Today's customers are increasingly responsive to marketing content that is personalised, highly relevant and speaks to them at the right time. The latest marketing platforms using Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help you achieve these goals.

Digital advancements and the incorporation of AI into mainstream marketing tools, means that it is now within reach of most businesses to transform interactions with customers.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

According to marketing personalisation platform Emarsys, ‘Artificial intelligence [marketing] is a method of leveraging customer data and AI concepts like machine learning to anticipate your customer’s next move and improve the customer journey’.

What this means is using insights into your customers to be smarter about how and when you communicate to boost campaign performance.

Technology advances increase personalisation opportunities

A Brightedge survey showed that 29% of marketers view personalisation and 26% AI as the big trends in content marketing. It is clear that businesses have become more receptive to the adoption of AI in how they engage and communicate with their target audience.

Personalisation has been around for decades, but it can now go further than ever before. These days, technology platforms combine elements of AI but also business intelligence, machine learning and cognitive computing.

Don’t worry if this seems like technical jargon – these phrases all relate to how computers can analyse and process data, to draw actionable conclusions about future customer behaviour.
 

Read more: How subscriptions can add value to your business


How to introduce personalisation

A good starting point for using AI and personalisation is in email marketing. Building and maintaining a list of your customer and prospect email addresses is a core marketing activity that supports good email marketing. Don’t forget that the data must follow GDPR regulations, i.e. you must have the permission of those on your list to contact them.

Once you have your list, you can use the AI features that are built into email platforms like Mailchimp and Constant Contact to optimise different stages of the email marketing lifecycle aimed at increasing audience interactions with your content.

Data is important

Businesses can collect valuable marketing data by asking subscribers to indicate preferences when they place an order and capture additional information through online forms, face to face sales interactions and other customer data inputs.

AI helps you to analyse customer behaviour and interests to generate insights that make it possible to create tailored emails for each of your subscribers. If you can create personalised emails at scale that appear to be from a real person, then you are more likely to be successful.

Targeting and segmentation

Segmenting customers into groups that share specific characteristics allows you to start making more relevant individual offers. Today, customers expect high levels of personalisation, which can only be accomplished with detailed segmentation and AI helps you to achieve this.

AI can identify purchase patterns and subscriber behaviour from your data to dynamically segment your subscribers into lists much faster than ever before. This can be simple – age and gender – or more complex such as different buying personas.

Optimised subject line and body copy

You only have a few seconds for your marketing email to catch the attention of the reader. AI uses data-driven insights from analytics and past campaign history to determine which subject lines and email content will be most likely to generate a response.

Even a small increase in the response rate can vastly improve the efficiency of your marketing campaigns.

Schedule for success

This is a proven technique where the email marketing platform uses AI to calculate an optimum time to send your email based partly on your subscribers’ past interactions with your emails.

This is really powerful because every subscriber list is different and will have its own characteristics. Depending on your product and customer profile, the best time to send your emails will vary, so this feature takes the guesswork out.

Product recommendations

Sending tailor-made product and service recommendation emails to your subscribers has been shown to boost customer loyalty and improve engagement and conversion.

AI can automatically track purchase and browsing behaviour, interest levels, and online activity to create real-time personalised product recommendations that can be sent by email, or dynamically displayed online as the customer is browsing your website.

Chatbots

A chatbot is a type of software that uses AI to chat with a user using conversational English. The AI enables the chatbot to understand words and phrases such as ‘how do I find out what your shipping costs are?’.

Chatbots can deliver personalised responses and improve customer interactions over time. They are fast becoming the new ‘must have’ in online marketing, with some experts claiming that ‘a website without a live chatbot is like a shop without an assistant’.

Website landing pages

AI has a massive role to play with how websites can increase usability and improve user experience. AI can determine what content and images will generate the best response. Browse any Amazon product page, and you’ll see several personalised recommendations.

Conclusion

The use of AI in marketing is continually expanding and improving. It can take your digital marketing to the next level, boosting the performance of your campaigns, Return on Investment and making your customer interactions more intuitive.

By improving marketing efficiency, AI also drives cost-effectiveness and for many organisations, with comparatively little effort. It really has the potential to help your marketing stay relevant and one step ahead of your competition.


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