Artificial Intelligence Powered Marketing Automation for Modern Marketers

Marketing automation has been around for a few years, helping marketers save time in deploying campaigns manually and spend more time developing effective strategies. And like any other technology, marketing automation, too, is evolving with time.

Marketing automation today is the most sophisticated — capable of understanding a user’s behavior and sending relevant communication via an appropriate channel.

This modern marketing automation platform works on top an Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine. The AI engine powers the marketing automation platform with smart decision-making, providing the who, what, when, and how of communication.

In this post, we’ll delve deeper and see how the modern, AI-powered marketing automation actually works.

The post covers the following aspects of a modern marketing engine:

• Responding to User Behavior


• Providing an Omnichannel Reach


• Facilitating a Personalized User Experience


• Communicating at the “Right” Time


• Offering a Unified View of Each User

Let’s begin.

Responding to User Behavior

The traditional marketing automation services basically worked on an email list that marketers fed to the platform. It allowed marketers to segment users on the basis of certain demographic features such as age, gender, location, etc., and communicate accordingly. The modern marketing automation systems, however, goes way beyond that.

The modern marketing automation platform is not limited to just emails and provides access to more channels (more on this in the next section). Further, marketers can now move on from basic segmentation and send communications to users triggered by their actions. The platform can track every action that a user takes across channels — website, mobile, email, etc. — and send relevant communication accordingly.

For instance, Boomtrain tracks user actions as activities and behaviors. An activity can vary from simple page views to more complex ones such as shopping cart updates. Behaviors, on the other hand, are a combination of activities — e.g., when a user views an item multiple times but never purchases. Talking to users during these activities — when they are the most engaged — promises to deliver marketers a higher rate of conversions.

 

Bonus: Marketing Automation Tactics that will Boost Your Sales

Providing an Omnichannel Reach

Marketing automation used to be synonymous with emails just a few years ago. Now, a modern marketing automation platform can allow marketers to reach users via a range of channels — push, messenger, SMS, in-app, IVR, and emails.

It is also the need of the hour, with millennials using multiple channels to connect with their favorite brands. Often, there is no single best channel — but a combination of channels — to reach your users in today’s digital era.

A truly smart marketing automation platform communicates with users through their preferred choice of channels. For instance, with Boomtrain, marketers can choose to send a message to users through the channel in which they have the highest engagement. This is what modern day marketers call Omnichannel Marketing Automation.

In short, the modern marketing automation helps marketers define dynamic segments and schedule triggered messages across email, push and SMS. They can chat live with users at precisely the right moment, build dynamic web and mobile app content that is individually personalized.

Must-Read: 6 Methods to Leverage Mobile Push to Drive User Engagement

Facilitating a Personalized User Experience

The traditional marketing platform allowed marketers to personalize user communication at a basic level; it was mostly limited to adding a user’s name at the start of the communication.

The modern, AI-powered marketing automation has arguably brought a revolution in personalization. Using AI to track and understand preferences and interests of users, the platform is able to curate highly individualized content for each user — and send over users’ preferred channel(s).

For example, a Media or Publishing brand can learn the kinds of articles that a user likes. The brand can then send recommendations to the user based on that. Similarly, eCommerce brands can learn users’ preferences based on products/items they view. eCommerce brands can send personalized product recommendations to users and have a higher chance of effecting a purchase.

Many brands have already realized significant results. For instance, Distractify used Boomtrain to send automatically personalized email content to their subscribers. Distractify saw an increase in their click-to-open rate by 9%. UpOut, too, was able to grow its click-through rate threefold, using Boomtrain’s email personalization.

Communicating at the “Right” Time

As we’ve seen above, an AI-based marketing automation platform helps marketers determine the “what” (personalized content), “who” (per dynamic triggers) and “how” (via appropriate channels) of marketing communication. A truly smart marketing automation engine also helps marketers determine the “when” of sending out a communication.

Just like how users have different content interests, they have different preferred times of engaging with your messages. An AI-powered marketing engine can determine that, and send the message, say email, at the time which has the highest chance of engagement.

This feature in the Boomtrain Marketing Engine is known as Prime Time Messaging. Boomtrain’s Prime Time Messaging optimizes campaign delivery on an individual basis to drive deeper content engagement, product sales, or other conversion goals.

For example, if you schedule a broadcast email to your email list using Prime Time Messaging, your email list members will receive the email at a distinct time, personalized on the basis of their past engagement history.

Bonus Content: 5 Reasons You Need Omnichannel Marketing Automation

Offering a Unified View of Each User

A traditional marketing automation system kept your contacts — prospects, and customers — as just names and plain emails (with a few more basic data fields). Hence, the contact list could be segregated only into broad fundamental categories, not providing any valuable insights.

With the marketing automation platforms of today, your contacts are much more than just names and email addresses. The platforms can capture every contact’s (and even anonymous visitor’s) interaction with your brand, and build individual user graphs that incorporate behaviors, sentiments, and preferences to present a unified view of each customer.

The modern marketing platform allows you to segment users on the basis of dynamic attributes — relatively basic ones such as lifecycle stage status or advanced ones such as specific user activities and behaviors.

With Boomtrain Marketing Engine, for example, you can learn the entire activity history of a user. You can understand how certain users engage with your communication and resources, and find conversion leaks. You can also identify the fraction of users that respond the most/least to your emails or push notifications and communicate with them accordingly. In short, segregating users on the basis of their behavior is a cakewalk.

Wrapping Up

The modern marketing automation platform truly allows marketers to reach the right user through the right channel at the right time. Marketers can now deliver highly personalized communication to each user via their preferred channel. They can track every activity of a user and connect with them accordingly.

An AI-powered automation engine helps marketers spend more time thinking of ways to delight your users and less time deploying campaigns.

Watch Boomtrain in Action

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