How AI Brings a Positive Change to Marketing Automation
AI is usually the last missing piece of the puzzle when it comes to a will-rounded marketing automation implementation.
Even after its growing popularity over the past decade, marketing automation by most brands is still devoid of the all important ‘human touch’. Most of the communication that we receive from various brands still feels machine-like. But, with the advent of AI technologies and machine learning, things have slowly started to change.
AI has brought in tech like predictive analysis, cognitive filtering and semantic analysis which improve the performance of marketing automation.
In this article, I’m going to explain how AI can impart a positive change on traditional marketing automation.
Related read: How Digital Marketers can use Cognitive Marketing
Rule based Settings don’t cut it
Most marketing automation softwares today operate primarily based on the rules set by the marketers. These rules are based on analysis of their user base and their online behavior; like their browsing habits, how they interact with your emails, push notifications, chat messages etc
However this is not the most effective way of setting your marketing automation flow, as it requires a lot of manual input and constant monitoring.To make the task easier and to keep the automation relatively human intervention free, one can use an AI based marketing automation platform. AI can help monitor user activity better and implement changes on the fly when needed.
AI helps you understand your customers better
The success of marketing automation is highly dependent on the user data that is collected. Here are some of the most important user data pointers that need to be collected:
- Online user behavior – Product usage and website browsing behavior
- Social Media activity
- Email and Mobile usage behavior
- Product interests
- Purchase History
And more.
Important information like this used to be fed into the traditional marketing automation services manually or through tedious rules set up by marketers.
On the other hand, AI based marketing automation platforms can be set to fetch this data easily while setting them up.
Once set up, AI will keep a close watch on all the interactions that take place between you and your customers. And all the data gathered from these interactions are pulled in and combined with the user profile data to keep a detailed account of every customer.
A MUST READ: The state of AI powered email marketing in 2017 – Comprehensive report based on the analysis of over 230 million emails sent using AI personalization
Customer segmentation like you have never seen before
All of this data is useless if you can’t leverage it to your advantage. AI can come to your rescue here. AI engines are capable of segmenting this data into intuitive customer segments. For example, an AI engine can help an eCommerce brand by segmenting its users based on their recent purchase, purchase cycle, product interests, browsing activity and more. Using these segments it can deliver a complete personalized 1:1 communication to the customers.
Having a properly segmented customer list opens the door for an intuitive digital experience that you can provide to your prospects and customers.
AI will completely change Digital Experience for your customers
Using the expansive user data that is collected (as explained in the previous 2 pointers) , here’s how AI based automation can give a WOW experience to your customers:.
- 1:1 Personlized Experience: From implementing simple personalization like – adding name tags to your emails’ subject lines to more complex ones like sending out a personalized “Things you might like” email, AI can help you personalize each and every aspect of your customer communication. This in turn would lead to better engagement between you and your customers.
- Recommend Product and Content that your users find relevant: AI and Machine learning engines can continuously monitor user activity on your website and app. You can use this data to show specific product pages, blog posts etc that the users would find useful/interesting.. Check out how Amazon leverages user behavior data to provide product recommendations to its customers.
- Lead Nurturing: AI based marketing automation platforms can help in identifying prospects that need to be nurtured and educated to move them to the next step of your sales funnel. They can deliver messages to these prospects to educate them about your product. Such lead nurturing campaigns can also be custom designed for different types of prospects based on their online behavior!
Final Words
Have you ever tried implementing marketing automation for your business? If you already have implemented it, have you thought about leveraging AI to make it more effective? I’ve seen many marketers from SMEs hesitating to try out AI based automation because of the misconception that it can only be implemented by big corporations like Amazon, Google, Apple etc. But this is far from the truth. We at Boomtrain have many customers who fall into the SME bracket, utilizing our AI based automation platform. If you want to know how you can implement it for your business, you can talk to us by clicking here.
