AI Powered Marketing Automation
Many firms use marketing automation to simplify, automate, and measure marketing operations and workflows. According to an eConsultancy analysis, 53 per cent of B2B firms are now employing marketing automation technology, and 37 per cent intend to deploy it. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence (AI) is creating a name for itself in the sector. According to Forrester, 70% of organisations anticipate using AI over the next 12 months.
While merging marketing automation with AI appears to be a promising strategy to prepare your company for the future, you may have some concerns. What are some best practices to put in place? What are the advantages of employing AI in marketing automation? What effect will all of this have on future business opportunities?
In this post, we’ll discuss some benefits of combining marketing automation with artificial intelligence, best practices for doing so, and anticipated developments.
What is artificial intelligence (AI)?
Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the training of machines to think like humans to make choices or gain insights (AI). Machine Learning is the most well-known use of AI. However, it has many more specific applications across industries and academic fields.
Managing multichannel marketing campaigns, discovering new market groups, and optimising message delivery are common uses in marketing.
What is marketing automation?
The use of technical solutions to automate marketing activities and workflows is known as marketing automation (MA). Marketers use marketing automation to boost the effectiveness and success of their marketing plan. Often automated tasks include sending pre-scheduled campaigns through email, social media, and SMS channels. The ability to schedule multi-step programmes, also known as customer journeys, is a common feature of marketing automation software. This feature enables marketers to create a preset series of activities to be carried out in response to specific consumer behaviour. While some marketing automation systems are channel-specific, others are channel-agnostic, meaning they can automate across various marketing channels. Channel-specific solutions sometimes incorporate extra automatic capabilities, such as social listening notifications for those specialising in social media.
Benefits of AI-powered marketing automation
1. Increased Efficiency
Currently, many businesses must manually manage all of their marketing activities. Managing the marketing technology stack occasionally requires a substantial investment of resources. Marketing automation may lessen risks associated with a labour-intensive, manual process while accelerating time combined with AI.
2. Enhanced Relevance and Marketing Results
The customer will stop listening if the marketing message is irrelevant to the target group. The customer’s expectations are not met when a marketing message is not pertinent. On the other hand, combining AI with marketing automation can enable you to anticipate the perfect programmes for the right audiences. Enter your goals and let the integrated technologies take you from broad to specialised audiences.
3. Boost your capacity to promote business expansion.
The rising quantity and speed of data can overwhelm marketing. AI may be utilised with marketing automation to improve marketing’s ability to convert data into choices, meaningful interactions, and advantageous business outcomes.
Best practices for AI-powered marketing automation
Before attempting to combine marketing automation with AI, take into account the following advised practices:
1. Start modestly and put it to the test
It’s crucial to determine what suits you the best. Unfortunately, the industry is hyped up, and many suppliers underestimate what a regular organisation can do. Is it easy to use the technology? How does it connect with the current solutions in your company? Is the vendor advancing technology, or is it lagging?
2. Invest in people and procedures
AI does not suggest that humans will be replaced by robots or other technology. It involves individuals teaching devices how to work more effectively. Furthermore, a team, a strategy, and a technique are necessary for AI to succeed. Spend five to ten times as much money on technology.
3. Earlier Obtain Leadership Support
By doing so, silos may be broken down, and everyone can stay informed and participate in the projects. Establishing objectives and goals may be helped by getting the C-early suite’s support and commitment. Although many CEOs are excited about AI, you must ensure they know how it fits into a more effective marketing strategy and technology plan.
Best tools for AI-powered marketing automation
1. ChatBot
Whether through texting, social media, or other digital avenues, people now want to be able to interact with businesses on their terms, and they anticipate it happening quickly. A great way to automate this process is by making your business more approachable with chatbots.
An AI-powered tool called ChatBot may help marketers by generating and segmenting leads, responding to customer questions about products, and gathering customer contact information. It uses machine learning to evaluate user input and continually enhance performance and natural language processing to interpret human speech and give customised responses.
2. Rasa.io
To create targeted email campaigns, you most certainly already segment your lists if you’ve been doing email marketing for some time. Rasa.io, on the other hand, goes above and above with personalization.
This marketing automation system uses artificial intelligence to track each newsletter subscriber’s historical behaviour to anticipate which material will interest them individually.
3. Yotpo
Yotpo is a platform for user-generated marketing automation that uses AI and machine learning to analyse customer reviews to assist you in finding areas for improvement and making more intelligent business decisions.
It highlights the main topics consumers discuss with your products and their overall opinions. To increase sales, Yotpo collects crucial data from prior assessments and makes it available to new customers. Additionally, it makes it simple to gather and display customer reviews and ratings, show customer photos and videos, engage customers via SMS, and manage customer data.
Final words
The growth and overlap of so many technologies make the period we live in interesting. Although it is challenging to predict the direction our marketing technology industry will go, it is reasonable to believe that combining AI with marketing automation will help your company position itself for potential new business prospects.
