- What is AI Marketing Automation?
- Benefits of AI in Marketing Automation
- Popular AI Marketing Automation Tools
- Keys to Successful AI Marketing Automation
Q: What is AI marketing automation?
A: AI marketing automation involves using artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to optimize and automate marketing tasks, enhancing personalization, efficiency, and overall campaign performance.
Artificial intelligence (AI) maintains a comfortable position as one of the most talked about top trending technologies of recent years.
Sure, it has been a prominent feature since the 1950s, but not with as much intensity and impact as it does today. The impact is so substantive across industries that one could say AI has its hands in every pie. And that’s only because we have found far too many use cases for the technology, especially in marketing.
From personalization and optimization to predictive analytics and automation, there are numerous applications of AI in marketing. Within any of these aspects, there’s enough to learn for a whole academic session.
Today, we’ll be focusing on AI in marketing automation.
What comes to mind when you think of the term “AI marketing automation”?
The marriage between AI and automation has birthed many things that are now commonplace. For starters, if you’ve ever communicated with a chatbot on a website or used a virtual assistant while shopping, you’ve experienced the power of AI marketing automation tools.
These AI automation tools, in their different forms and capabilities, are helping businesses enhance personalization, streamline processes, and optimize campaigns like never before.
And more businesses are quickly adopting automated marketing campaigns to boost their business growth strategies.
AI marketing automation creates a win-win situation between businesses and their target audience. Marketing becomes easier and more cost-effective for business owners and marketers, and the target audience has a more personalized experience.
It is no surprise that businesses are adopting AI in marketing automation at scale.
In fact, the global AI in marketing market is currently worth around USD 25 billion, up by USD 5 billion from 2023, and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 26.7% to reach USD 214 billion by 2033, according to a 2024 Market US report.
Tech giants like Intel Corporation and IBM Corporation recently launched advanced AI-powered tools for optimizing and automating marketing tasks and workflows, with more tools in the works.
Clearly, AI marketing automation is only getting started, and now is a great time for you to hop on the trend and refine your digital marketing strategies.
In this article, we’ll be taking a broad look at the benefits of AI marketing automation and the AI marketing automation tools that can help you start the journey.
But first, what is AI marketing automation, and how does it work?
Save Big! Virtual Office Business Address
Type your email address in the form below and we’ll send you a Promo Code
Use the Promo Code at checkout to Save at least $100 on your Virtual Office
What is AI Marketing Automation?
AI marketing automation is the application of artificial intelligence technologies, such as natural language processing and machine learning, in marketing processes to optimize and automate tasks, enhancing personalization, efficiency, and overall campaign performance.
Natural Language Processing in Marketing in Automation
The natural language processing (NLP) elements empower AI marketing automation tools with the capabilities to understand, interpret, generate, and manipulate human language.
Basically, the primary functions of NLP in automated marketing campaigns include text classification, speech recognition, natural language comprehension, and natural language generation.
Machine Learning in Marketing Automation
The machine learning elements empower AI marketing automation tools with the capabilities to automatically learn and adapt to situations without explicit instructions or other forms of human intervention.
Machine learning algorithms are able to do this by using statistical models to analyze current and historical data to draw useful and applicable insights and make predictions to improve campaign performance.
Essentially, machine learning algorithms learn from past campaign performances to continuously refine, optimize, and automatically execute routine marketing tasks, such as email campaigns, social media management, and ad campaign optimization.
Applications of AI in Marketing Automation
AI relies on NLP, machine learning, and other algorithms to analyze vast amounts of data, predict trends, personalize content, and automate tasks.
The mechanisms vary, depending on the process being automated.
For instance, in reviewing the role of natural language processing in marketing automation, you’d easily see how it fits well in generating personalized content that mimics those generated by humans.
Switch the lens to machine learning in marketing, and you’d see how it fits more perfectly with content distribution, ensuring that the right campaign message gets to the right audience at the right time.
Let’s have a more concise look at how AI marketing automation typically works:
- Enhanced data collection and predictive analytics: AI systems can automatically scan, collect, and segment data from various sources, including customer interactions, social media, website analytics, and other customer-facing channels. By pooling vast datasets into a central point, these AI marketing systems are able to efficiently analyze all relevant indicators and gain comprehensive insight into target audience behaviors and patterns and market trends. Consequently, AI empowers marketers and business owners with real-time insights into the performance of their marketing campaigns and target audience base. It also forecasts future trends based on the assessed data, enabling marketers to anticipate shifts in market trends and customer behavior and tailor marketing strategies to deliver personalized experiences.
- AI chatbots and virtual assistants: The modern customer wants your help, and they want it now. Unfortunately, it’s nearly humanly impossible to deliver timely and effective customer support 24/7, especially if you have a large customer base or you are in your peak season. Businesses use AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants to automate their customer support processes. These intelligent systems learn and employ the brand’s tone and messaging to respond to customer inquiries in real time—at any time. They are also useful for lead qualification.
- A/B testing: If you’ve ever done manual A/B testing, you’d most likely agree that they are quite a tedious, time-consuming chore. Today, businesses use AI’s machine learning algorithms to automatically analyze vast amounts of data to determine the most effective versions of marketing campaign processes based on identified patterns. One of the great things about AI-driven automated A/B testing is that it is a continuous process that doesn’t particularly require your oversight. The system learns to identify the best variations and automatically adapts relevant processes or channels to be the best fits, ensuring that your marketing strategies are up-to-date, adaptive, and responsive.
- User journey optimization: Building on AI’s enhanced data collection and predictive analytics capabilities, businesses employ AI automation in patterns and behavioral analysis of customer interactions. The results enable business owners and marketers to create seamless and personalized user journeys for various customer/audience segments. Relying on the outcomes of optimized A/B tests and real-time decision-making, AI automation tools go further to deliver personalized content to each customer based on their position in their journey, ensuring instant adjustments as the customer’s actions change.
- Social media management: This is one of the common applications of AI-driven marketing automation strategies. Marketers use AI automation tools to create hundreds of on-brand social media content, automate publication calendars, and engage social media followers, all with just a few clicks. This puts your social media marketing on autopilot while ensuring you have a solid digital presence.
There are endless applications of AI in marketing automation. The question is, what would you like to automate?
If you can think of it, there is probably an AI tool readily available for it.
From email campaigns and lead scoring to content personalization and targeting, there is no limit to what you can use AI to automate in your marketing strategies.
The baseline for most professional marketers is usually to employ AI automation tools to optimize and automate tasks that are time-consuming, repetitive, tedious, and cost-intensive.
Benefits of AI in Marketing Automation
Just as there are numerous applications of AI in marketing automation, there are equally numerous benefits of AI in marketing automation.
To be concise, we’ll address the benefits across four themes: predictive analytics, personalization, automation, and enhanced engagement.
Predictive Analytics
Predictive analytics might as well be the foundational superpower of AI in marketing automation. AI-driven predictive analytics allows for advanced analysis and reporting, providing market forecasts to help marketers optimize their marketing strategies accordingly.
The predictive capabilities of AI form the underlying basis for marketers to:
When done right, you can capitalize AI predictive analytics to future-proof your marketing strategies, ensuring that your campaigns are relevant and effective for the foreseeable future.
Salesforce Einstein is an ideal example of AI predictive analytics in marketing automation. With access to customer and company data, Einstein can make intelligent predictions that fuel customer engagement and team productivity through:
- Segment creation: Salesforce users employ Einstein to accurately determine or predict customer behaviors and segment the customer base based on shared traits.
- Customer journey optimization: Based on the predictions, the AI system can further customize and automate all aspects of customer engagement.
- Lead scoring: Marketers minimize resource wastage by using AI scoring to identify high-value customers and channel resources accordingly, based on levels of importance.
AI is your secret tool for knowing what customers need long before they are bothered enough to ask. This can keep you several steps ahead in your target market, bringing you closer to customers and boosting your ROI.
If you are bothered about the accuracy of AI predictive capabilities, it might help to know that 64% of consumers are more receptive and open to purchasing new products and services recommended by AI, according to a 2023 Capgemini Research Institute report.
Personalization
AI automation tools employ both predictive and generative abilities to identify consumer patterns. This helps to automatically create different styles of texts, videos, images, and other marketing materials personalized to aptly suit the preferences, behavior, and engagement patterns of a target consumer.
You can leverage AI to provide personalized support and enrich your customers’ experience with a more interactive and intelligent relationship with your support services.
For as many customers as there are in your database, AI can recognize every one of them as an individual with distinct behaviors and engagement patterns. This enables AI marketing automation tools to generate and distribute personalized content at scale.
When it comes to the benefits of AI marketing automation in personalizing campaign strategies, the rewards are quite extensive. There’s a lot that AI can automatically personalize, including:
- Send frequency
- Email send times and overall email automation
- Product, service, or content recommendations
- Ad targeting
- Event triggers (for dynamic content dissemination)
It’s important to know that AI doesn’t always work alone when personalizing customers’ experiences. AI-driven marketing tools can share customer insights with sales reps and support agents, equipping them with the information they need to personalize solutions based on each client’s individual needs.
This relationship between AI and marketers is evident in how various AI-driven CRMs, such as Zendesk AI and Salesforce Einstein, relay lead scores and use journey optimization recommendations and other important information to enhance personalization strategies.
Netflix is a great example of a business using AI algorithms to market products. The streaming platform is well-known for using AI to streamline content recommendations for streamers. Besides that, they also use AI to:
- Personalize thumbnails: Netflix AI tests hundreds of frames taken from a movie or TV program to determine the thumbnail that would most likely compel viewers to click.
- Optimizing streaming quality: It is difficult to provide high-quality video to over 220 million people all at once. Hence, Netflix AI forecasts the number of viewing subscribers the platform will have at any given time and optimizes video assets in advance to improve video quality for each view, even during peak periods.
Automation
The cost and time-saving benefits of using AI to automate repetitive tasks such as ad placements, email campaigns, and performance tracking cannot be quantified.
As of 2022, 90% of marketing professionals across 35 countries were using AI tools to automate customer-facing processes, according to Statista.
We can look at the benefits of AI automation from three perspectives:
- Cost-savings: Comparative costing is one way to measure the cost-savings benefits of AI in marketing automation. Say, what would it cost to have support agents across multiple channels attending to your customers 24/7, all year round? What would it cost to have AI chatbots and virtual assistants do the same thing with minimal human input? The probability of AI automation coming out cheaper is high. AI automation frees up more money for you to channel into other business growth strategies.
- Time-savings: You can substantially cut down on time ordinarily spent on mundane and repetitive tasks when you leverage AI to automate those tasks. For instance, you can save over 6 hours per week when you automate social media posts and ads, according to Encharge. Extend AI automation across more processes, and you’ll free up more valuable time.
- Increase productivity: Probably more important than the cost and time-savings, AI marketing automation frees up your employees or team members to engage in more meaningful tasks that propel business growth.
These benefits translate to improved ROI, amounting to up to a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead, according to Nucleus Research. The growth in revenue is also a function of improved customer satisfaction, which drives sales.
Enhanced Engagement
Overall, automation streamlines your marketing processes and optimizes your marketing campaigns, leading to hyper-personalized campaign targeting and messaging that incredibly enhances your customers’ experiences and engagement.
For instance, AI can automatically create dynamic content and ads that adapt in real time to user interactions and behaviors, keeping campaigns relevant and engaging.
This is something that Whole Foods has been able to achieve multiple times by leveraging AI for tailored messaging.
- In 2016, Whole Foods launched a chatbot/virtual agent that uses artificial intelligence to assess users’ responses and recommend food recipes that fit their moods or preferences. The chatbot offered an engaging experience, as users could even use emojis to request recommendations. All the recommendations led users to Whole Foods products and services, boosting their marketing and sales efforts.
- In 2021, Whole Foods launched multiple Just Walk Out stores across the U.S. Customers were able to pick up items and leave the store without having to stop at a register. The store leverages AI automation to charge customers as they leave the store. More than that, the AI builds a database of a customer’s purchase information, which it then analyzes to identify patterns and forecast future behaviors. The result? Whole Foods uses the information to send personalized messages to the customer based on their purchase history and other historical indicators.
With the instances above, you can see how AI employs dynamic content to keep Whole Foods’ customers engaged.
Looking at the Whole Foods example, what would count as enhanced engagement for your customers? Whatever your conclusion, seamless personalization is at the core of customer engagement.
Popular AI Marketing Automation Tools
With all you now know about AI marketing automation strategies, you are probably keen on integrating them into your campaigns.
Here are some AI marketing automation tools that professional marketers are using to drive automated marketing campaigns:
HubSpot
HubSpot offers several AI-based features, including AI-driven content creation, lead scoring, and automated email marketing to streamline marketing efforts.
Take automated email marketing, for example:
- HubSpot uses Seventh Sense, an AI-driven email delivery optimization system, to determine, optimize, and customize email delivery times for each individual, boosting engagement.
- HubSpot leverages AI-powered predictive analytics to identify which email versions would perform best in terms of different conditions set by different metrics.
You can experience similar applications of HubSpot AI across other marketing functions, including company research, enhancing data analysis, generating social media copy, optimizing channels, and lead scoring and nurturing.
HubSpot is a great marketing system because it is an all-in-one system, and both small and large businesses can easily optimize it for their marketing campaigns.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a powerhouse of AI marketing tools for email content optimization, personalized recommendations, and automated marketing campaigns.
Mailchimp works with Intuit AI Assist to:
- Automate personalized campaigns at scale: Use AI-generated automation and fully-built emails to onboard new contacts, recover abandoned carts, and win back churned customers. AI makes everything ready; all you have to do is review and publish.
- Generate on-brand emails and copy: Mailchimp allows you to create personalized emails with precise targeting based on a customer’s segment and behaviors. This is further enhanced by automated real-time reporting.
- Enhance engagement through data-driven insights: Mailchimp’s content optimizer can compare your email strategies against millions of high-performing campaigns in your industry and provide data-driven suggestions to improve your content optimization and overall email campaign performance.
Additionally, you can use Mailchimp AI to optimize your email send times, run A/B testing, and generate on-brand designs for your marketing materials.
Also, you would soon be able to get AI-powered recommendations to target leads when they are ready to convert, according to Mailchimp. Then, use generative AI to get recommendations for effective campaign strategies that maximize conversions.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Marketers use Salesforce Marketing Cloud for AI-driven insights, predictive analytics, and personalized customer journeys to enhance marketing effectiveness.
Some of the primary functions include the following:
- Automating intelligent journeys through AI-driven customer journey optimization, content creation and selection, and messaging insights.
- Scaling lead generation and account-based marketing with AI-driven lead scoring, high-value account identification, and full funnel multi-touch attribution.
- Personalizing real-time moments through AI-driven event triggers, real-time customer affinity profiling, and AI-automated offers.
Besides functions enhancing customer experiences, Salesforce marketing cloud also offers AI-power data integration, marketing performance insights, and automated planning and pacing, to help optimize your spending, planning, and performance.
Marketo Engage
If you want to generate compelling content, optimize your marketing strategies, and automate lead nurturing, then Adobe Marketo Engage is a good place to start your AI-automated marketing campaigns.
According to Adobe Experience Cloud, Marketo Engage is the largest marketing automation platform, providing a singular solution that combines the power of automation, lead development, content, and account-based marketing.
With Marketo Engage, you can effortlessly plan, personalize, and streamline every bit of your customer’s journey.
Some ways you can employ Marketo Engage for your marketing automation strategies include:
- Audience building and segmentation: Use AI to build and segment your audience by firmographics, demographics, and cross-channel behavioral patterns to get a comprehensive view of customer, prospect, and engagement data.
- Cross-channel personalization: Use AI to personalize your webpages, social media, ads, emails, and landing pages with integrated forms that compel your leads to convert.
- Lead nurturing and scoring: Use AI to develop intelligent scoring and qualification models across all your marketing programs.
- Performance analytics: Use AI to measure various performance metrics across various channels to determine which marketing investments translate to the greatest ROI.
Keys to Successful AI Marketing Automation
From HubSpot and Mailchimp to Salesforce marketing cloud and Marketo Engage, these AI marketing automation tools ensure that you reap the benefits of AI marketing automation, reducing your sales cycles and boosting your ROI.
Before you embrace any of these tools, you must note that the successful implementation or integration of AI in marketing automation is a result of the following:
- Extensive data collection and segmentation: You must gather data from various sources to create a comprehensive customer profile, then use AI tools to further analyze and integrate this data.
- Proper audience segmentation: Segment your audience using AI algorithms to target specific behaviors and preferences.
- Personalized content creation: Implement dynamic content blocks and AI-driven recommendations to tailor content to individual recipients.
- Campaign optimization: Leverage AI algorithms for continuous testing and optimization of content elements to improve engagement and performance.
- Automation and workflow enhancement: Set up automated workflows triggered by specific actions or events, such as content updates or social media posts.
Finally, review the tools to ensure compatibility with your marketing goals and existing systems. Dissonance among marketing systems and strategies could result in poor campaign performance, regardless of the technological advancements of the systems.
Wrapping Up: AI Marketing Automation
There have been many developments in the AI marketing automation market, and there are many more lined up for the future as tech giants are cooking up more AI tools to enhance marketing operations.
Now is a great time to join the league of business owners and marketers using AI to hyperpersonalize customer experience and automate routine tasks and predictive analytics to enhance customer engagement and overall campaign performance.
Leverage the AI marketing automation tools like HubSpot AI, Salesforce marketing cloud, Marketo Engage and Mailchimp to streamline, automate and future-proof your marketing and business growth strategies.
Further Reading:
- Hybrid Work Schedule Explained: Balancing Flexibility with Productivity
- Blueprint to Success: Crafting Your Comprehensive Business Plan
- Forwarding Calls: A Comprehensive Guide to Call Routing and Management
- The Customer Connection: Is a Live Receptionist Your Key to Success?
All in all, this strategy positions your business to enjoy higher marketing productivity and ROI while gaining a formidable competitive edge over relevant businesses in your market.
Talking about high productivity, revenues and future-proofing, Alliance Virtual Offices offer several resources and services that help small businesses stay ahead of the curve.
Contact us today to learn more about how you can use Alliance Virtual Offices’ services to enhance your AI-driven marketing performance and boost overall business productivity.
