TECHNOLOGY

AI for All: Automation for Improved Customer Experiences

By Ascend Marketing

FEBRUARY 28, 2022 | TECHNOLOGY

In 2022, content automation does not just apply to scheduling emails. Nearly all marketing processes can benefit from the glut of Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions developed in the past decade, which use machine learning to further automate and simplify marketing tasks. Marketers have increasingly been using automation tools for tasks of all levels and sizes, from helping proofread documents (you should do this—it’s easy!), to curating content personalized for each individual, to enhancing how companies respond to questions and complaints. It can even generate quality, high-value content itself, with little-to-no human input. For these reasons and more, it may be worth considering how your business can benefit from increased automation to streamline marketing tasks of all kinds.

Ascend Marketing’s Take on Content Automation

Marketers are likely well aware that automation drives good personalization strategies, but not all are using every tool in their kit. Recent research finds that impersonal brand experiences increasingly frustrate the majority of customers—in fact, 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. To keep up with today’s customer demands, responsively delivering the right personalized content at the right time requires some assistance from AI tools. 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 many major marketing automation tools include the following:

  • Score leads and filter out unqualified prospects in real time, with customizable criteria.
  • Create new segments automatically based on customer actions and trends (or manually, if needed).
  • Make dynamic content that triggers and changes based on your viewers’ segment or behavior.

These features allow for campaigns that anticipate customers’ evolving needs and react with the right content, more quickly than is possible to do manually. But many platforms can go beyond what traditional customer segmentation delivers, by using AI to automatically learn which actions are likely to lead to immediate sales or engagement. These tools allow for one-to-one personalization for building 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 and through the right channel. Unlike manual personalization, this strategy may involve minimal human input. Nevertheless, predictive recommendations are sophisticated enough to respond to customers on the individual level, based on only a few site visits. With every interaction, each customer experience becomes more deeply and accurately personalized, such that AI tools will recommend products that are most relevant to previous behaviors and purchases. 

Some predictive personalization features to consider in 2022 include:

  • AI-automated triggered personalization, which can send useful messages to customers based on an algorithm that accounts for 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 be optimized for specific image-reliant industries such as fashion, and can pick out logos and relevant product features.
  • Omnichannel capabilities, which allow for integrated journeys across devices. As nearly 3 in 4 customers use multiple channels before converting, personalization tools increasingly account for actions from all devices (particularly mobile) when generating a recommendation, which is then delivered using the customer’s preferred medium.

Marketing tools using AI to optimize content delivery will continue to improve and become more sophisticated, but your results will depend on whether you can 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. Automation tools aren’t just for making content creation easier—they can also make it better.  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, automated tools can provide an extra set of eyes (so to speak) and are often very advanced in detecting complex grammatical errors. It can also ensure that avoid any accidental plagiarism.
  • AI can generate ideas—writing can be an immensely time-consuming task, but AI tools can get original copy done 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 large part driven by the perception that a company is constantly present and responsive. Creating a customer service experience that is responsive at all times can be demanding, but 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 addresses issues, creating a stronger brand.

Some ways to incorporate a conversational marketing strategy into your automated marketing campaign include the following:

  • Setting up a chatbot to automatically handle customer service issues allows for more information-rich interactions to occur at any time, 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 whenever a customer is most likely to have questions about your products or services. 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 social media messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger. This ensures that anyone who clicks your contact button receives an immediate response, boosting your online presence with minimal effort.

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

Keep Reading: Content Automation

Next-level customer responsiveness is likely within your reach, but only if you make the most of automation tools in your martech stack. Automation will continue to bring new possibilities to marketers looking to stay ahead of the curve and create a truly customer-centric brand experience.

For more information and some in-depth discussion about content automation, you can watch a recording of our past Martechify session about content marketing and personalization in 2021. Stay tuned for our upcoming session—Content Automation: Leveraging Martech for Next-Level Content Personalization—in which martech experts discuss the benefits and use cases of content automation to create personalized, optimized experiences.

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