AI for all: Automation for improved customer experiences

Remember when marketing automation was about scheduling emails? We’re way past that. Now Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are coming into play for tasks at all levels and sizes, from helping proofread documents, to curating personalized content, to enhancing how companies respond to questions and complaints. AI can even generate quality, high-value content with little-to-no human input. For these reasons and more, it may be worth considering how your business can benefit from the plethora of automation options now available. 

Ascend Marketing’s take on content automation 

Despite general awareness that automation fuels good personalization strategies, not all marketers are using every tool in their kit. Recent research finds that impersonal brand experiences increasingly frustrate the majority of customers, while conversely, 4 out of 5 say that a personalized experience makes them more likely to purchase from a company. Content personalization helps to create a more frictionless experience, and when done right can make brand interactions more unique and memorable for the customer.  

AI tools can enable companies to keep up with customer demands, responsively delivering the right personalized content at the right time. Thankfully, the recent proliferation of user-friendly AI has made advanced personalization strategies available even to small and medium-sized businesses. 

Some capabilities unlocked by AI-enabled marketing automation tools: 

• Scoring leads and filtering out unqualified prospects with customizable criteria 
• Creating new segments automatically based on customer actions and trends 
• Making dynamic content that triggers and changes based on engagement

These platforms can go beyond what traditional customer segmentation delivers by using AI to learn which actions are likely to lead to immediate sales or engagement. This allows for one-to-one personalization that creates meaningful, memorable customer experiences at all stages. 

Predictive personalization 

Predictive personalization, or hyper-personalization, involves campaigns that automatically predict and respond to customer behaviors at the right time in the right channel with minimal human input. Based on only a few interactions, each customer experience becomes more deeply and accurately personalized.  

Some predictive personalization features to consider include: 

• AI-automated triggered personalization, which can send useful messages to customers based actions such as scroll pattern, clicks, wait time, and more. This allows for optimally-timed messages to automatically intervene before a bounce occurs. 
• Image-based AI tools, which can analyze images of viewed and purchased products to create sophisticated recommendations. These tools can pick out logos and relevant product features, making them optimal for image-reliant industries such as fashion. 
• Omnichannel capabilities, which allow for integrated journeys across devices. Since nearly 3 in 4 customers use multiple channels before converting, personalization tools increasingly account for actions across all devices (particularly mobile) when generating a recommendation, which is then delivered in the preferred medium. 

Marketing tools using AI to optimize content delivery will continue to improve, but results will depend on whether you make the most of the available features. The same can be said for content creation, which can also be streamlined and enhanced with the help of automation. 

Content generation 

Although many associate the phrase “AI-generated” with garbled, non-human attempts at targeted messaging, newer solutions create much more sophisticated content. Engaging social media posts, blog posts, and articles can be created with the help of AI tools, sometimes with little-to-no human input.  

Here are some potential uses for automation within your content creation process: 

• When checking for errors in your content, AI can provide an extra set of eyes (so to speak) and is often very advanced at detecting complex grammatical errors and accidental plagiarism. 

• AI can generate ideas—AI tools can generate original copy quickly, or at the very least generate some new topic ideas for springboarding. 
• Within your social media campaign, automated content creation can be highly useful for generating updates and alerts about your products and services. For example, some solutions can instantly transform a small amount of information into a report to save time. 

AI-generated language is increasingly sophisticated, which can have numerous applications within the marketing realm. Additional AI solutions can help your business be more conversational with your customers, and thereby more responsive to their needs. 

Conversational marketing 

Brand loyalty is in part driven by the perception that a company is always available to help, but creating a customer service experience that is responsive at all times can be demanding. The right automation tools can take much of the difficulty out of this process. To address changing customer demands—and avoid missed opportunities—AI tools can improve how quickly your company responds. 

Incorporating a conversational marketing strategy into your automated marketing campaign can help: 

• Setting up a chatbot to automatically handle customer service issues allows for information-rich interactions on the customer’s terms. These often take few resources to set up and maintain and can be highly rewarding in terms of brand building and ROI. They can also be set up to make proactive help offers and suggestions at the right time. 
• You can also introduce automation into your live chat, by enabling an initially-automated chat window that can appear when a customer is likely to have questions. It can then direct them to helpful resources or a representative if needed. 
• Automated chat tools can be incorporated into your social media marketing strategy. By integrating a chatbot within apps such as Facebook Messenger you can ensure that anyone who clicks your contact button receives an immediate response. 

Proactively offering customers the right help resources goes a long way in establishing strong customer relationships.