Artificial intelligence has not yet fulfilled its email marketing potential, at least not without human help.
There is a maturation gap between the AI-powered email that marketers can imagine and the campaigns they can actually create. Filling this gap could be a significant opportunity.
Email Endures
Email marketing should seemingly be obsolete. The first “email,” after all, occurred in October 1971, nearly 55 years ago.
Surely, social media platforms, text messaging, and various applications such as WhatsApp and Discord could have supplanted it. And let’s not forget the grim industry concerns when Gmail introduced the “Promotions” tab in 2013. Today, AI inbox summaries are the latest marketing threat.
Nonetheless, for many ecommerce businesses, email continues to produce a disproportionate share of revenue. The channel remains durable not because it is novel, but because it is owned, measurable, and tightly connected to shopper behavior.
The potential of AI-driven email marketing lies in targeting each shopper individually.
Relevant
As an example, self-described email marketing nerd Chase Dimond recently posted on X his ecommerce email marketing recommendations.
Diamond’s “7 Types of Emails Every Ecom Store Should Send” and “4 Must-Send Ecommerce Emails” describe traditional, pre-AI tactics.
His recommendations imply that core campaigns — abandoned cart reminders, urgency-driven promotions, referral requests, content-led engagement sequences — still convert. The underlying psychology of timing, relevance, and motivation has not suddenly expired.
Audience of One
This apparent status quo, however, does not mean that email marketing cannot evolve. We expect artificial intelligence to be disruptive.
To this end, AI’s greatest potential:
- Enables segmentation at the audience-of-one level,
- Delivers the right offer to the right person at the exact moment it will convert,
- Achieves precise, individualized relevance.
True AI means every subscriber becomes a segment of one, combining behavioral signals, predictive intent, contextual timing, and offer economics. The result is an individualized experience optimized for conversion.
I see four requirements for this sort of AI-powered email.
- Predictive personalization. The AI automation must evaluate a shopper’s evolving propensity to purchase specific products or respond to particular offers. Where rule-based segments might separate “high value customers” from “lapsed buyers,” a predictive model determines when a specific individual is ready to buy, and what offer is most persuasive.
- Contextual timing. Pre-AI workflows fire fixed triggers based on cart or browse abandonments. AI should identify not only the event but the best moment for conversion.
- Offer optimization. Rather than blasting a single discount or incentive to every subscriber, an AI system can adjust its amount or type. Shopper A responds to free shipping, while shopper B requires a small bonus.
- Scalable to individual behavior. In theory, AI could generate thousands or millions of unique message variations tailored to individual behavior and propensity. It could orchestrate dynamic sequence choices, conditional messaging paths, and offer decisions — all without human interaction.
An audience of one redefines email marketing.
The Gap
Unfortunately that vision is not achievable today. AI is currently more of an email marketing assistant than a personalized engine.
Certainly it can streamline campaign variations, generating, for example, multiple subject lines and tests. Many email platforms now include native support for real-time behavioral scoring, predictive intent, individualized offers, and send-time optimization.
Yet the gulf between possibility and practical tooling is why many marketers say “AI isn’t there yet.” The potential remains high, but the infrastructure is still emerging.
In the meantime, creative email marketers can experiment with audience-of-one approximations by stitching together existing technologies, such as:
- Workflow automation tools knit disparate systems that function autonomously once created. Providers include Zapier, Make, and n8n.
- Recommenders. Platforms such as Recombee and Luigi’s Box can drive product and offer recommendations. These too can sync with workflow automations.
Until platforms close the gap, experimentation and integration are likely to shape competitive advantage, enabling some ecommerce email marketers to approximate individualized messaging well before such capabilities become standard features.
