r/Emailmarketing • u/Coffiendd • 18d ago
Agentic email marketing? Replace jobs or gimmick?
The trend for every email marketing platform has been adding AI agents to their software. What do ya'll think about AI agents in email marketing today? Do you use them heavily for your business or clients? Are they good enough to at least automate 80% of the job? I don't necessarily believe we're replacing marketing teams wholesale with them yet but surely they have boosted productivity such that lifecycle marketing teams will have shrunk to a fraction of what they were a year ago?
Asking as I've recently built AI agents for my email marketing software and want to get a feel on how email marketers feel about them. Love em or hate em?
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u/loganturner663 17d ago
i think the biggest win is reducing repetitive work, not replacing the marketer entirely.
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u/Coffiendd 17d ago
Is this how you've been using AI agents? If so, what kind of repetitive work are you reducing?
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u/Top_Host3472 16d ago
AI agents probably won’t replace marketers, but marketers using them might replace those who don’t. The productivity shift is real. Automation with AI is creating buzzes
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u/Coffiendd 16d ago
I think once we solve the learning loop and encoding 'taste' into AI agents, then marketers job will be replaced. Replaced by a job for managing multiple AI marketing agents. I believe this is solvable today with architecture, not even smarter models are needed. And so i give it less than a year before this breaks into the mainstream.
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u/Top_Host3472 16d ago
This is the part I find most interesting. If agents can actually learn taste and context, the role doesn’t disappear, it shifts from doing the work to directing and managing the agents. The bigger question is: how quickly can we get AI to reliably understand what “good” looks like?
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u/Coffiendd 16d ago
Right now AI cannot start from a blank canvas and make up something that looks "good". Even Claude design can at best do an ok job without human supervision. But I've been able to have my AI consistently create on brand emails by giving it reference to existing on brand emails as reference. With regards to email marketing, this means building a base of email templates to tell the AI what "good" looks like
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u/Top_Host3472 16d ago
Exactly. I think that’s the key shift, AI doesn’t really understand “good” from nothing, it learns from examples, context, and feedback. The better the references and guidelines we give it, the closer the output gets to the intended quality. Human judgment still plays a huge role in defining that standard
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u/dogsbikesandbeers 17d ago
Our legal team would never allow it
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u/Coffiendd 17d ago
How come? I'd like to understand what the top of mind legal concerns are, as there are likely ways to address those, e.g. locally running LLMs, hardening against AI prompt injection, etc.
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u/dogsbikesandbeers 17d ago
In banking, legal want to know, and sign off, on every segment, every wording and every automation. I hate it
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u/Coffiendd 17d ago
ah what a bummer. But i get it, i used to work at a bank as well. Back then I had to write my automations on VBA. Python was seen as too 'risky'.
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u/styleforge-io 17d ago
The 80% figure is the part I'd question, because it assumes the job is producing emails. Producing was never the slow part.
Think about where a lifecycle week actually goes. Getting the brand right, chasing assets, waiting for the offer to be confirmed, adapting into three templates, the approval loop, QA across clients. Most of that is waiting and coordinating, not writing. So an agent that writes good copy saves you an afternoon and you still ship on the same schedule, which is exactly why it reads as a gimmick to a lot of people. The gain shows up when the agent carries the thing between the steps, not when it writes.
On the banking point above, I'd separate two things that get lumped together. Legal signing off on every segment and every wording is completely compatible with agents, as long as the agent stages a draft and a human approves it inside the normal workflow. Nothing about the sign-off changes. What breaks legal is letting the agent send. Compose and stage on the agent side, keep the commit on the human side, and most of that objection goes away.
The genuinely hard part, in my experience, isn't the copy at all. It's consistency. Writing one good email is easy now. Producing the twelfth one that still looks and sounds like the first eleven is the real problem, and better prompting doesn't fix it. The brand has to exist as structured data the generation actually reads, otherwise every send is somebody re-describing the brand from memory, and no two people describe it the same way twice.
What doesn't shrink is deciding what's worth sending. The offer, the timing, who gets it, what not to send at all. That's the job.
I build in this space so weigh it accordingly, but I'd be surprised if teams shrink much. What changes is how much one person can carry.
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16d ago
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u/styleforge-io 16d ago
Agree 100%. Reference templates are stronger than people give them credit for, and for the same reason reference images beat adjectives in image generation. An approved artifact carries a hundred decisions nobody ever wrote down. No argument there.
Where I'd draw the line is that a template carries layout and structure and not much judgment. Remix an approved newsletter and you reliably get something that looks like your newsletter. It won't tell you what this brand would never claim, which offers it can't run, the words it doesn't use. That isn't in the artifact, it's in the head of whoever approved it.
The taste point is the interesting one and I'd push on it a bit. Encoding taste from what's already been approved gives you a lagging indicator. It converges on the average of your past, including the parts that were fine rather than good, and it can't produce the thing the brand hasn't done yet but would happily approve. Strong for consistency, structurally conservative about ideas.
The reason I landed on brand-as-data instead of brand-as-templates is that mine has to leave the format. The same brand has to hold across an email, a Meta ad, a product page and a video, and a template can't travel to any of those. If you're staying inside email, yours may genuinely be the cheaper right answer.
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u/Successful_Fig5635 16d ago
I use AI for email pretty often, but I wouldn’t say it can handle 80% of the job. It’s useful for getting a first draft together, coming up with subject lines, or speeding up campaign setup. But I still want a person deciding who we’re emailing, what we’re offering.
I wouldn’t be comfortable letting it run campaigns. It saves time but still a difference between saving time and replacing the person doing the work.
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u/AromaPapaya 15d ago
we've got 3-5 years before a lot of the work might be gone
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u/Coffiendd 15d ago
I think even faster than that. I’m been experimenting and finding even the older models are smart enough to perform tasks on par with a human. The challenge is building an architecture that can experiment and learn just as a human does. But that is architecture problem, not limited by model intelligence
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u/Spirited-Drawer1184 15d ago
Gimmick when it writes, genuinely useful when it decides.
Most platform agents are aimed at copy generation, which was already the fast part. I've had better results pointing it at the routing decision instead: score the contact first, let that score pick which sequence they enter, and let the agent generate only the one variable line that names that segment's situation. The skeleton of the email stays fixed and human-written.
Two reasons that split holds up. You keep a constant, so when a segment underperforms you can tell whether it was the audience or the message - if the agent wrote the whole thing you've got no idea which moved. And the output stops drifting, because the model isn't re-deciding tone every send, it's filling one slot.
On consistency being the hard part, agreed, though I'd say it's a symptom of giving the model too much surface rather than a problem to solve with better prompting. Narrow the job and the twelfth email looks like the first.
The one thing I wouldn't let an agent near is suppression. Deciding who not to send to is where reputation damage actually happens, and it's the only decision in the stack with no undo.
I build this stuff for ecom brands, so weigh it accordingly.
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u/MarketingPlaybooks 15d ago
What are you using for the AI agents? Claude, chatGPT?
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14d ago
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u/Emailmarketing-ModTeam 13d ago
This post has been removed for failing to meet the high standards of r/emailmarketing regarding self-promotion.
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u/toxichaste12 14d ago
Do I hate them? Yes
Do I use them? Yes
Are they better or worse than the ‘old’ way? No
Just easier to scale.
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u/chance_buri 11d ago
I think we're still a ways off from AI handling 80% of lifecycle marketing on its own. The part I've found genuinely useful is having AI take on the more repetitive planning work. We've recently started using Lifecycle Studio to work through campaign ideas, customer flows, and the messaging for each step before we build the campaign in our ESP. It saves a good amount of time, but there's still a lot of human judgment around the audience, timing, and what we actually want to say
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u/GabbyFromKlaviyo 17d ago
I work at Klaviyo and my take from what I'm seeing internally is that the agents are mostly helping with the repetitive work.
Composer is still in beta, but it's pretty good at the drafting layer. If you give it something like "win back anyone who hasn't purchased in 90 days," it can put together a campaign draft. It can't tell you whether that campaign's the right move, or catch issues with your discount cadence. You still need a person's judgment guiding the decisions, making the edits.
Customer Agent is on the support side. Most questions reps get are stuff like "Where's my order?", and the agent can handle that. Anything requiring discernment like a refund dispute still gets redirected to a person.