Key takeaways ✨
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In the 2023 State of Email Workflows Report, we discovered marketing teams spend, on average, two weeks or more creating a single email. From the campaign inception to campaign delivery—they’re spending two weeks on everything that goes into a great email campaign like strategy, copy, design, code, setup, segmentation, testing, approvals, and sending.
That was before artificial intelligence (AI) changed everything about how we work.
As the promise of AI is top of mind for everyone around the world, our main focus at Litmus is optimizing the email workflow.
We’re already seeing some of the changes AI is making on email marketing, yet we’re still in the flip-phone-phase. 70% (!!) of email marketers we talked to for this year’s State of Email report say that up to half of their email marketing operations will be AI-driven by the end of 2026.
Fundamentally, the way email marketers strategize, conceive, create, and analyze your communications is already changing, and AI is only going to get better from here. This raises the question:
Where will AI have the greatest impact on streamlining the email workflow, so marketers can spend less time on manual tasks and more time creating amazing campaigns?
Table of contents
- AI in email marketing is more than just writing
- Where email workflows get stuck (and how AI can help)
- What’s next for email marketers?
AI in email marketing is more than just writing
When you think about the entire email marketing workflow, the copy is just one small part. (Although some writers—myself included—like to think it’s the most important part!) Using generative AI to write your business emails, sales emails, and cold emails is a valid tactic. You can train generative AI to write like you do and to learn the value in what you’re selling—and even help you personalize the emails easily. The options are endless and the potential is huge.
But if you want email to live up to its reputation as the strongest ROI of any channel ($36+ for every $1 spent), then using generative AI for your writing is not the best use of the tool.
There are so many more applications for using AI throughout your email workflow—and they work much, much better than generic, vague, or so-so copy that AI is currently producing.
Think of AI as an extension of the automation you’ve already come to rely on as an email marketer with a million items on your to-do list. Whether you use AI or not, a great email marketing campaign still needs to have:
- A compelling and engaging design that aligns with your brand experience.
- Valuable content that a subscriber or customer can use or benefit from.
- Clear insights on the back end to help you measure what’s working.
Let’s talk about how AI can help you with each of these elements.
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Where email workflows get stuck and how AI can help
When we asked email marketers about their email processes for our annual State of Email survey in 2024, 62% of teams said they needed two weeks or more to produce a single email.
That number in 2025? It dropped to only 6%.
Automation and AI are completely changing the way emails are created, making teams more efficient and productive. This frees up teams to think more creatively and strategically about where email falls in the overall marketing lifecycle, rather than just churning out email after email “because so-and-so asked for it.” Combining AI with automation tools like Litmus and Validity can unify segmentation, AI-driven content, and testing into a seamless workflow.
1. Spitball your email strategy with AI
One of the overlooked ways AI can help break through any sticking points is by using it as a strategic consultant. Taking the time to train a company-specific version of Claude or Chat-GPT can pay off with insights about your customers and subscribers you may not have thought to look for.
To do this right, though, you need to take the time to feed the machine important information like:
- Persona and target audience information.
- Subscriber metrics.
- Past high-performing campaign examples.
- Your goals.
“You can’t dump AI onto your emails and say it’ll fix everything without thinking about your strategy,” says Rafael. “If you use AI to create six different emails sent to the same person in forty-eight hours, they’re not going to read it. It doesn’t matter which variation of subject line you’re doing if they won’t engage, and it just hurts your deliverability. You still need to think.”
Asking AI to be “an email marketing expert” with this information is a useful way to help yourself think more clearly about your email marketing strategy. Try asking it to suggest campaign ideas based on your first-party data, drip campaign, or email sequences based on your product, or ask it for special offers ideas to sell more products.
Think of it as another person in the brainstorming meeting, rather than an oracle, so that when you do use tools like BriteVerify for segmentation and email hygiene, you’re ready to put those new segments to use.
2. Create copy quickly with AI—but use caution
This one gets a pass because inboxes are crowded and email is as close as we get to our customers, prospects, and communities. That means content is more important than ever. In fact, according to the State of Email Report 2025, content creation is the most highly sought-after skill when hiring for email marketing roles.
“I find AI to be very useful as I do research ahead of my writing, in addition to helping edit my work,” says Rafael. “I can ask it to create a dossier of data around the topic I’m trying to learn more about, and then I use a tool called Canvas, which throws all that data as input and it spits out an infographic to make it super digestible. It’s invaluable as I create content.”
Generative AI can speed up many copy-related areas:
- Email subject line brainstorming
- Generating subject line options
- Copywriting and editing
- Image generation
- Video content creation
Where AI can be most useful is as a tool to help get you started or fight through writer’s block. And don’t forget about generative AI’s partner in crime—assistive AI. This type includes tools like Grammarly to support content creators while they’re doing their best work. Litmus Assistant, for example, can optimize your copy by suggesting compelling subject lines and copy alternatives in different tones.
3. Templatize your design with AI
Of course, we’re big believers that your email design should be some of your best work, built to drive your most compelling and thoughtful campaigns. It’s insulting to subscribers when brands spend the big bucks and all their resources trying to pull in new audiences—and then the loyal subscribers are stuck with an afterthought like “template 42” with a logo upload.
Generative AI is moving quickly on the design front, but when it comes to being on-brand and effective, you need to pay as much attention to design here as you are to the copy to ensure your brand stands out in the inbox. AI is no replacement for your brand…we’ve all seen how AI has struggled with the human hand.
Machine learning and predictive analytics will play an increasingly important role in how email marketing campaigns are designed for personalization and that strategy will be core to the design.
We recommend working with your email developer and email designer to craft a highly templated, modular email design system with re-usable components to make things faster and easier. (As a bonus, we have a whole library of pre-tested email snippets for you here at Litmus!) We were surprised to learn that only 28% of companies in our State of Email report told us that they used a centralized design template system to maintain brand consistency across email types. AI can recommend (and build) some of those components to make your designs and accompanying code more scalable across different campaigns.
4. Use AI for basic coding to spend more time on personalization
A strong workflow process and project management tool will allow this phase to be as quick as possible at this stage. While there has been some experimentation with generative AI tools in email code creation, AI can miss the mark by failing to:
- Include workarounds for Dark Mode.
- Write accessible code.
- Take into account the potentially 300,000+ ways an email could render.
A dedicated email developer will always take on these considerations.
AI can also help with basic code and de-bug your code more quickly. Think: the repetitive tasks your developers haaaate doing anyway.
That way, your email developers can spend their time testing new ways to innovate and personalize emails than custom coding every single email design. Using dynamic content tailored to individual preferences or location-based personalization can be extremely effective, but it’s more technically challenging than classic segmentation or subject line personalization.
This is where AI can really shine. You’re already collecting mountains of data about your subscribers—harnessing artificial intelligence to pull that data together can offer more effective opportunities for dynamic, personalized content that converts.
Thamima Christensen, Head of Product for Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation at Oracle says, “Many brands collect vast amounts of customer data, but without a centralized data strategy and real-time activation, that data often sits unused. Integrating AI-driven segmentation and automation can bridge that gap and turn data into meaningful customer interactions.”
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5. Speed up feedback and approvals with AI
Teams consistently report that the most time consuming part of sending an email is the feedback and approvals stage of the send. Anyone who has ever tried to get an email out the door and needs to get approval from multiple stakeholders can relate.
It goes something like this: You send a test email and forward it to the group who needs to review it. You think you’re asking for a last pass at grammar edits to give you some peace of mind. Inevitably someone in the reviewing group takes that moment to question the approach, the image, the call-to-action (CTA) button color, the audience—or even the whole idea. (Note to marketing leaders here: let’s either empower our teams to own the final product or be timely in our feedback.)
How can we speed this up? We recommend taking an Agile approach, a strong creative brief, and very defined roles within the proofing stage. (And Litmus Proof takes those email threads out of rotation altogether.)
Is AI going to have an impact on this? We’d love it to—but a human touch is crucial at this final stage. To ensure the multitude of boxes are checked correctly for the perfect email send, humans need to be involved in this process.
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6. Analyze your performance with AI
So much of the hype with AI is about content creation and copy…when the best use of AI is still in the land of numbers. Many analytics tools (like Litmus Analytics and Validity Everest) include recommendation engines (sometimes with AI, sometimes without) that can offer next steps based on your current performance. At least 41% of companies are using AI-driven analytics in some form, according to our State of Email report.
Understanding the huge amount of data that email marketing creates will make your future campaigns more tailored and interesting to your subscribers. The most common use case is basic segmentation and targeting, followed by automated preference optimizations such as email send time (34%), advanced behavioral predictive modeling based on customer behavior (32%), customer journey mapping (30%), and churn/retention prediction (22%).
Predictive analytics and recommendation engines give you a much clearer picture of what your data means for your email strategy and equip you with better evidence to bring to your larger marketing team about next steps. The data shows that companies using AI outperform companies that don’t and also have a clearer sense of ROI generated from email.
AI in email marketing: A summary
Generative AI gets all the hype, but much of the success of AI in email marketing comes from other types of AI, like reactive recommendation engines.
| Email workflow stage | Challenges | How to use AI | What humans should still do | How Litmus and Validity can help |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Email Strategy | Pulling data from disparate sources into one place. | Tailoring your strategy to your audience using data from a wide variety of sources. | Use AI recommendations to think more deeply and creatively about delivering high-performing email to your subscribers. | Validity BriteVerify provides secure, scalable contact validation so you can easily build and maintain an actionable database. |
| Content creation | Doing more with less. | Generate copy and images quickly with generative AI. | Edit, edit, and edit. | Litmus Personalize makes it easy to incorporate dynamic personalized content into your emails. |
| Coding | Handling finicky email clients and requirements across dozens of devices. | Create a code snippet library to templatize your designs in a flexible way. | Test your emails with a human eye. | Litmus Guardian monitors your emails and flags any issues. Plus, Litmus Previews helps you QA before you hit send. |
| Feedback and approvals | The constant back-and-forth with stakeholders. | Not yet! | Take an agile approach with a strong creative brief. | Litmus Proof helps you skip that back-and-forth with email. |
| Analysis | Figuring out what action to take from your performance data. | Run analyses across your marketing lifecycle and offer recommendations. | Filter those recommendations through what makes sense for your business. | Litmus Analytics offers recommendations based on your current performance. |
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What’s next for email marketers?
Do we need AI? The email workflow is complex and nuanced. Everyone does email differently.
Yet, there are commonalities in how we do email that could be made better, easier, and less stressful with some help. It’s a real learning curve, but 29% of marketers believe that AI-driven content generation and analytics will be the biggest change in email marketing this year…maybe even this decade.
Most marketers plan to use AI to augment human work—70% say that up to half of their email marketing operations will be AI-driven by the end of 2026, while another 18% predict that 50-75% of their email marketing will be AI-driven.
At Litmus, we’re all about testing, and so that’s exactly how we’re approaching incorporating AI into our email workflow.
AI isn’t coming to replace you—especially because it hasn’t solved all of our email marketing challenges yet. But one thing is clear: the shift in how email is done has already begun, and marketers who understand how to work alongside it will have an advantage.
We envision a world where apps are infinitely more helpful, guiding you through natural language processing to solve why emails aren’t showing up with the design you perfected. There’s so much potential to explore with AI and we can’t wait to hear more from email geeks as they find great prompts and applications that send more personalized, relevant emails to their subscribers.
But in the meantime, with complex emails that include high levels of personalization or live content, you’ll want a set of human eyes testing every facet of your emails to ensure you never send a broken email. At Litmus, we’re continuing to explore and support this evolving space—and we’re excited to help you do the same.
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