How Can AI Help Your Marketing Automation Be More Intelligent?

Artificial Intelligence is labelled as the next digital frontier. AI is facilitating the rapid growth of marketing automation. Investments in marketing automation have grown vigorously. According to a Forrester report, spending on marketing automation technology is predicted to reach $25.1 billion annually by 2023. As the industry continues to spearhead growth, a lot of marketing automation is utilizing AI to improve marketing and sales performance.

AI integration is enabling marketers to increase sales by 52%. Furthermore, 82% of marketers have adopted AI because it has improved customer experience, efficiency, lead generation, and delivery of content. Email marketing, social media marketing, analytics, SEO, content creation, and other technologies are using AI to analyze vast amounts of consumer data and automate time-consuming repetitive tasks. 

In an age of intelligent marketing, AI-powered automation is enabling marketing leaders to efficiently capture, analyze, and segment customer data to personalize and guide the customer through their lifecycle. According to Gartner, 30% of companies worldwide will be using AI in at least one of their sales processes by 2020. Forrester predicts that by 2020, businesses with data-insights-driven teams will grab $1.2 trillion from peers without that culture. Accenture shared that AI will create $14 trillion of additional revenue and profitability will rise by 38% by 2035. As AI continues to become a mainstream marketing technology, profitability and scaling up in organizational operations will depend on how companies leverage AI and automation across all their departments.

The goals of using marketing automation

Marketers have stated the following as the most important objectives for implementing marketing automation-

• Optimizing productivity (43%)
• Increasing marketing ROI (41%)
• Improving campaign management (40%)
• Improving database quality (39%)
• Acquiring more customers (39%)
• Measuring performance (37%)
• Aligning Marketing and Sales (24%)

64% of e-commerce marketers say email marketing and marketing automation contributes to more sales. It has led to an increase in visitors, engagement and better insights into the target audience.

The benefits of AI deployment in marketing automation

Precision lead generation and nurturing- Successful lead generation relies on precise audience segmentation and targeting. AI-powered automation can quickly and accurately catalog quality leads through analysis of behavioral and other consumer data, and categorize them on the basis of their converting potential. This helps marketers enormously to create and deliver personalized content to their audiences. AI also gives recommendations for touchpoints that are most relevant to the specific customer which helps businesses to formulate an efficient lead nurture path for each lead. 

Content automation, personalization, and optimizing
Advancement in artificial intelligence has ushered in a new trend where Natural Language Generation (NLG) is being used increasingly to automatically generate blog posts and news stories from business and marketing data at scale. AI-generated graphs are helping marketers gain a birds-eye view of marketing campaigns, and enhancing their decision-making process. AI is always helping businesses to personalize content for different audiences to generate higher ROI. AI is driving the optimisation and personalization of both content and email marketing. AI is quickly becoming mainstream in the publishing industry.

Improved customer experience
AI is helping marketers to automate and personalize their content and communication to meet customers’ expectations. Tailored content elevates customer engagement and customer experience. Machine learning and NLG are being used to create relevant content that delivers unique messages to customers. AI-powered chatbots are also driving customer experience through their 24/7 availability to assist customers. In fact, 43% of millennials would consider paying a premium for a hybrid human-bot customer service channel. AI-powered marketing automation is helping businesses to improve the customer experience on a bigger scale.

Omnichannel approach
Adopting an omnichannel marketing strategy can help businesses to improve their digital reach. AI has the ability to identify and predict the preferred marketing channel for each lead. It can send relevant content to every lead through the most appropriate channels. As such AI is helping businesses deliver seamless omnichannel customer experience, thereby improving customer retention and loyalty.

Insightful data collection
AI-enhanced marketing automation is capable of gathering massive amounts of data from all possible sources. It can comb through volumes of unstructured data to produce insightful reports and recommendations. AI is able to work quickly and accurately, and delivers more specific results. 

Final Thoughts

AI technology is not going anywhere. AI-enhanced marketing automation can help marketers build more effective marketing strategies that generate higher ROI and growth. At Alkye, we help clients adopt marketing automation services to help them develop a unified brand experience to enhance customer engagement & retention.