“See you in the future.”
When demoing Backstroke’s new AI-powered email campaign generator, Backstroke’s Head of Prodcut & Design, Tyler Hill, shows us that the future is NOW. This latest product release makes work faster and simpler. It helps ecommerce marketing teams create smarter, more impactful campaigns effortlessly.
Not only can this new release generate AI messages that are optimized to drive revenue for highly specific audience clusters though . . . it can also create full AI email and SMS journeys in seconds. Watch below to see how it works.
These advancements in email marketing AI are powered by Backstroke’s proprietary access to 10k+ ecommerce brands’ messaging data. This data powers our Brand Brain, which further tailors messaging, content, and flows to unique, individual brands. If you’re using Backstroke, it analyzes your website, brand guidelines, and team’s inputs to create AI messaging that aligns with your voice, resonates with your audience, and drives engagement and retention.
Keep scrolling to get in-depth looks at how it works. We’ll show you how to create promotional email campaigns, email and SMS journeys, and personalized content for audience clusters, all of which are optimized to drive revenue and built within a moment.
Email Campaign Generator: Two Types of AI Email Marketing Campaigns
Let’s start from the top. There are two ways Backstroke creates AI email campaigns.
Recommended campaigns are automatically generated campaign concepts. Think of them as shortcuts to optimized campaigns, recommended for your brand by AI.
They’re based on your ecommerce brand’s historical performance, with Backstroke predicting how well each new recommended campaign will drive engagement and revenue. By examining comparable past content and cluster-specific messaging for your audiences, Backstroke ideates and generates fresh AI email campaigns that are predicted to drive success for your brand.
You can also create a new AI email campaign idea on your own. Here’s how . . .
Building an AI Email Campaign from Scratch
When creating something completely new with Backstroke’s AI email campaign generator, simply write about the email you’d like to send! Descriptive prompting of your campaign’s desired elements—which as a marketer you’re already well aware of—is all you’ll need to detail in the prompt field!
Include information like:
- A description of what you’d like to spotlight: Do you want to detail a new product? A specific collection? Call it out in your descriptive copy!
- Words that describe your offering’s characteristics: Is there exclusivity surrounding your offer? Are you promoting a discount that runs for a limited time? Be sure to include what makes the contents of this email special or unique.
- Phrases that exude the feelings surrounding your brand: Do your shoe collections exemplify sophistication? Are your cosmetics bright, bold, and practically screaming for attention? Include words and phrases that describe these brand and product-focused feelings in your prompts.
Once your AI email campaign description is done, Backstroke will identify the key words & descriptors it’s using to power your creation.
In seconds, Backstroke creates AI messaging campaigns—including both SMS and email—that are fully ready to send. This method of generative email creation provides several options to choose from, all of which you can browse and sort by audience segment or cluster.
Each of these campaign options are accompanied by a campaign score, which clues you in to how well it aligns with your brand’s tone and the estimated revenue impact it’ll drive.
Customizing Your AI Generated Ecommerce Email
Now let’s say that you’re liking the way one of Backstroke’s AI marketing campaigns looks. Let’s also say that you’re a perfectionist, and you want to double-check its contents or tweak them just a bit to ensure they’re exceptional.
By clicking into the AI email campaign that strikes your fancy, you can customize it further. Drilling deeper into each AI message, you’ll see which exact products from your shop that Backstroke chose to include. Our Shopify integration means that you can add new ones or make substitutions by pasting in product URLs.
Each product Backstroke places in your campaigns is done so with historical ecommerce data and your current customer data in mind. Backstroke picks and ranks each product photo, based on predicted performance, as well. This is all powered by insights from your brand, customers, and product inventory.
Along with featured products, you’ll also see the best email subject lines and preview text for your campaign’s specific clusters.
A drop-down menu at the top of the pages allows you to select different audience clusters, then view how your email’s creative elements update to fit their preferences. You can even click the Remix button to switch up the email’s visuals and get a sense of other creative ideas to send to your audience cluster.
AI Email Journeys
AI marketing emails and SMS messages are just the beginning of what Backstroke can now create. Beyond single sends and campaigns, our latest release creates and optimizes completely new and existing customer journeys.
Yes. Backstroke identifies ways to optimize your existing messaging flows. Predicted Engagement Lift scores break down the numbers behind how exactly these AI-powered email recommendations are expected to impact each journey’s performance. While Backstroke’s recommendations may be extensive and detailed or simple and straightforward, all can be completed in a click, with users automatically implementing their journey enhancements.
Similar to the email campaign generator we discussed earlier, you can also write a prompt to describe a unique email journey you want AI to create. After prompting our journey builder using descriptive language of your campaign’s features and goals, Backstroke will generate all the steps needed for a comprehensive email and SMS journey.
Above, you can see how Backstroke details a new journey flow’s contents and provides a visual representation of its structure, helping users understand all the steps in the flow’s process. Of course, the customization doesn’t stop there. You can dive deep into each email or SMS step, previewing and editing their contents to perfection.
