Finding Balance with AI
Let’s be honest, if you’re in marketing, you’re feeling the pressure to adopt AI. The buzz is everywhere and the promise is incredible: hyper-personalized content, campaigns launched at a massive scale, and data-driven decisions that promise to finally unlock a boost in engagement.
But here’s the uncomfortable catch that often gets lost in the hype, the same AI tools designed to lift your engagement can actually become the thing that sabotages your sender reputation! Implementing AI in your email strategy isn’t a simple “set it and forget it” task. It’s a lot like a tightrope walk, a constant and conscious balance between huge reward and significant risk.
Why is the risk so high? The line between genius and generic is actually incredibly thin. The same sophisticated language model that crafts a seemingly high-converting subject line can also populate your email body with phrases that trigger spam filters. It can personalize a message with so much specificity (example: “Hope you’re enjoying that blue sweater you left in your cart 43 days ago!”) that it creeps a subscriber out, prompting them to hit the ‘report spam’ button. The efficiency that allows you to create ten emails in the time it used to take to make one also paves the way to potentially alienate your audience ten times faster. And at this point, a single misstep can have a cascading effect. The ultimate risk is a potentially damaged sender reputation, which we all know is a really fragile asset to lose (and takes a lot of hard work to rebuild).
So, how do marketers navigate this without falling off the wire? The first and most important step is a mental shift. We have to reframe how we see these powerful tools. Think of AI as your new, overly eager intern who can be brilliant, fast, and never sleeps. It can generate a dozen draft variations in seconds, crunch massive datasets to identify hidden patterns, and segment lists with a precision that would take a human days. But would you let a new intern have the final sign-off on a major client campaign without oversight? Of course not! They lack context and strategic judgment. The final decision-making and calculated oversight must come from you. A human should always be in the loop, applying the brand voice, checking for appropriate tone, and confirming that the message feels authentically human (rather than off-puttingly robotic).
This “human-in-the-loop” model means your role evolves into that of an auditor before every send. This involves a few big checkpoints:
- Spam Check: Never skip running AI-generated subject lines and copy through a dedicated spam filter checker. What sounds good to AI might read like a spam trigger to a filter.
- The Read-Aloud Test: This is a simple, but powerful trick. Read the email out loud. Ask yourself – Does it flow naturally? Does it sound like something a real person would say in a conversation? Does it have that overly salesy “AI feel” to it?
- Fact-Check Everything: AI models can occasionally pull incorrect information. This can lead to potentially disastrous personalization, like referencing an offer that doesn’t exist or a product feature that’s inaccurate. Verifying every dynamic element, link, and personalized claim is non-negotiable for maintaining customer trust.
Your auditing role also extends to list management. Use AI as a guide for list hygiene, not an automatic executioner. Allow it to identify disengaged segments or potentially risky addresses. But once that step has been done, you need to apply your human-led policies. Before suppressing 10,000 contacts, use that insight to launch a thoughtful, human-designed re-engagement campaign. This can preserve your list integrity and protect your reputation.
Finally, the golden rule: start small. Don’t attempt a full-scale AI revolution across all of your campaigns on day one. Choose a single segment or campaign type and run controlled A/B tests. Pit your best human-written email against the AI-assisted version. But keep in mind, your monitoring should go beyond opens and clicks. Keep a close eye on spam complaints, unsubscribes, bounce details, and reply rates. These are your early warning signals for reputation damage.
The primary driver to your success utilizing AI is to stop thinking it as a self-governing employee and start treating it as that energetic intern. It is a force that can do the heavy lifting and generate incredible ideas. But it must be managed, guided, and repeatedly checked by a human expert. Use AI to sharpen your tools and enhance your creativity, not to replace your strategic brain. Find that balance!
