A new breed of marketing automation is on the horizon — one that’s built around artificial intelligence.
It’s no secret that marketing automation has advanced significantly in recent years, but it’s about to get a whole lot better. AI is the next frontier for marketing automation, and it promises to revolutionize further the way marketers conduct their business. Let’s go over how AI is poised to alter the face of modern marketing.
But first, a little back story.
The rise of marketing automation
Nowadays, organizations large and small struggle to manage their marketing efforts. Unfortunately, these efforts are often hampered by resource limitations and bungling human errors. Especially when the cost of each mishap can amount to thousands of dollars.
Luckily, marketing automation has taken on the burden of mitigating those risks. Thereby ensuring your marketing campaigns reach their optimal potential.
AI-enhanced marketing automation
Marketing automation tools are highly capable of performing tasks that would otherwise require manpower. But when it’s combined with AI, marketing automation takes on a whole new meaning. It enables you to:
- Maximize marketing efficiency to increase opportunities for business growth.
- Get faster access to real data insights to create superior customer experiences.
- Improve relevance and boost marketing performance.
- Generate greater customer value.
The consequence of this merger is a powerful marketing system that can get close to what a human could do but without human intervention. Using AI-enhanced marketing automation, you’re able to reach your target audience more effectively and efficiently than ever before.
Impact of AI-powered marketing automation
Just like how a learning organization uses past experiences to learn and adapt to environmental uncertainties, AI tools keep on learning from customer data and behavior patterns to improve the accuracy of its future outcomes. It is this slice of data-driven insights that makes AI-enhanced automation platforms a cut above the rest. While many are still trying to wrap their heads around the idea of AI, its impact on business is already being felt. Here are some of the key bearings to consider:
1. Improving lead scoring
There is no point in allocating expensive resources toward low-quality leads that will never convert into customers. That’s why AI-powered predictive lead scoring lets you spot and prioritize your hottest leads.
AI will help you filter the sea of customer data to squeeze out potential clients who have demonstrated traits that correlate with high customer value. Result? A highly-qualified, ready-to-go lead pool that’s worth pursuing.
An example of a platform that uses AI-enhanced lead scoring to aid marketing reps is Pardot’s Einstein Behavior Scoring tool.
Unlike other lead scoring tools, it doesn’t simply grade prospects based on the amount of data they provide or how often they respond. Instead, it leverages the power of AI and machine learning to reveal which leads are most likely to buy something by analyzing behavioral data points that speak to a user’s propensity to purchase.
2. Providing a basis for more quality data collection and real-time persona creation
AI-enhanced marketing automation tools offer an unrestricted ability to collect data from every probable source. Obtaining data in this way allows you to pinpoint:
- what it is that attracts your prospects to your business
- what keeps them coming back for more
This data can be used to define more specific and meticulous customer personas. And since they are built on real and observable data, these personas are far more actionable for marketing campaigns.
3. Delivering hyper-personalized customer experiences
The biggest perk of AI is its ability to offer real-time personalization. AI-based automation tools have the ability to make quick work of customer data and assist marketers in delivering personalized experiences.
Because of their scale and speed, AI models can adjust their behavior for each customer. That means companies can quickly establish the best and most tailored approach for each prospect. This is especially useful when making real-time product recommendations based on a user’s previous experiences. Think Amazon’s product suggestions or Spotify’s audio recommendations.
You will likely find AI-enhanced automation technology to be quite helpful in the dissemination of your marketing messages as well, particularly when it comes to delivering marketing messages in a way that users will appreciate.
AI can help you see where your audience is at right now and understand what they need to hear from you. It starts with some basic segmentation of your audience. This data is then processed through a few smart filters to narrow down who you should reach out to and how. This guides you away from generic, irrelevant marketing messages and towards a one-to-one communication strategy. By doing so, you can tailor every outreach to the individual receiving it.
To illustrate just how potent AI-crafted personalized messages are, let’s take a look at an example from one of Amplero’s campaigns. Their client, PetSmart, wanted to use AI to identify relevant micro-segments and boost their email campaigns.
The company’s tweak was simple. An AI algorithm that first classified prospects into relevant micro-segments. It then served them with customized products and deals through email. This AI-driven personalization reportedly led to an increase in PetSmart’s open rates.
4. Speeding up response times
Acknowledging a customer service query is key to a positive customer experience, as is responding as soon as possible. In fact, 90% of customers rate “immediate” response to customer service queries as important or very important. That’s a quick win for you since AI has the potential to cut response time by a huge margin.
AI-integrated marketing automation platforms enable you to reply to customer inquiries with personalized emails in less than no time. As a result, the response time is reduced proportionally.
Whatever the opportunity may be, it can be capitalized on almost instantly, thanks to AI’s unmatchable speed. Best of all, it can work across multiple digital channels with seamless consistency. So, you will never have to worry about your customer getting frustrated by your company’s lack of response.
5. Making content ideation and curation easy
You could rely on your gut instinct to come up with content topics, but why not let technology figure it out for you? Not only can it provide faster results, but it can also provide deeper customer persona insights.
The perfect content discovery tool should be able to assess the audience you’re going after and spit out a list of ideas while also providing a solid framework for tracking the effectiveness of those ideas. A solution like Curata is apt for such applications.
It uses AI to categorize the most relevant and popular options for a company’s audience. It also ensures that you’re using the right type of content to achieve your goals.
AI also helps craft content to match each individual user’s preferences. It feeds on previously gathered data and offers customers more of what they enjoy. This makes the users more inclined to stick around. Netflix’s recommendation engine is a great example here. The streaming giant has been pushing technological boundaries with its AI-based recommendation system, which rivals those found in the world’s best retail companies.
Another example is Encharge’s Magic Writer tool. It’s the first AI content creation tool built right inside of a marketing automation platform. Based on the GPT3 technology (developed by OpenAI — the company co-founded by Elon Musk), the Magic Writer can create unique subject lines, email outline ideas, and even write whole emails for you in a matter of clicks.
Give the Magic Writer a go by signing up for a 14-day free trial for Encharge.
Or, if you are not ready to try the Magic Writer yet, make sure to check out our Free AI Email Subject Line Generator, which is based on the same technology. It doesn’t require email signup!
AI will take the power of marketing automation up to 11
The combination of marketing automation and AI is already changing the way businesses are run, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. The next-gen marketing automation platforms will be moving away from a “traditional robotic” approach to a more “humanized robotic” one. Ironically enough. These platforms promise improved marketing strategies by meeting the shape-shifting demands in real-time.
While integrating AI with automation can help your business seize tomorrow’s opportunities, your true success will hinge on how well prepared you are when you need it.
