糖心Vlog

In 2026, email remains for businesses of all sizes, tying with social media for the number two spot. But it’s also one of the most involved to do right. Thankfully, using AI in email marketing can help.

Whether creating your first strategy, cleaning up your subscriber list, drafting copy for a nurturing campaign, or automate your processes, there are dozens of AI email marketing tools designed to help you save time and improve results.

In this piece, I’ll unpack what you can do with AI email marketing tools, how to get the most out of them and avoid common challenges, and share some of my favorites for the most common email marketing needs.

Table of Contents

• What is AI email marketing?
• Why should you use AI in email marketing?
• What are the challenges with AI in email marketing?
• Could AI ever replace an email marketer?
• How to Use AI in Email 糖心Vlog
• AI Email 糖心Vlog Best Practices
• Best AI Tools for Email 糖心Vlog
• Leveling Up Your Emails With AI

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What is AI email marketing?

AI email marketing is a process powered by machine learning that helps marketers launch email campaigns that reach their audiences at the right time with the right messages.

AI email marketing tools use data (like past performance data) to help improve your email strategy (i.e. deliverability and send time) and save time by automating tasks (like email sends) and generating email content.

Using AI in email marketing, you can:

• to understand the health of your campaigns.
• Analyze past email performance to optimize your send time, subject lines, calls-to-action, design, and more.
• Write compelling copy that resonates with you audience.
• Personalize email content to specific audience segments and even individuals.
• Clean up your email lists to improve deliverability.
• Trigger marketing workflows after people take a specific action.

Some tools have one specific function, like a generative AI email tool that writes copy, while others offer multiple features.

Why should you use AI in email marketing?

By now, the benefits of artificial intelligence are well-known and evident. AI can help marketers optimize their strategy, speed up planning and execution, lower costs, and ultimately improve ROI ?but let’s take a deeper look at each of these from an AI email marketing lens.

Strategic Advantages

There’s no arguing with the fact that AI can analyze data and find valuable trends and insights faster than any human possibly could. Most AI email marketing tools are also powered by machine learning, meaning that they use these data points to help you optimize your email strategy.

What subject lines do our subscribers respond to? What copy works best? What call-to-action text will attract the most conversions? What offers will?

Using AI in email marketing, you won’t be left to guess what works best because the technology can look at your past emails, audience behavior, industry benchmarks, and competitors to determine the best plan forward.

Faster Execution

that 54% of marketers report saving 1–5 hours a week thanks to AI in email marketing, while 31% save 6–10 hours. In other words, AI can save marketers up to an entire workday a week. That’s huge.

Time-consuming and often mundane tasks can be completed faster thanks to AI, and, in turn, you can launch campaigns and see results faster. Tasks AI in email marketing can complete include:

• Drafting copy
• Creating send lists
• Scheduling sends

According to , the share of teams taking two weeks or more to produce a single email dropped from 62% in 2024 to just 6% in 2025. This shift is largely credited to AI and automation adoption.

Improved Campaign Performance

With better data driving your email marketing strategy, your campaigns are likely to perform better, too. In fact, our research found the number one email marketing KPI that saw improvement after using AI was conversion rates (37%).

Click-through rates (33%) was number two, signaling that more recipients were taking action from AI-aided emails than those prior.

Increased ROI

By saving time and labor during execution and improving campaign results, AI in email marketing can increase overall return on investment (ROI). And with email marketing already ranked among the by marketers, the potential impact is big.

If you want to learn more about how AI affects marketing, watch this episode of 糖心Vlog Against The Grain. It talks about how AI helps businesses.

What are the challenges with AI in email marketing?

AI in email marketing enables automation, personalization, and optimization of email campaigns, but it isn‘t without its challenges. AI tools are still relatively new, so they’re not perfect. In fact, our survey found 52% of marketers believe AI makes content so easy to create that it’s actually less effective overall, but why's that?

Poor AI outputs (34%) and lack of AI knowledge (35%) were almost tied as the top AI implementation challenges . This suggests the problems are both with the tool and many users’ ability to get the most out of it.

Here are a few challenges marketers face when using AI in email marketing, along with how they address them.

Not Understanding Brand Voice/Tone

Anyone who’s asked ChatGPT to write an email knows the first response is rarely ready to go. Understanding brand voice and tone was one of the areas marketers felt AI lacked the most (35%), and those first drafts are an example of why.

Most AI tools need to be trained to match your brand’s voice and tone, and even then, you’ll likely still need to edit to get it where you’d like.

What can you do?

Use more specific prompts

, a conscious marketing strategist, addresses this challenge by using clear, specific prompts.

“I want [my emails] to sound like I’m talking to a friend,” says O’Neill. “I’ve added this requirement to my prompt, and it’s helped a lot. Sometimes, I’ll give [the AI tool] the name of a famous business person and ask it to write in a similar tone.”

Establish and share brand voice guidelines

Tools like Claude and even Grammarly also allow you to upload brand guidelines to help keep generated content on brand.

, powered by can analyze your writing and create a summary that matches your style and tone. You can then use this summary within the platform or share it with others.

Lack of Quality/Originality

Whether you use AI to write email body copy or generate subject line ideas, the quality of the overall writing can leave a lot to be desired.

“The quality is not always there,” says Jeanne Jennings, Founder and Chief Strategist for , an email marketing consultancy. And she’s not alone in this thought.

Our survey found that over half of marketers feel they need to edit AI-generated email copy significantly, while 37% said AI doesn't generate new ideas.

As fellow HubSpotter and explains, “As powerful as they are, LLMs are really just prediction engines. They look at what’s already been said and synthesize what statistics say you want to hear.”

Simply put, AI is only as good as the information it has access to. It doesn’t have original thoughts shaped by experience, work, or relationships. It doesn’t have likes, dislikes, or personal opinions. These elements are what make content different, and for a personal medium like email, that humanity is important.

“If your content strategy doesn’t go deeper than ‘type a prompt into ChatGPT,’ what makes your email any more valuable than 1,000 competitors who did the same thing?, continues del Principe.

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• Learn how you compare to competitors.

What can you do?

Take time to “humanize.”

Allow time for editing in your writing process. Adding personal stories, original data, or examples from your own work helps make your content more valuable while keeping your brand's unique voice.

More on that in “How to humanize AI content to rank, engage, and get shared.”

Data Inaccuracy

Ben Schreiber, president at Latico Leathers, found the biggest challenge he’s faced using AI in email marketing to be data accuracy and integration.

“Good quality data is paramount to the success of using AI systems,” he says. “We have had issues with outdated or incomplete data, and it directly affects how well or poorly our campaigns perform.”

As a marketer, the last thing you want is to send your prospect an irrelevant offer or call them by the wrong name. Unfortunately, if AI doesn’t have access to current or accurate information, it doesn’t have the discernment to know not to send the message.

What can you do?

Choose an AI tool that can work with your CRM.

Technology will never be infallible, but one of the best efforts you can make to keep your data clean is to get it directly from the source. In other words, choose AI tools that can integrate with or automatically access information from your CRM (i.e. buyer purchase history, website behavior, past sales interactions, name, job title, etc.)

HubSpot, for example, offers connectors to both and , in addition to its built-in AI, , so any personalization or strategic choices for your email marketing can leverage your full contact records.

And as always, make time for human review. Having a member of your team check your any email marketing assets aided by AI is invaluable.

HubSpot's AI Search Grader

See how visible your brand is in AI-powered search engines.

• Analyze your brand for today’s AI search engines.
• Maximize your AI search performance.
• Assess your brand’s visibility and presence.
• Learn how you compare to competitors.

Could AI ever replace an email marketer?

In short, no. AI won‘t replace email marketers anytime soon. As useful as AI can be to your email marketing strategy, it’s not infallible and can make mistakes if left unchecked by human intervention.

For example, Air Canada was who was given incorrect information about a refund policy from the airline‘s chatbot. A court found that Air Canada didn’t check the accuracy of its chatbot. The airline was told to pay the difference in fare.

Similarly, Fable, a book tracking app, after users reported receiving AI-generated messages that many deemed culturally insensitive.

AI systems also run the risk of plagiarism, hallucination, and bias.

The bottom line is that human intervention is needed to clean up any mess an AI tool makes before it reaches your audience. Otherwise, your organization could end up in an awkward position with the public. AI may have done the damage, but you will have to take full responsibility.

How to Use AI in Email 糖心Vlog

Content Ideation

Even the most creative minds can hit a wall, once in a while. Fortunately, there are AI writing tools that can help come up with catchy email subject lines, video ideas, image ideas, and even outline a multi-email drip campaign.

Tell AI what you need to accomplish with email (i.e., generating registrations for an upcoming event, driving sales of a new product) and ask it to suggest content ideas.

Content Generation

80% of marketers report using AI for content creation, 59% using it specifically for email content generation. Not sure how to get started?

Read: AI-powered email content suggestions that actually convert leads

Here’s a sample prompt from HubSpot’s Kipp Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan you can experiment with. The prompt is for a three-email nurturing campaign, but it can be reworked for any of your needs:

"Identify the top three [Features] that a [Target Persona] at [Company Name] in the [Industry Type] industry would find most beneficial when using [Your Product Name]. For each feature, provide a concise explanation detailing why it is essential for enhancing their specific job functions. Limit the response to these three features and their justifications only.Craft a personalized, fun, and punchy email to [Persona Name], the [Persona Job Title] at [Company Name], encouraging them to meet with a [Your Company Name] sales rep. Highlight the top three features previously identified. Emphasize the key benefits of each, underscoring how they can improve [XYZ]. The goal is give them a real reason to take the meeting.Then, create a drip email campaign. The drip email campaign should be 3 emails spaced out across 2 weeks:

Email 1: The initial email you've crafted for [Persona Name].

Email 2: Design a follow-up email to be sent 5 days after the first if there's no response. This email should shorter than the first one.

Email 3: If you haven't received a response, create a final reminder email to be sent 3 days after the second. This should be the shortest, with a direct call-to-action to schedule a meeting with the sales rep.

We still suggest editing and improving any content from an AI tool, but having those rough drafts to work from will make the process much faster.

You can also use AI to generate images, videos, and even audio.

Pro Tip: “Make sure to frontload your prompt with expert insights, original data, and, of course, your irreplaceable voice,” recommends del Principe. The more information you can provide AI tools before generating your email marketing content, the better they will understand what you want to see in the finished product.

HubSpot's AI Search Grader

See how visible your brand is in AI-powered search engines.

• Analyze your brand for today’s AI search engines.
• Maximize your AI search performance.
• Assess your brand’s visibility and presence.
• Learn how you compare to competitors.

Variant Testing

From subject lines to body copy to design elements, testing is one of the best ways to increase engagement and improve your email marketing performance. AI is extremely helpful in this process.

HubSpot allows users to of both standard and automated emails at once, and can include changes to:

• Subject Line
• Sender Name
• Preview Text
• Email Content (design, copy, calls-to-action)

Pro tip: For the cleanest results, test one variable at a time. If you change more than one, say both the subject line and the sender name simultaneously, you won‘t know which change drove the outcome. AI tools can help by automatically isolating variables, suggesting statistically significant sample sizes, and flagging winners before you’d catch them manually.

Quality Data Collection & Updating

AI doesn't just speed up data collection; it makes the data itself more useful.

AI tools can watch subscriber behavior in real time (opens, clicks, purchases, browsing patterns) and send it directly to your CRM. This eliminates the manual exports and spreadsheet work that marketers spend a lot of time doing.

But the bigger opportunity is data quality. AI can infer subscriber attributes like predicted purchase intent or content preferences, based on behavioral patterns alone. They adapt send times and suggest more effective subject lines or copy.

You can also use AI for:

• Progressive profiling: Instead of a 10-field signup form, use AI to serve one targeted question at a time based on what you already know about a contact — building a richer profile over time without killing conversion rates.
  
  Tools like HubSpot's Smart CRM paired with Breeze AI can do this passively, updating smart contact properties with data from call transcripts and other behavior.
• Zero-party data capture: Deploy AI-powered quizzes or preference centers that feel like value to subscribers, but function as structured data collection for you.
• List hygiene automation: AI can flag invalid emails, detect bot signups, and suppress chronically unengaged contacts before they tank your deliverability. (More on that shortly.)

All of these backend processes come together to improve the quality of the data your AI tools use for email personalization and preferences overall.

Process Automation

, email is the area marketers use most automation worldwide. Marketers automate numerous email processes, and the impact on day-to-day efficiency is significant.

With AI, everything from scheduling emails to data entry can be done automatically. This frees up time for more important work like planning and creative.

It’s not just anecdotal: The 67% of marketing teams say AI saves them 10 or more hours per week, and another 68% say it's meaningfully increased their productivity. And the scope of what can be automated keeps expanding.

Today's AI tools can trigger sends based on user behavior, auto-populate CRM fields from email replies, and even pause campaigns when engagement signals drop, all without manual intervention.

Email List Cleanup

A bloated or outdated email list doesn't just hurt your open rates; it also damages your sender reputation and deliverability as email clients recognize poor engagement.

AI can quickly and efficiently clean up your list by removing spam, inactive, or duplicate addresses using a combination of syntax checks, domain validation, and cross-referencing known server records.

Beyond the basics, AI-powered list hygiene tools can flag patterns, like spikes in bounces from a specific domain, or a cluster of addresses being added in a short window (a common sign of bot signups). You can also activate AI spam filters that block phishing emails, low-priority senders, and other threats before they ever touch your list.

Pro Tip: Run a list hygiene audit before any major campaign send — especially if your list hasn‘t been cleaned in 90+ days. Most AI tools will surface a health score alongside specific recommendations, so you’re not guessing at what to fix.

Personalization at Scale

The 2026 State of 糖心Vlog found 93% of marketers report that personalization improves leads or purchase numbers. However, the promise of email personalization has always run into the same wall: doing it well means time, and most teams don't have free time to do it at scale. AI removes that constraint.

AI algorithms analyze behavioral data (i.e. website activity, purchase history, past email engagement, even time-of-day open patterns) and use those signals to deliver a better email experience.

That means dynamically generated subject lines, body copy that references a subscriber's last purchase or browsing history, and product recommendations that update in real time based on inventory or relevance.

Amazon is a big fan of this approach to email marketing:

The result is personalization that goes well beyond inserting a first name.

A subscriber who just browsed your pricing page gets a different email than one who hasn't opened in 60 days — automatically, and at whatever volume your list demands.

Send Time Optimization

Even the best email in the world gets ignored if it lands at the wrong moment. In the past, marketers relied on broad industry benchmarks (we’ve all heard “send on Tuesday at 10 AM”) that apply to averages, not individuals, let alone their specific audience. AI makes that obsolete.

AI-powered tools analyze your real user behavior to determine when individual subscribers are most likely to open, click, and act.

For instance, a B2B buyer might engage during their morning commute, while a consumer shopper browses after dinner. AI learns these patterns at the individual level and adjusts delivery timing automatically.

What makes this especially powerful is the self-improving nature of the models. The more emails you send, the better the tool can predict the optimal send time for each subscriber. So, your timing gets sharper with every campaign.

Predictive Analytics

For a long time, email marketing has been reactive. You send a campaign, measure what happened, and adjust next time. Predictive analytics flips that model, letting AI forecast what's likely to happen before you hit send.

In email marketing, this means forecasting customer behavior, preferences, and engagement levels using historical data, machine learning, and statistical modeling.

In practice, that translates to knowing which subscribers are most likely to convert on a given offer, which contacts are drifting toward disengagement, and which segments are worth prioritizing in an upcoming campaign, all before

In the bigger picture, it .

Identifying and Responding to Behavioral Triggers

Emails triggered by behaviors have always outperformed broadcast campaigns. AI makes them even smarter. Traditional trigger systems were rule-based and fairly simplistic: a subscriber abandons a cart, they get a cart abandonment email.

AI goes further, reading the context behind behaviors. AI can detect if a prospect visits your site multiple times but avoids the pricing page, signaling hesitation — and instead of sending a generic follow-up, it delivers content that addresses price concerns directly.

Audience Segmentation

According to our research, the largest group of marketers (33%) sends to just 26–50% of their mailable list each week. Just 13% of teams reach 76–100% of their list weekly.

AI aims to close that gap through advanced segmentation. Savvy marketers use AI to segment audiences and personalize content at scale. AI zeroes in, breaking audiences into highly specific groups based on behavioral signals, purchase patterns, content preferences, lifecycle stage, and dozens of other attributes simultaneously.

Where older segmentation might produce five or ten audience buckets, AI can generate and manage hundreds of dynamic lists that update in real time as subscriber behavior changes.

HubSpot's AI Search Grader

See how visible your brand is in AI-powered search engines.

• Analyze your brand for today’s AI search engines.
• Maximize your AI search performance.
• Assess your brand’s visibility and presence.
• Learn how you compare to competitors.

AI Email 糖心Vlog Best Practices

Now that you know what AI can do, here are some best practices to keep in mind as you’re executing.

Read: Implementing AI in your marketing tech stack — expert tips and tricks you need to know

Start Small and Scale

You don‘t need to overhaul your entire email program overnight to get value from AI — in fact, that’s a good way to overwhelm your team and get inconsistent results. Start with one use case where the time savings and performance lift are high, and risk is low, like:

• Subject line optimization
• Send time optimization
• List hygiene

Once you've seen what AI can do in a contained environment, scaling from there is much easier.

Focus on Data Quality

AI is only as good as the data it‘s trained on. Feed it bad inputs, and you’ll get confidently wrong outputs. Before leaning into AI-powered segmentation, personalization, or predictive features, it's worth auditing the health of your contact data.

Are fields consistently populated? Are segments up to date? Is your CRM syncing cleanly with your email service provider (ESP)?

companies investing in AI are seeing a revenue uplift of 3–15% and a sales ROI uplift of 10–20%, but that gap closes fast if the underlying data is stale or incomplete. Data hygiene isn‘t glamorous, but it’s the foundation on which everything else is built.

Measure What Matters

When evaluating AI's impact on your email program, resist the urge to fall for vanity metrics like subscriber count. Instead, anchor to metrics that connect directly to business outcomes (i.e. revenue per email, conversion rate, and customer lifetime value). These tell a more honest story than list size or open rates alone.

Create a Prompt Library

HubSpot SVP of 糖心Vlog, Kieran Flanagan, recommends every marketer develop a library of tried and true AI prompts they could turn to in times of needs including email marketing.

It all starts with opening ChatGPT or another AI tool and saying:

“When I give you any kind of marketing discipline (e.g., SEO, paid media, lifecycle), create a prompt library designed by an elite marketer in that field.”

Flanagan breaks down the whole process here.

Maintain Human Oversight

AI is a powerful accelerant, but it still needs a human in the loop. It can miss context, misread tone, or make technically accurate recommendations that don't quite fit your brand or audience.

Remember the court cases we talked about? Simple human review can avoid very expensive problems.

Build approval checkpoints into your workflow, especially for anything customer-facing. The goal is to let AI handle the data-heavy, repetitive lifting while humans stay accountable for creative judgment and brand voice.

Best AI Tools for Email 糖心Vlog

AI email marketing platforms offer features like predictive analytics, send time optimization, and automated workflows. Here are some of my favorites and their best use cases.

(If you're looking for more, that collects and organizes all the latest and greatest AI tools in one place.)

1. : Email Personalization, Content Generation, Automation, Contact Management, Variant Testing, & More

HubSpot provides AI-native email marketing solutions for all business sizes. It integrates seamlessly with a host of other powerful features including its smart CRM, dynamic and static lists, automated workflows, personalization tokens, A/B testing, and content generation via Breeze AI.

Notable AI Features

• : Easily create email workflows to reach your target audiences with the right messages at all stages of their journey.
• and : AI assistant to help you ideate and create content, streamline tasks, and draft edits.
• : HubSpot email personalization uses what it calls “tokens” in the drag-and-drop editor to insert contact, company, or custom CRM data into copy, subject lines, and links.

Price: Free tools are available.

2. GetResponse: Email Content Generation & Design

promises to make email success with AI “limitless.” It includes unlimited emails with AI subject lines and copy catered to the audience, unlimited automation to nurture and re-engage contacts, and 99% deliverability rate for 160+ countries.

Notable AI Features

• Share keywords or phrases, email goals, and tone with the GPT-powered email generator that leverages industry data to produce emails most likely to increase your conversions.
• Display different images, text, or AI-driven product recommendations depending on the recipient.
• The AI subject line generator helps you test subject lines and learn what stands out in your subscribers’ inboxes.

Price: A free 30-day trial is available; paid plans start at $15 per month.

3. Levity: Email Process Automation

focuses on inbox analytics and complex workflow automation. It looks at your email inbox to help spot repetitive requests, handoffs, and bottlenecks, and then develop AI solutions to solve them.

Notable AI Features

• AI Tool Builder: Create tools unique to your business by uploading your data
• Categorization Criteria: Share traits with your AI to automatically sort and take action on emails as soon as you receive them.

Price: Call for pricing.

4. Hive: AI Email Engagement

is a project management software with a host of different tools. In terms of email, it offers Buzz AI that can connect to your Gmail or Microsoft Outlook accounts, learn from what it sees, and determines what to do next, whether it’s booking a meeting or drafting a response written in your voice, with full context.

Price: There is a free forever plan. Teams plans cost $12 per user a month. Enterprise pricing is available.

5. Beefree: Drag-and-drop Email Builder

is an email design suite where teams can come together to design, collaborate, and review email campaigns. The user-friendly drag and drop email builder make it so anyone can create an HTML and the tool even integrates with popular CRMs and ESPs like HubSpot.

Beefree also includes a built-in AI Assistant that helps you generate and refine email and landing page content, translate text, create images from prompts, and even boost accessibility with alt text suggestions.

Price: Forever free plan available. Paid plans start at $25/month.

6. Grammarly: AI content writer and grammar tool

isn’t a dedicated AI email marketing tool, but it is an AI tool that is invaluable for email marketers. Grammarly machine-learning recognizes in-text errors and suggests how to fix them. The tools are available on the Grammarly website ot Chrome extension (which you can use in HubSpot or your favorite email platform.)

Price: A free forever plan is available. Premium plans cost $12 per month.

7. Smartlead: Cold Email Assistant

is a cold email outreach software that uses AI automation workflows to help businesses scale with cold email. Smartlead uses AI-generated “spintax” to create multiple email copies and uses intent detection for automated reply categorization.

Users can choose the best email variant in A/B testing with the AI variant decision algorithm. The platform provides recommendations on deliverability improvement, campaign management, and campaign health monitoring.

Price: A free 14-day trial is available. Users can then choose the basic plan for $39/month, the Pro plan for $94/month, or a custom plan for $174/month.

Leveling Up Your Emails With AI

From writing copy to generating subject lines and even collecting and organizing data to improve personalization, a majority of marketers agree that using AI for email marketing makes their job easier.

When AI tools are used as just that — tools — they can improve your email marketing campaigns and give you more time to spend on creative tasks that make you better at your job.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in June 2025 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

HubSpot's AI Search Grader

See how visible your brand is in AI-powered search engines.

• Analyze your brand for today’s AI search engines.
• Maximize your AI search performance.
• Assess your brand’s visibility and presence.
• Learn how you compare to competitors.