This isn’t a blog about whether AI is good or bad. It’s an honest guide for marketers who are already using it and want to know how to get the most from it without losing what makes their marketing genuinely good.
We’ll cover:
AI is at its best when the task is repeatable, data-heavy, or time-consuming. Here’s what we’ve found useful, based on our own research, and what customers tell us they use day to day.
AI is great for getting something on the page quickly to avoid blank page syndrome – the anxiety caused by staring at a blank Word doc. Subject lines and first drafts take minutes instead of hours. The output isn’t always great, but having something to edit can spark more ideas and get the job done faster.
Taking a piece of content and rewriting it for a different channel takes time, and it’s easy to deprioritize. A lot of marketers use AI to edit copy, keeping the core message intact while adjusting for character limits and channel context. It’s one of those tasks that’s easy to hand off once you’ve tried it.
When you have a large mailing list, building personalized, relevant marketing messages can feel daunting. But AI can help add personal product recommendations to campaigns without the extra workload. Using insights like a customer’s purchase history or browsing behavior, AI-powered product recommendations can boost conversions by over 53% and help increase revenue by around 20%.
AI spots patterns in your campaign data in seconds. It can highlight underperforming segments, predict when customers are likely to churn, and recommend the best time to send, so you spend less time searching for insights and more time acting on them.
AI can generate different subject lines, different CTAs, and different content angles, so you can run more tests without doubling your workload. Experimenting with new subject lines can help keep your emails feeling fresh and improve engagement. Mountain Warehouse used AI to generate and test new ideas, increasing open rates to 50%, up from a typical baseline of around 35%.
While AI is speeding up a lot of day-to-day tasks, there are some areas where the human touch cannot be replaced.
AI can tell you what the data says about your audience, but it can’t tell you what it means. Only you can interpret those insights to understand where someone is in their journey, why one message resonated more than another, or what your audience needs next. That’s the kind of context AI still struggles to replicate.
AI can be trained to write in your brand voice, and with a good voice guide, it’ll get impressively close. But sounding like your brand and knowing what your brand should say are two different things.
Say you’re a retail brand with a playful voice, and your summer sale campaign is ready to go. Then your delivery partner has a meltdown and half your customers are waiting on late orders. The AI will happily write you a cheeky, on-voice sale email, because that’s what it was trained to do. It takes a person to see that the sale email should wait, and that what customers need first is a plain, honest update about their orders.
That call sits nowhere in a voice guide. It comes from someone who knows what’s happening with your customers right now and can judge how the brand should show up for it. Get it wrong and the same voice that usually feels charming suddenly feels tone-deaf. So let AI keep your copy consistent with the voice you’ve defined, and keep a person deciding how that voice meets the moment.
AI is very good at producing content that’s technically correct and structurally sound. It’s less good at the kind of creative leap that makes a campaign memorable. The unexpected angle, the cultural reference that lands perfectly, and the idea that makes someone stop scrolling all still come from human creativity.
When a news story breaks, or your audience suddenly cares about something, the brands that land it are the ones where a person spotted the opportunity, judged whether it was theirs to join, and found the angle only their brand could take. AI can help you draft fast once you’ve had the idea, but the instinct for when to act, when to stay quiet, and what only you could say is human through and through.
Even the most AI-assisted campaign is full of human fingerprints, and that’s what keeps it feeling genuine:
None of that work is visible to the customer, but all of it shapes what lands in their inbox. It’s the difference between a message that exists because a system could send it and one that exists because a person decided it was worth sending.
Audiences can’t see the process, but they can feel the result, and they’re getting better at telling the difference between communication with a person behind it and content that was generated.
The marketers we see getting the most from AI are the ones who’ve worked out where it saves them time without costing them quality, and where it doesn’t.
If this has got you thinking about how you’re using AI, these are some helpful reads to check out next, depending on what’s most relevant to you right now.
It’s your creativity, empathy, and strategic thinking that make your marketing stand out from others. By merging the best aspects of both AI and human input, you can create campaigns that are both effective and connect deeply with your audience.
