The way users search for information is changing in real time as adoption of ChatGPT and its competitors increases. While most marketers are focused on how this shift impacts organic and paid search strategies, there’s another channel you should be paying attention to: email marketing.

At DMi Partners, we’ve noticed that AI-driven search behaviors are creating ripple effects in the way users consume email. This might come as a surprise since email is one of the oldest and most evergreen digital marketing channels, but integrating these new behaviors into your email marketing campaigns can unlock significant benefits.

Here’s how you can adapt your email marketing to align with changing user behaviors driven by AI search.

1) Use AI to Generate More Content to Test

This isn’t a search behavior, exactly, but ChatGPT (the tool that launched the AI search era) is incredibly useful in helping our email team spin up variations of copy in subject lines, body copy, etc. The usual caveat that themes and original ideas come from humans applies here, but LLMs dramatically speed up the rate of iteration, which can have a material benefit for finding winning variations that lift open rates and click rates.

It is also important to note that you can compound the benefits by:

• Keeping an organized archive of your winning copy.
• Re-deploying similar copy and messaging for future campaigns

2) Align Email Intent with AI Search Behaviors

Whether the data is coming from traditional search or LLMs, SEO gives you real language from real users. You can see how they ask questions, the phrases they use, and what they care about right now. Bringing that intelligence into email copy and messaging makes emails feel more relevant and current.

To date, marketers are seeing that AI search queries tend to be more informational and educational than traditional SEO queries, which are more likely to result in clicks onto product pages.

That shift means brands need more top-of-funnel, helpful content, and email should match that tone for users coming in via AI-driven search pathways. AI search queries can also be extremely detailed and carry tons of nuance. If those nuances start appearing within different audience segments, targeted emails incorporating them (while having relatively small send groups) can register surprising engagement lift.

3) Leverage Search Trends to Inform Campaigns

Emerging trends (especially within LLM search) reveal what your audience is learning, questioning, and comparing. Email teams can use these signals to inform campaign themes, seasonal messaging, and when to lean into certain educational vs. promotional content.

4) Share Email Insights with Your Search Marketing Team

Right now, one of the most common questions brands have for their marketing teams or partners is how to get more AI search visibility. There are a lot of factors at play to get there, but don’t forget that email marketers gather rich behavioral data every day, learning:

• Which messages resonate
• Which CTAs work
• How preferences shift week to week

Most organizations don’t push those insights upstream into their organic strategy, whether it involves Google or LLM search or both. Closing that loop, particularly since email insights can be gleaned at the speed of a send and not organic indexing, can help brands stay ahead of the curve on content and positioning

Why Email Marketing Deserves More Attention

In my two-plus decades of running DMi Partners, email has long been the most undervalued channel (relative to the ROI it provides) we offer. Brands that come to us for growth strategies simply tend not to invest as much in things like automation and personalization as they could if they wanted to maximize performance.

Adapting email campaigns to fit changing user search is another initiative I think will take a long time to be broadly adopted; the brands that do will likely have a competitive edge for a while. If you’d like to work with a partner who’s finding that edge for clients across verticals, let us know at info@dmipartners.com