AI Tactics for Email, SMS, and WhatsApp Marketing That Actually Work

Let’s move beyond the theoretical: Here are some proven, practical strategies for leveraging AI in your marketing for transformative results. Steal our AI tips and tricks to dramatically improve your email, SMS, and WhatsApp outreach.

1. Enhance your text

While AI often struggles at generating original content from scratch, it excels at refining and improving existing text. AI tools such as Grammarly or Jasper can learn from your brand voice guidelines, molding text to align with a specific tone that resonates perfectly with your intended audience. 

You could try a prompt like, “Give me feedback on my customer support message as if you were Jeff Bezos" to help shape your message to one that adopts Amazon's customer support principles. This kind of a prompt can be part of a bigger play to help train your AI tool to match your preferred tone of voice and also, brand guidelines.

AI-driven text improvement can help marketers maintain a consistent voice across all their communication channels, delivering error-free messages that perfectly align with their branding.

2. Generate new ideas

AI is great at getting your creativity unstuck if you feed your LLM of choice the right kind of prompt. Tools like ChatGPT or Gemini can come up with a host of ideas to use in your marketing campaigns, or at a minimum, give you a place to start. Here are some ways to use AI for idea generation in marketing:

• Brainstorming: Generate a broad range of ideas for email newsletters, social media posts, or ad copy. Remember that is necessary to be super specific with your requests to get good results from AI. Describe who you are, what your desired outcome is, and advise if there are any details you wish to be included. Example: Give me a series of 10 email newsletter ideas for a drip campaign on our new product launch.

  
  

• Creating variations: Create multiple variations of a single marketing message, choosing the best fit based on language and branding. Example: Give me 10 ways to say “Join our newsletter” for different audiences, or, Create different versions of this copy for email, WhatsApp and SMS.

  
  

• Create product descriptions: Find unique and appealing ways to describe your products. Example: Give me several creative product descriptions for a hair detangler, optimized for mobile devices with fewer than 75 characters.

By integrating AI into their creative process, marketers speed up and streamline content creation, while simultaneously uncovering innovative ideas that they may not have thought up themselves. 

3. Create (and standardize) images

Keeping your company’s visual assets consistent with each other and with your company’s branding strategy can be difficult, especially across platforms and channels. MagicStudio and similar AI-powered image editing apps make it simple to create and standardize images, from company headshots and blog images, to on-brand WhatsApp visuals and video shorts.

These tools can standardize background colors, poses, and lighting to create high-quality visuals that adhere to brand standards, fostering a cohesive, professional image across all your assets. 

For businesses that may lack the resources to do extensive photo shoots or work with professional designers, AI tools open the gateway to producing consistent, on-brand imagery for digital marketing. Creating images with AI is as easy as typing a prompt for what you’re looking for (i.e. “In a modern style, create a vibrant, eye-catching background that makes this pair of sneakers stand out.”).

4. Automate workflows and processes

AI-powered workflows and process automation can save you significant amounts of time, even if you don’t have any coding or technical expertise. For example, Bird Flows automate complex processes by breaking them down into simple, manageable steps. From customer service interactions to marketing and sales communications, Flows can optimize (and personalize) all kinds of workflows, using AI to understand intent, suggest improvements, and more.

One compelling use case for workflow automation is in-app appointment scheduling. Traditionally, scheduling appointments has involved back-and-forth communication and manual entry into scheduling software at worst, or a pricey investment in a tool like Calendly or Instant Booker from Chili Piper at best. With Bird Flows, this process becomes a simplified, automated WhatsApp conversation, where customers can easily select from available times based on real-time data. 

With cumbersome processes automated, customers enjoy more convenience and speed, while businesses benefit from reduced administrative overhead and increased efficiency. 

5. Analyze data

The world’s best digital marketing teams let data inform their every move, but the sheer volume and complexity of data that companies generate can be overwhelming. This makes it challenging to extract actionable insights. Here, AI can step in to sift through massive datasets to identify patterns and provide answers to specific questions. Instead of getting bogged down in data crunching and tool wrangling, decision-makers can focus on marketing strategy and execution.

Consider a scenario where a company has run 450 different marketing campaigns across various channels and wants to understand which ones have been the most effective. Traditionally, this analysis would require gathering data from multiple sources, cleaning it up, and then using statistical methods to determine the top-performing campaigns—a process that is both time-consuming and prone to human error.

With AI, however, the company can simply upload a CSV file containing campaign performance data to a custom GPT or a custom application. By asking the AI, "Which 10 campaigns of the 450 listed in this file drove the most customer engagement?", the system can quickly skim the data and provide a ranked list of the top campaigns based on engagement metrics. 

6. Tweak content to be a perfect fit for each channel

The key to effective multi-channel marketing lies in adapting your message to fit the unique characteristics and expectations of each platform. For example, the way you speak to various audiences via text and email may not be the same. That’s why savvy marketers often use AI to customize their existing copy for various mediums. 

Say you run a car dealership planning a December promotion, offering 10% off leading up to Christmas. You want to engage past customers with personalized WhatsApp messages, and send out an email blast to your broader prospect base. 

For WhatsApp, you should keep the tone conversational and personal, as if speaking to a friend, and focus on the short-and-sweet details. 

You could ask an AI tool to then customize this message for email, which would take on a more professional tone and include more details.

AI tools can take your core message and automatically adjust the tone, length, and formatting to suit each of your marketing channels. This keeps your messaging consistent across platforms, while also maximizing the impact of your promotion by speaking directly to the audience's expectations and preferences on each channel.

7. Personalize content across channels

True personalization is more than inserting a customer’s name into an email or SMS message. It requires a deep understanding of customer preferences, behaviors and needs. 

AI can engage your customers by generating highly tailored messaging, providing smart recommendations and conversational support—all without your manual intervention. Build and test AI-powered chatbots that deliver a level of personalization and responsiveness that feels genuinely one-on-one. 

If you give your AI application of choice past purchase history, previous customer service interactions, geography information, and any other information a customer has provided before, your customers will receive faster, more personalized service—and the manual workload on your team’s shoulders will get lighter. 

For example: Imagine a scenario where a customer abandons their cart. 

Having access to the customer's profile, AI could recognize that they’re most active on WhatsApp and that your company has confirmed opt-in from them to send messages. A Bird Flow could trigger and automatically send a WhatsApp message one day after the cart abandonment, offering a unique 10% discount coupon code. This level of detail in personalization can significantly enhance the customer experience and the customer’s likelihood of completing the sale.

Achieving this level of personalization isn't just about having the right AI tools; it's also about integrating all of your channels and tools across your entire marketing ecosystem, including email, SMS, and WhatsApp. Using APIs and integrations allows for the smooth flow of data between platforms, ensuring that personalization is consistent, accurate, and compliant across all channels. You’ll be able to craft marketing campaigns that not only recognize the same customers across platforms, but also adapt to their evolving preferences and behaviors in real time.