This article is part of our unPredictions series — no guesswork, no lofty trends, just real commerce marketing priorities to help you drive customer engagement and increase growth and revenue in 2022.
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AI is here to stay. Marketers have to adapt sooner than later because AI systems will become more integral to the role as time ticks on. While some marketers succumb to the stories of fear surrounding the technology, others embrace it. It’s time to learn to partner with AI and let it help (not hurt) our organizations.
AI empowers marketing teams to execute on intelligent personalization, which requires advanced segmentation based on behavior and purchase history, as well as fully unified data sets. It also helps to deliver personalized content in real time, at the exact moment it will make the most impact on the customer.
With so much that AI does, and can do, there’s one thing we want to make clear right now: AI won’t take roles on your marketing team… in fact, it will create them.
How AI Adds Value to Marketing Teams
Imagine trying to do intelligent, real-time personalization with the limited manpower you have at your disposal. To do as a human what a machine could do in a fraction of the time and cost, you’d have to:
- Arrive at work early to analyze each and every customer segment and then identify which ones you should prioritize that day, week, and year
- Stay up all night, plied with caffeine, to sift through endless amounts of data and find any potential sales opportunities
- Memorize the purchase and behavior history of all your customers so you’ll always know the perfect content to send, when to send it, and what your customers will want next
- Repeat this over and over and over again, at any scale
- Bring donuts into the office to share with your team
Clearly, no human can do all those things. And even if there were such a person, let’s be honest — you couldn’t afford them (because they would be the most in-demand marketer on the planet).
But hope is not lost! You can find this team member in the form of technology.
Artificial Intelligence is the home-run hire, the team member you desperately need to enhance your marketing, make better strategic decisions, and step into the realm of intelligent personalization. AI delivers sophisticated, 1:1 engagements, in real-time, at scale.
Here’s 4 big ways AI will add value to your organization.
AI Will Do the Hard Work for You
AI can handle the “heavy lifting” that stands between your marketing team and true 1:1 personalization. You can lean on AI to do the hard work of advanced, proactive segmentation – analyzing your customer data for sales opportunities and scaling your
personalized marketing.
When you add AI to the marketing mix, it’s like adding the following pivotal
team members:
- Customer Data Genius. Organizational silos are the enemy of a high-performing marketing team. Having to go to IT and BI teams to get the data and insights you need to make informed decisions will slow you down. When you have your data consolidated, AI can rapidly analyze and discern key segments and patterns in your customer data and lead you to where your next move should be. 94% of marketers see using AI to segment data as an important opportunity to save time, according to a study we did.
- Segmentation Guru. With AI, you’ll never doubt which segments you’re engaging, or which content they are receiving. AI finds and identifies the right customer segments to engage based on where those customers are at in their lifecycle. The tech will ensure those segments receive the right message to move that customer further along their journey with your brand.
- Real-Time Marketer. Message, channel, timing, execution — AI has all these critical considerations under its figurative thumb. AI handles all of this, making sure each customer receives individualized engagements at the most impactful moment. This ensures you can easily scale real-time personalization consistently across channels, no matter the size of your customer database or breadth of channel.
Make Informed Decisions, Fast, Using Predictive AI
AI is so effective at analyzing data that it can see patterns that humans might miss. In essence, it essentially acts as a customer behavior fortune teller.
AI also removes a lot of the uncertainty and guesswork that surround marketing, especially when it comes to predicting your customer’s actions. The tech can predict which customers are likely to buy or convert, remain inactive, or defect. That way, you never miss an opportunity to convert interested customers, or engage at-risk buyers before they leave your brand for good.
When you incorporate AI into the mix, your marketing goes from reactive to proactive. Not only is this beneficial for how you’re engaging your customers, it improves your ability to drive revenue.
Giving your customers what they want before they even know they want it establishes you as the brand that understands them best, that they can rely on and trust. AI also gives you the ability to accurately predict overall campaign performance, which means you can continually optimize your marketing efforts to achieve your goals and objectives faster.
Putting it into Action
The role of the marketer is ever evolving, and the use of AI is just another tool in the toolbox that we can use to help build out a robust library of content that will engage customers.
While it may seem like AI will do all of the work, it is not quite the case. AI should be seen more as a precision tool that can help us deliver the most relevant content at the best time.
The needs of a modern day marketing team are constantly changing, and the roles and skills these teams need to function effectively should be regularly evaluated.
With the ever-expanding list of technologies (like AI), channels, and data integrations, it’s important that the teams are regularly training and growing their skillset to use these modern digital amenities to the fullest.
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