Will Email Marketing Be Replaced by AI?
Last updated: 5 June 2025 — ⏱ 5 min read
With AI doing everything from writing poems to creating deepfakes of your cat playing chess, it’s only natural marketers are asking: Will AI replace email marketing?
Spoiler: Not quite. But there’s nuance, fear, optimism, and maybe just a touch of existential dread, in the conversation.
Diverse Perspectives: Fears and Hopes
Fears: Is My Job Toast?
Redditors are sounding the alarm.
"Yes for a lot of kinds of email marketing AI will have the potential to completely take over and arguably it should."
— u/datatenzing (source)
Some worry that AI will not only automate subject lines but also eat their lunch and go as far as ghostwrite their resignation letters without their permission. With all the hype pusdhed by Sam Altman, Elon Musk and others, these fears are understandable. But it's hard to know whether some of this hype is, well, just that. Hype aimed at boosting a company's share price, or whether some of the more extreme predictions may have been overstated.
Hopes: More Time for Coffee and Creativity
Many are far more optimistic.
AI is seen by some as the marketing assistant we always wanted. No coffee runs, no complaints about meetings, just pure data crunching and personalization on autopilot.
For hundreds of years, we've been promised that new technologies will lead to much less work and more leisure time. The industrial revolution, personal computers, the internet. All these promised to take over our jobs. And yet, we're all still working pretty long hours. We perhaps can get more done in the time we have, but we're still putting the hours in. I was chatting with an AI programmer recently who predicted much the same for AI. It will become commonplace for AI to be used as our assistant, amking us more productive and taking some of the tedium out of some aspects of work, leaving us to focus on some of the more creative parts of jobs. There are inevitably social and political questions regarding who owns AIs and who profits from them, but they're beyond the scope of this article.
"AI in email marketing uses machine learning algorithms to personalize content, optimize send times, and segment audiences."
— Salesforce
What AI Is Actually Doing in Email Marketing (Right Now)
Let’s separate the hype from the “oh wow, that’s real?”
Personalization at Scale
AI tools can analyze user behavior to serve hyper-personalized content. It's like that one weirdly perfect product recommendation that makes you suspicious that your phone is listening to you.
Predictive Analytics
Forget crystal balls. AI can predict the best time to send emails, what type of content to use, and even the tone of voice most likely to get a click.
Auto-Generated Content
Yes, AI can now write emails. But be warned: it might sound like a robot who just finished a corporate jargon buffet. Human editing still matters. Again, it's best to think of AI as an assistant. It can help you order your thoughts. It can provide you a structure for an email. It can even draft an email. But without some editing afterwards to bring your tine of voice to it, it'll just sound pretty generic and easy to skim over. The more people get used to reading things written by AI, the more it'll just sound familiar and unnoticable. It's a bit like when you're in your house, you generally don't pay much attention to your furniture or pictures as it's so familiar. It's only if someone put a new chair in your living room that you'd pay much attention to it at all.
Smarter A/B Testing
AI helps run faster and smarter A/B tests. No more guessing whether "You’re missing out on points" or "URGENT. You’ve got ONE DAY left!" works best in subject lines. The bots can figure all that out for you.
The Pros and Cons of AI in Email Marketing
Pros
- Efficiency: Automates tedious tasks so you can actually take that lunch break.
- Personalization: No more “Hi [First Name]” fails.
- Insightful: Predicts trends and behaviors faster than your analytics guy.
Cons
- Job Worries: Some roles may shrink or shift.
- Data Dependence: Garbage in, garbage out. You still need to learn to use it well. The output will always be some combination of your work and the AI's work.
- Robo-Tone: AI still struggles with nuance, wit, and empathy, so your emails could start sounding like HAL 9000 on decaf.
So... Will AI Replace Email Marketing?
Here’s the twist: AI won’t replace email marketing. It’ll replace bad email marketing.
AI is a tool. It's a really powerful tool, but a tool nonetheless. Tools need skilled hands. The future is not bots taking over, but bots and humans teaming up like some Marvel crossover you didn’t know you needed.
"Training the team to effectively use AI tools is time-consuming and expensive."
— Digital Authority Partners
So marketers, keep your creative chops sharp, and maybe learn to speak a little Python on the side.
Bonus Tip: Use AI-Enhanced Tools (But Wisely)
One way to future-proof your email game? Use platforms that already bake in smart automation, like Moosend.
It combines AI-driven personalization with good old-fashioned usability. And no, it won’t send a “Happy Birthday” email to your ex unless you really want it to.
Need a full breakdown? Check out our full Moosend review. For anyone who needs other tools as well as email marketing, it's worth also checking out our reviews of pabbly and systeme.io to see if their excellent offerings might be a more cost-effective approach for you.
TL;DR
- Will AI replace email marketing? Nope.
- Will it enhance it? Absolutely.
- Should you be learning how to work with AI, not against it? 100%.
So embrace the bots. Just don’t let them write your breakup emails.