Artificial Intelligence: Next Marketing Automation frontier?

In this era of digital world, consumer interact with the internet in almost every aspect of their journey in utilizing products and services. Different businesses often try to leverage the ever-growing data to make an impression on consumers by means of digital devices, website, email, social media and paid media. Although programming or querying data on consumers and products helps to identify relevant groups for outreach, but a system needs to address changing environment and should have ability to learn without manual intervention. If you are thinking how to use AI in your marketing initiatives. Then you are at the right place.

These changing environments certainly vary with industries, from finance to retail to service based within B2B and B2C space. With the pandemic, industries need to realize a different paradigm in digital innovation and gaining customer insights. As swiftly the daily consumer and investors are welcoming digital transformation it is dire need for marketers to capture and convert the leads at the same time build loyalty with consumers. Instore marketing ads, face to face selling investment portfolios or enticing to opening accredit card in branch is almost thing of the past and while moving digital it is absolutely essential to know who to reach out and when and why.

According to Salesforce’s research in State of Marketing, Marketers in India mentioned that Innovation is their top priority and raise customer journey analysis is one of top challenges.

Today Artificial Intelligence automates many of theoperational processes,although according to State Of marketing Technology Report from Walker Sands, 56% marketers think their companies can’t keep up with emerging marketing technologies. Multi-Channel communications are gaining popularity however email is still the strongest player in the game, and that’s why it is vital to eliminate repetitive and manual tasks within the engagement process and become one with data-driven approach. AI certainly gained popularity in recent years of self-driving cars, entertainment, manufacturing and ready to be baked into your marketing strategies as well. Here are the top 7 things AI allows to shape targeted marketing with better segmentation and automation.

1. Optimizing send times:

Email campaigns usually gets sent out in a blast however, how many of us have wondered seeing an email and not opening it at the moment it arrived? Since different people open email messages at different times it is essential to know the optimal schedule to send the message when there is higher probability of client looking at it. With predictive optimization not only email messages however in-app messaging, social and Push can delivery higher open and click through rates.

 

2. Target Audience Segmentation-

According to marketing evolution, $37 billion is wasted every year failing to engage right audience with an ad. Depending on what your company is offering there is always a broader audience and niche audience group.

In Broader a group of clients may be interested in getting a weekly ad newsletter however niche group could be always focused on either innovative wearable tech or a sport athlete in running shoes or sports gears. And these traits certainly change with the time, priorities and other factors. AI can detect such patterns as they emerge from one and traverse to other, where Predictive Models with machine learning can effectively segment the audience on the go in real time.

With Data driven and propensity models AI can eliminate the human bias such as Only kids and teenagers are interested in Video games.

Hence it enables to draw better decisions mush faster in addition to baseline segmentation of demographics, geographics and behavior. These new persona segments are now groups with niche target could deliver high conversion rate via engagement.

3. Choosing channel

With the ever-growing use of internet and multiple social platforms often it poses challenge to marketers of choosing right channel of establishing conversation with consumers and stay ahead of the competitors. Algorithms can better predict such scenarios on real-time basis as opposed to traditional ways of data analytics which could require significant time in implementation. AI baked in with machine learning can optimize email, mobile, SMS and social channel much efficiently creating a profile relationship with clients as well as increase in lead generation.retention and engagement.

4. Message fatigue

Too many marketing messages can certainly divert potential customer to your company’s opt out page or getting marked as spam. It hampers the brand reputation and in-turn reduces the loyalty. With AI predictive analytics prioritization allows campaigns to better associate right message to client rather than sending a generic occasional newsletter. AI helps control that information overload.

 

5. Personalization with AI:

Creating a personalized bond with building relationship between brand and consumer goes long way in loyalty. According to Salesforce, 94% of marketers in India believe personalization improves overall marketing efforts. Excellent example would be how Amazon shows relevant products you may have interest in next best possible way. In addition to using personalized preheader, subject lines, content tailored to individual need, algorithms utilize insights from past interactions, interests and recommends the next best offer or product. For example, in financial investing client spending long time on researching individual stocks, it might interest them to look at index fund as well which offers diversity. Companies often use personalization in their emails however AI delivers it at scale and creates a comprehensive omni-channel experience for users.

6. Conversational Marketing:

With effective use of Chatbots in customer service, companies can establish that one of one talk with consumers. Chatbots can jump from channel to channel as well as cross topics. Similar to live customer representative AI can delivery human like responses sensing customer’s emotions, solving customer problem and gathering key information at the same time at massive scale.

7. Insights and Analytics:

With insane amount to data collection every day, not all data is structuredand clean; manual data analysis and reporting isn’t the smartest way. Instead, a faster, smarter data projection technology can give 360-degree viewon consumer data and effectiveness of product or services. Consumer psychographics, lifestyle, values such metrics bring out crucial information. Natural language processing, text-based keyword extraction, sentiment analysis, emotional analysis help companies research about client’s insights and brand themes. Speech recognition, Video and Image analysis tells what is important for consumer and how much time is being spent on product search.

Enabling AI can take the marketing automation to next level in your marketing strategies helping Building trust overtime with clients and customer acquisition.

According to 2020 MIT technology review, it shows what percentage of different industries aspire to leverage AI in their businesses.

Orchestrating campaigns with integrated assortment of datasets, models, machine learning services can implement intelligent processes to achieve better ROI on digital marketing investments and improve customer journey via all channels and touchpoints.

Author:

Priyal Borole is Marketing Automation Expert. He is currently working as Lead Manager – Digital Marketing and Analytics for T. Rowe Price, a one of the top investment management firm worldwide. Priyal comes from database marketing with history in retail banking and insurance industries. He holds Masters from DePaul University, Chicago and Adobe certified expert.He has been working in Marketing Automation more than a decade and leveraging diverse tech stackto innovate and create omni-channel communications to build strong relations between the firm and its clients.

Disclaimer: No Deccan Chronicle journalist was involved in creating this content. The group also takes no responsibility for this content.