Exploring the Potential of AI in Sales Email Optimization

Sales professionals are well aware of the power of AI.

Per HubSpot, two-thirds of B2B teams have already invested in sales-specific AI or automation tools.

But there’s still more progress to be made — especially in the field of email outreach.

If you think cold email AI is all about churning out snappy subject lines and email copy faster, you’re wrong. In this article, we’re going to discuss the wide-ranging benefits and use cases for AI in sales emails, from analyzing reply sentiment to improving email deliverability.

Let’s get into it…

What Is Email AI?

Email AI is a broad phrase that refers to any email-related use case for AI — from writing emails to segmenting audiences.

It’s also sometimes used as a catch-all term for other types of email automation, such as sending automated follow-ups and drip sequences.

Whatever the context, from a sales perspective, email AI is all about helping your reps do more with less. But let’s take a look at some more specific benefits:

What are the Benefits of Using an Email AI Tool?

HubSpot’s research revealed that sales teams use a wide range of AI and automation tools. These tools assist with day-to-day tasks like data entry, lead scoring, and prospecting:

Why is AI so popular in the sales world? And what, exactly, are the benefits of email AI?

Let’s find out…

1. Boost Efficiency and Productivity

Arguably the most obvious benefit of artificial intelligence is its ability to save time on manual tasks. That’s a massive deal when your reps are managing multiple client accounts.

The efficiency savings of AI can be substantial, with HubSpot discovering that the average sales rep can save:

• 2h 15m a day by using AI tools to automate manual tasks

• 2h 7m a day using AI to assist with prospect outreach

So it’s no surprise that 71% of business leaders say AI tools have made employees more productive, while just 13% say AI has reduced productivity:

2. Dedicate More Time To High-Value Tasks

Of course, increased productivity doesn’t necessarily lead to improved results. It’s only truly useful if your reps prioritize their time effectively.

Fortunately, this doesn’t seem to be a concern in sales. Per HubSpot, 80% of sales pros say that AI and automation tools can help them spend less time on repetitive, labor-intensive manual tasks, while 79% say AI allows them to spend more time selling.

This is a massive deal given that the average rep spends just 28% of their working week on sales-related actions, according to Salesforce. The rest is eaten up by non-revenue-generating activities like admin, data entry, and internal meetings:

By handing those tasks over to AI tools, your reps have greater scope to add value by testing new messaging and replying to prospects.

3. Reduce Human Error

The more tasks your sales team performs manually, the more scope there is for mistakes to creep in.

Take one common sales action: updating your CRM. Humans make approximately 100 times more data entry errors than automated systems. Across 10,000 data entries, your living, breathing reps can be expected to make up to 400 mistakes — compared to just 4.1 for automation tools.

Of course, data entry is far from the only task your reps perform.

From personalizing emails to building outreach sequences, there’s a ton of potential for errors. And while AI is by no means perfect, it’s less likely to make a typo or paste a mail merge field in the wrong place.

4. Deliver Better Cold Email Results

We’ve seen how AI can lead to higher productivity, fewer errors, and a greater focus on high-value activities.

Combined, those benefits empower your sales reps to do better work. Indeed, 34% of sales leaders who replied to HubSpot’s survey agreed that AI tools make employees more effective at their jobs, while 26% said AI tools help them deliver more personalized experiences.

All of which adds up to stronger results for your clients — think more opens, clicks, replies, and leads.

5. Generate Higher Sales ROI

Ultimately, businesses don’t purchase sales AI tools to make life easier for their reps. They do it to make money.

According to McKinsey & Co, companies investing in AI are enjoying:

• Revenue increases of 3% – 15%

• Sales ROI uplifts of 10% – 20%

The higher your ROI, the more you can scale your sales operation, helping you deliver even better results. It’s a win-win scenario.

6 Ways To Use AI in Cold Outreach

As we’ve seen, AI can unlock some major benefits for your sales outreach strategy. Now, let’s explore six practical use cases for email AI:

1. Improve Cold Email Deliverability

What’s the single most effective thing you can do to improve your cold email results? It’s simple: increase your email deliverability.

Fact is, the more of your outreach emails land in the main inbox, the more opens and replies you’ll generate. But manually analyzing inbox performance and changing senders is slow, repetitive work.

In other words, it’s exactly the type of sales task that benefits from AI and automation.

That’s why QuickMail created Deliverability AI, which automatically sends emails from top-performing accounts.

Deliverability AI helps you get more value from your email domains (without all the tedious monitoring) by cycling accounts in and out of recovery, making it easier to maintain a healthy sender reputation and maximize your deliverability.

Which means a higher ROI from your outreach activity and happier clients.

2. Analyze Email Response Sentiment

Another key use for email AI is in analyzing the sentiment of your prospects’ replies. That way, you can prioritize responses that demand immediate action or have a higher chance of converting.

Plenty of outreach solutions offer some form of sentiment analysis, but most only label replies as positive, negative, or neutral.

QuickMail’s AI sentiment tool is different. We analyze the prospect’s emails to understand their intent, such as:

• Unsubscribe request

• Not interested

• Not the right person

• Not now

• Needs more information

• Interested

We even recommend specific next steps to move the conversation forward.

3. Trigger Follow-Up Sub-Campaigns

The best email AI tools don’t just understand the sentiment behind replies from prospects. They know what to do next — and they have the power to make it happen.

Once again, QuickMail shows just how effective email AI can be.

When our platform detects the sentiment of a prospect’s email, it can use that sentiment to trigger a follow-up sub-campaign based on their reply.

To give a simple example, if a prospect asks for a phone call to learn more about your product, QuickMail can automatically follow up with a meeting request email incorporating a calendar link.

It’s not just about saving your reps time. It’s about creating a smoother buyer journey.

4. Speed Up Content Creation

HubSpot’s survey found that 31% of sales professionals are using generative AI tools for writing sales outreach messages and/or creating sales content.

It’s not hard to see why.

AI writing tools help you craft new email templates in an instant based on simple text prompts. This can be a real time-saver given that not all salespeople are natural writers.

However, if you’re going to use generative AI for writing emails, we’d strongly recommend editing and personalizing them before hitting “send”.

Because sending generic emails to thousands of prospects rarely yields results.

5. Optimize Email Send Times

Naturally, you want to send emails at times when prospects are most likely to open and respond to them.

Email AI can help here, too.

Unlike other outreach platforms, QuickMail’s analytics shows open and reply rates based on when you sent the original email:

You can use this insight to automate send times for your outreach sequences. For instance, if you’re targeting 150 prospects a day, you can set daily send times from 9 am – 5 pm.

You can even add a pause for the lunch break.

6. Research Prospects and Personalize Emails

According to Salesforce, the average sales rep spends 9.3% of their time researching prospects.

Wouldn’t it be good if AI could do the research for you, then transform all that prospecting data into personalized email copy?

Turns out it can!

Some email AI platforms are capable of scraping information from prospects’ company websites and LinkedIn profiles. Not only that, but they use the information to craft personalized subject lines, intros, and even entire emails.

However, most AI-powered email writers don’t offer this functionality. And even when they do, the results often aren’t great, so you’ll definitely need to do some manual sense-checking and editing.

5 Top Email AI Tools To Boost Efficiency and Results

If you’re going to take advantage of email AI, you need to invest in the right tools for the job. Get started with our roundup of five top email AI platforms and solutions:

1. QuickMail

• Pricing: $49 – $129 per month

QuickMail is a cold outreach platform that allows sales reps to build omnichannel campaigns spanning email, LinkedIn messaging, cold calling, and SMS.

It incorporates a bunch of email AI and automation features, including: 

• Deliverability AI: Our proprietary solution for maximizing email deliverability by automatically sending from top-performing accounts.

• Sentiment analysis: Automatically identifies the sentiment behind a prospect’s email or LinkedIn message.

• AI sub-campaigns: Trigger follow-up messages based on how the prospect responded to a previous email in your sequence.

Read more: How LevelUp Leads Served 120+ Clients in 3 Years with QuickMail 

2. Toolsaday AI Email Generator

• Pricing: $7.99 – $99.99 per month

Toolsaday’s AI Email Generator is exactly what it sounds like: a generative AI tool for writing emails and replies. Just provide some basic information — like the purpose of your email and who you’re writing to — and the platform will do the hard work for you. 

You can customize the results by setting the desired word count of your email (up to 500 words) and tone of voice. The AI Email Generator also supports 38 languages.

3. Jasper AI

• Pricing: $49 – $69+ per seat per month

Jasper isn’t an email-specific AI tool. Rather, it’s a generative AI platform that helps users quickly craft on-brand copy. 

Users can get started fast using 50+ templates based on different use cases, from email subject lines to LinkedIn Company Bios. Jasper can also generate copy based on classic sales and marketing frameworks like AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) and PAS (Problem, Agitate, Solution).

At time of writing, the platform supports 80+ languages.

4. Mailbutler

• Pricing: $4.95 – $32.95 per user per month

Mailbutler offers a bunch of email-related features, including email tracking, signature creation, and email scheduling. But its main function is as an AI email assistant.

The platform’s Smart Assistant for Apple Mail, Gmail, and Outlook is capable of drafting emails based on keyword prompts, summarizing lengthy emails in a couple of sentences, and checking your spelling and grammar as you go.

5. WARMER.ai

• Pricing: $59 – $279 per month

WARMER.ai is another email writing tool. The platform crafts content based on the objective of your campaign, such as driving website traffic or booking meetings.

But unlike most similar solutions, WARMER.ai is capable of personalizing email copy by analyzing the recipient’s LinkedIn profile and/or website. You can even upload a CSV list of multiple prospects to generate personalized emails at scale.

Deliverability: The #1 Use Case for Email AI

The vast majority of email AI solutions help you with writing emails. But even the world’s most engaging cold email won’t generate replies if it lands in the spam folder.

That’s why the #1 use case for email AI is to boost your deliverability.

Deliverability AI from QuickMail doesn’t just save your reps a bunch of time — it extracts more value from each and every email send by helping you hit more main inboxes. Which means better results for your clients.

But don’t just take our word for it.

Try out Deliverability AI (and all our other amazing features) by signing up for your free QuickMail trial.