This is the age of automation and artificial intelligence! Every organization, big and small, are implementing AI, machine learning and marketing automation into their functions. According to a study conducted by Emailmonday, on average, 51% of companies are currently using marketing automation. Companies using AI for sales were able to increase their leads by more than 50%, reduce call time by 60-70% and realize cost reductions of 40-60%, Harvard Business Review. AI-based marketing and content AI are the next big things in the marketing world. Here are some ways in which you can use AI for marketing automation, thereby streamlining your processes and reflecting high-profit figures.
1. Scaling your content – In today’s marketing world, with customers interacting with you across several channels, there is a rising need for content that is scalable. The problem of scalable content can be easily solved with the help of content AI. Competitive content AI, like the one provided by Marketo, can help you in delivering personalized and authentic content at scale – across email, web, social, mobile and ads. According to a study by Wunderman, 79% of customers only consider brands that show they understand and care about the individual customer. Content AI can help you leverage the best performing content for each type of audience. Content AI facilitates AI-based marketing by enabling a feature called predictive content, which helps in identifying and predicting content aligned with what your individual customers’ needs and wants. Offering the unique function of one-to-one personalization across channels brought to scale, content AI will first gather and tag all your content, before identifying and communicating the content which is best aligned with your leads. This is done across multiple channels like email, web, landing pages etc.
2. Email Marketing – With over 6.69 billion email accounts, a company cannot do without an effective email marketing strategy. Personalized email marketing campaigns can drive conversions and build meaningful relationships with your customers. While marketing automation can help you in customizing your emails, AI-based marketing can assist you in doing so from a grassroot level. An effective content AI like Marketo content AI can boost your email marketing efforts by predicting the best content for specific audiences and industries. How is this done? Content AI first automatically discovers all your content and tags the same based on predefined categories (industries, interests, actions etc). With a feature called “make predictive”, the emails that you design will then be sent to specific audiences with the predictive content which is aligned with the audience. AI-based marketing can also help you in performing critical functions like email performance analysis, segment identification and more. By automating such crucial functions, you can not only focus on other important activities but also track exactly what is and isn’t working. AI-based marketing can also automate your email responses. With this function, you can completely automate two-way conversations, until a lead is identified, when the conversation will be passed along to sales personnel.
3. Lead generation and nurturing – One of the major features of marketing automation is lead generation. Once leads are generated via landing pages and forms, customer profiling and segmentation is done to identify hot leads, after which lead nurturing tactics are implemented. AI-based marketing automation can help you in identifying high-quality leads, driving more conversions and sales. AI-based marketing compares the current customer base with would-be customers in order to generate a list of prospects which have high chances of conversion. Content AI can help you in designing lead nurture campaigns which are deeply personalized according to your buyer personas. For example, with content AI you can create customized call-to-action buttons which engage and motivate receivers to click. Additionally, using AI can provide support to marketing automation by automating the marketing-sales process, identifying customer pain points, automating the data collection process and nurturing leads faster. Effectively combining AI and marketing automation can guarantee that all your processes are functioning seamlessly and generating the required results.
4. Cross-Selling – Cross-selling to existing customers is much more cost-efficient than acquiring new customers. Major companies, like Amazon, Flipkart etc use cross-selling strategies to boost their sales figures. Content AI analyses the performance of your different content pieces for different audiences and machine learning algorithm learns which content and products work best for which person in real-time. Once you implement marketing automation into your organizational structure, you can easily track your customer’s purchase behaviour as well as their actions on your website. While marketing automation can help you in tracking customer activities, AI can help you in predicting whether a customer provides a cross-selling opportunity or not. Content AI uses all the customer data to calculate and predict whether the customer is a good candidate for cross-selling, and if yes, what additional products will satisfy his requirements. Mirantis, a B2B cloud computing services company used Marketo content AI across both web and email to identify and suggest cross-selling opportunities. As a result of this endeavour, they observed a 27% boost in views.
Using AI in your marketing automation tool adds an extra boost to the results generated by the latter. Content AI can help you in generating profit figures which are impossible to achieve with traditional marketing activities. Interested? Read on to know how you can use chatbots with marketing automation to boost your sales and profits.