How does AI transform marketing?

Artificial intelligence has already entered many sectors and industries. Online marketing is no exception. Thanks to AI, marketing activities are faster and more effective. Let’s have a look at how this tremendous technology transforms digital marketing and how you can implement it in your strategy.

Artificial intelligence is a technology designed to help people execute relatively simple and repetitive tasks. As a result, we can save a lot of time and focus on more strategic questions and problems. Moreover, AI simply does many things better and quicker than human employees. All in all – you should be vitally interested in introducing AI-powered solutions and tools to your company.

And speaking of AI-powered tools, when it comes to marketing, there is quite a lot going on! Artificial intelligence has a lot to offer to the marketing world, especially in three major areas:

1. Conversational AI
2. Automation
3. Personalization

Let’s take a look at each of these areas and see how you can benefit from them.

Conversational AI

Here, we talk mainly about intelligent assistants – chatbots and voicebots. Their popularity has been skyrocketing for some time now. That’s because they are extremely useful. Smart assistants can deal with up to 70% of conversations with your customers!

Chatbots and voicebots come in handy concerning:

• Answering frequently asked questions
• Providing information about the order/delivery status
• Scheduling appointments
• Distributing promo codes and vouchers
• Collecting resumes from candidates and many more situations

Customers value intelligent assistants, especially when they don’t have a lot of time and need their answers quickly:

Image source: Gladly’s CX Report 2021

Every month there are more and more intelligent assistants out there, and estimations are their number has already exceeded 4 billion. That’s mostly because people quickly get used to them. According to Adweek, 65% of consumers feel comfortable handling an issue without a human agent.

Thanks to chatbots, your company can save a lot of time and money, provide users with quick 24/7 service, and increase customer experience (70% of millennials who talked to a chatbot at least once say they had a positive experience with them).

The list of chatbots’ capabilities is continually growing. Today, they can even help patients with dementia or depression. But when it comes to marketing, they can even help you gather and respond to leads, just like roof.ai, a real-estate chatbot, does:

Image source: Roof.ai

HOW TO IMPLEMENT A CHATBOT

How can you implement a chatbot in your company? In general, you have two options. You can decide to build a chatbot from scratch or use a ready-made solution. The first option is far more expensive and time-consuming. On the other hand, you are sure that the bot you get is fully tailored to your needs and expectations. Ready-made chatbots are available thanks to such platforms as ChatFuel. All you need to do is configure such a chatbot to work the way you want. In many instances, you don’t even need coding skills! The technology behind chatbots will continue to grow. Earlier this year, there was announced a new technology called Ivy.ai. It enables companies to benefit from chatbots that build and update themselves.

Automation

Welcome to our backyard! Automation is what we do here at iPresso, and this area of online marketing also frequently uses AI. Intelligent marketing tools help you execute your campaigns and achieve goals and KPIs without hassle. Today, the list of marketing tools that are based on some form of artificial intelligence is simply mind-boggling.

Today, there are intelligent marketing tools that help you:

• Write and edit content (Frase.io, Jasper.ai, Grammarly)
• Set optimal prices in your online store (Dealavo, Prisync)
• Send email campaigns and manage relations with customers (Optimove)
• Improve SEO of your website (Contadu)
• Analyze marketing data (Google Analytics, Albert.ai, Granify) 
• And many more!

Marketing automation is possible thanks to the vast amounts of data that we can use today (so-called data-driven marketing). Here, it is vital to mention one important technology, and that is machine learning. It’s an AI-related solution that’s based on a simple premise – the more data the algorithm has, the better it becomes. As a result, marketing tools that use ML are getting better and better over time.

As we mentioned earlier, marketing automation is where we shine. Take a look at the list of available features and ask us about the details!

Personalization

Personalization is simply a must-have solution in today’s marketing and e-commerce world. Personalization allows you to approach your customers more effectively, offer them tailored products and services, and build long-lasting relationships with them.

And be in no doubt, personalization is far more advanced than just putting the recipient’s first name in a newsletter. Advanced personalization engines analyze the behavior of each website visitor and compare it with other people of similar profiles to find patterns that can be used in product and content recommendations. In general, we can distinguish three basic personalization engines:

• Collaborative filtering: This type of recommendation engine focuses on the information gathered through the customers’ activity, behavior, likes, and preferences. Let’s use an example. If we have an online store for gamers and we have two customers interested in buying a new gaming laptop, and one of these customers is also interested in buying a gaming mouse, too, then it is likely that the other customer might want the same mouse as well. That’s how collaborative filtering works.
• Content-based filtering: Here, the engine is focused solely on one customer – it analyzes the type of products the customer is interested in and suggests items similar to the item which was viewed or already bought.
• The hybrid model: It simply combines the first two types.

Netflix is a perfect example of a company that mastered product recommendations. Netflix’s algorithms analyze the choices of a given person as well as other viewers with similar interests. That data is then used to generate accurate product recommendations. Such advanced personalization would have never been possible without artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Take a look at this short video to see how Netflix recommendations work:

Embedded video: 

Personalization is a technique that enables you to:

• Offer accurate product/service suggestions to your customers
• Create effective loyalty/VIP programs
• Recover abandoned carts
• Build a positive image of your business
• Enhance the quality of your marketing campaigns (e.g., email marketing, push notifications, text messages, etc.)

Interestingly, content personalization is the number one reason why US CMOs use AI in marketing, according to a survey by MarketingCharts.com:

Image source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2019/07/07/10-charts-that-will-change-your-perspective-of-ai-in-marketing/?sh=55962a092d03

At iPresso, we also offer product personalization! It’s a rather new service in our offer, so we encourage you to take a look at it: Recommendation frames.

To sum up, AI in marketing is a real game-changer. With this technology, you work more effectively, your campaigns are better tailored towards the needs of your customers, and you save a lot of time. So why wouldn’t you give AI a try?