Is Your Digital Marketing Strategy Ready for an AI Intervention?

So you’ve been using email marketing for a while now, but it seems like you’ve simply run out of ideas for your customer lifecycle campaigns. You’ve optimized your website, but you feel it customers need a little something more to get truly engaged. You’re looking for something that takes your digital marketing strategy to the next level. In your emails, on your website and to build a truly omni-channel experience that increases conversions.

Why Artificial Intelligence for Marketing?

Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and big data analytics have been around for a while in the B2B world. They help businesses take essential decisions and optimize their strategy and workflows, but how do you know if an artificial intelligence platform can help you build a more engaging, personal connection with customers – and improve your metrics?

We broke down the essential factors to consider when you are deciding whether your brand and website could use an AI intervention that takes your digital marketing strategy to the next level. Think of this as the essential checklist to gauge if your marketing plan is on track and ready for the next step up.

Index

• Content Production


• Metrics to Improve


• Segmentation


• Meta Tagging


• Marketing Automation: User Tracking and Rule Based Triggers


• What Is the Impact of an AI Platform on a Digital Marketing Strategy?

Content Production

If you’re already creating content for your website or brand, you should consider the results you are getting from your top-of-the-funnel to bottom-of-the-funnel content. Having an understanding of what your audience and customers find useful is one of the best ways to create more useful content and personalize it for every user.

Image: Brafton

When creating content, it is also important that your content is tagged and meta tagged right for SEO and for a machine learning product/algorithms to understand and work with. Check out Google’s Schema formats to really enhance your content tagging.

 

Back to top

 

Metrics to Improve

 

Chances are, if you’ve been publishing content, selling products online or generating conversions for your brand with your website – you have some essential metrics that you look at regularly. These could be as simple as open rates and click-thru rates. They could also be more complex, like which stage of your conversion funnel most users get stuck at. As revenue from advertisers continues to drop, publishers need to look at new ways to build revenue, and that starts with engagement. 

Image: Salesfusion

When it comes to eCommerce, building customer retention and loyalty is often a big challenge in a medium sized business. If you have a clear idea of what metrics are working and what you want to improve, now is a good time to talk to someone in charge of sales/customer success at an AI or machine learning platform to see how their solution can get those numbers up in your digital marketing strategy.

Back to top

 

Segmentation

Image: Infodiagram

You have a sizeable audience of subscribers and you’ve realised that one size does not fit everyone. Adding that small personal touch to an email is a great way to build relationships with individual customers. You’ve built segments according to geographies, gender, engagement levels and more to reach the right users with the right content, across your channels. If you haven’t done this yet, don’t worry. It doesn’t take long to set up segmentation with the right guidance from a customer success manager from the artificial intelligence powered marketing platform of your choice. Segmentation can go a long way to answer questions you have about your customers or subscribers, eventually strengthening your digital marketing strategy.

Back to top

 

Meta Tagging

Especially for brands with online stores and eCommerce platforms, the way you tag and describe the products in your inventory is hella important. Why? Because machines still can’t scan an image of your product and tell a customer what size, build, dimensions, stock and colours you have available. Clear tagging lets a machine learning platform understand what’s going on and makes it easier to recommend personalized products, content and brands to every customer.

 

When it comes to Media and Publishing, tagging helps an artificial intelligence platform understand your content better using natural language processing (NLP) this way you are providing context about a particular piece, that a machine can learn from. Tags in media and publishing can vary based on the subject of the article, the timeliness, the political stance, the popularity, geographical relevance and a whole lot more. Across industries, meta-tagging is an essential foundation of a robust digital marketing strategy.

Back to top

 

Marketing Automation: User Tracking and Rule Based Triggers

If you already doing all of the above and you already send automated emails to your customers based on their activities and behaviors, you should pat yourself on the back. Not bad! You’re quite a pro already. You could still use some help to optimize these campaigns though. Whether it is an abandoned cart campaign, a re-engagement campaign, or a reminder to a customer who is late on their bill payment – learning from every campaign and reiterating to get a better result is something that rule-based triggers just can’t do. But you’re in luck, because artificial intelligence platforms can.

Image: Act On

With an AI platform, you can add dynamic content, which is content that changes according to factors that you decide. These factors could be anything from a user’s location, an activity they performed on your website, a page they liked on facebook, a link they shared – the list is endless.

If you are in the online publishing industry, you can also personalize your emails for customers depending on the content they love to read, and recommend reads based on their interest areas. For an eCommerce platform, personalization in your emails and on your website helps you give customers more choices as they search for and narrow down what they plan to buy. This is a great way to showcase your inventory and increase sales.  

Back to top

 

What Is the Impact of an AI Platform on a Digital Marketing Strategy?

Companies that have implemented Artificial Intelligence platforms in their onsite and email marketing have seen dramatic changes in their engagement levels, and been able to scale up their content creation and marketing efforts too. The online publisher Yellowhammer News was able to personalize content for their email subscriber base of 100K with Boomtrain’s marketing solution. The travel and deals company Cheap Caribbean saw a 1.8X return on their investment in the Boomtrain artificial intelligence platform. The online laptop bag, surface and tablet case company Brenthaven increased revenue from their welcome email alone by 54%. All these are cases for how an artificial intelligence platform can work wonders for your digital marketing strategy with the right planning and execution.