbox, a productivity tool may be enough. However, if you are running campaigns across thousands of customers, you will need an enterprise platform that can personalise at scale.

Beyond these differences, it is worth considering how each tool fits with your data, your workflows, and your long-term goals.

• Set your goal: Decide whether you need a tool for personal productivity, team collaboration, or enterprise marketing.
• Check integrations and data: Note the systems you already use, such as your CRM, and make sure the tool can integrate with them.
• Confirm privacy and compliance: Understand where your data is stored, how it is used, and whether the tool meets your compliance requirements.
• Decide if you need analytics: Look for features like A/B testing, reporting, and send-time optimisation if performance is a priority.
• Assess scalability: Choose a tool that can grow with your business, with options like role-based access and flexible user limits.
• Weigh up the cost: Compare the cost of the tool against the time it will save or the revenue it can generate.

Here are some of the most useful things AI can do to help your email marketing:

• Clean up your list: Remove duplicates and inactive contacts to improve your deliverability.
• Segment audiences: Group customers by behaviour, preferences, or purchase history to send more relevant messages.
• Personalise content: Add dynamic recommendations and tailored offers that match each of your customers’ needs.
• Translate: Quickly adapt emails into different languages for global audiences.
• Predict the right time to send: Analyse engagement patterns to schedule messages when each customer is most likely to open them.
• Write copy: Generate variations of subject lines, headers, and body text to tailor messages for different audiences.
• Optimise frequency: Monitor engagement to find the right balance and avoid overwhelming subscribers.
• Detect spam triggers: Check subject lines and copy against spam filters.
• Summarise insights: Pull out key learnings from each campaign to help understand what works and what doesn’t.
• Forecast ROI: Model trends to estimate revenue or conversions before you even send the email.

AI models are trained to deliver insights from every customer interaction. Their algorithms continuously adapt and learn with each interaction. Here’s how that can translate into a better ROI from your email marketing.

Every time a customer opens, clicks, or ignores an email, AI learns from that behaviour. Those insights are then applied to the next send, so your campaigns get stronger over time.

Instead of one message for everyone, you can use AI to tailor content and recommendations to each customer. That relevance helps lift conversion rates and keeps customers engaged for longer.

Repetitive tasks like drafting subject lines, setting up A/B tests, or managing send times can all be automated. This speeds up the time it takes to go live, lowers campaign costs, and gives your team more time to focus on strategy.

Only 31% of marketers are fully satisfied with their ability to unify customer data sources. Without a single view of your customer, it becomes much harder to accurately personalise emails or measure ROI in a meaningful way.

Stronger customer engagement (and more sales) is one of the most immediate benefits of using AI in email marketing. A great example comes from PaySauce, a payroll software company. After adopting Marketing Cloud to segment audiences and automate newsletters, they lifted open rates from 37% to 52%, and supported 87% year-on-year growth.

There’s no doubt AI email marketing is the wave of the future. Here are some AI fundamentals you can’t afford to skip:

Start with building an ethical, strategic, and technological foundation. This means implementing transparent data practices, ensuring data privacy compliance, and fostering a culture of ethical AI usage internally. In fact, 68% of customers say advances in AI make it more important for companies to be trustworthy.

It also means establishing clear goals and plans for how you want to apply new AI advances. Having a roadmap for what you wish to accomplish should always be the first part of the plan.

Here are a few other tips:

• Use embedded, no-code AI features like send-time optimisation, content selection, and subject line testing. Work up to creating multi-variant emails allowing for diverse content versions catered to specific customer segments.
• Move into the realm of real-time personalisation, tailoring email content in response to immediate customer behaviours and preferences. Start exploring the intricacies of building custom AI models tailored to your unique business needs.
• Start with your email data as a foundation. Grow your customer profiles using a fuller picture of each customer across marketing, sales, commerce, and service. The customer insights you get from integrating data into a CDP will help you create more personalised emails.
• Apply what you know about AI capabilities for personalisation to segment your audience.
• Learn how to creatively prompt AI to generate fresh content.
• When you do your A/B email testing, don’t test multiple things at once. It’s important to make sure you have a control group. Leading AI email marketing platforms have tools to automate this process so you can test continuously.
• Employ a system for analytics, iteration, and retargeting. This system should be able to connect your email performance to web and app conversion, as well as commerce and sales data, to optimise business impact. This is a key requirement to look for in your AI email marketing software.

Using AI in email marketing means you can do more with less. The key is starting with clean data, then using AI to personalise emails, test what works, and predict what customers want next. Over time, this can help your campaigns perform better without adding extra workload.

Salesforce offers a built-in AI and a single view of your customers, you can personalise at scale, track the impact of your marketing, and keep every email on brand.

Curious to know more? Explore Salesforce Marketing Cloud to see how AI can take your email marketing to the next level.