Is Email Marketing About to Be Automated?

Artificial intelligence may be ready for a prominent role in corporate copywriting, suggest experimental results from Chicago Booth’s Jean-Pierre Dubé and Booth PhD student Ariel Xu. The researchers worked with an online wine retailer to test how automation might affect the performance of its daily marketing emails. Across three experiments using different AI models, the AI-based approaches consistently generated the highest projected annual net profit. In one experiment, they compared messages drafted by humans with others written by a large language model trained on five years of the company’s most successful emails. Human- and machine-written messages performed similarly to each other, but the AI emails cost far less to produce, the research finds. Dubé and Xu argue that the results should encourage companies to consider the potential for this and other aspects of marketing communications to be automated. (For more on this research, read “AI Is Coming for Marketing Copywriters.”)