Marketers know creativity is what attracts an audience and commands its attention. They also know that personalization is what delivers the right message to the right target at the right time to convert a prospect into a customer. For the greatest thinking on creativity and strategy, organizations will always depend on people.
But creativity and personalization don’t happen by chance. And one of the biggest challenges businesses have long faced is how to combine these valuable assets to deliver both relevance and innovation, and do it at scale.
Today, artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are solving that problem,
helping marketers transcend the limits of manual interactions and personalize marketing to customers. AI can scale creativity and strategy, expanding human ingenuity to wider audiences.
They can use AI-powered data science to narrow in on specific sets of customers based on criteria, such as their predicted lifetime value, and personalize content for these customers with dynamic product recommendations. AI could also help them to analyze their data for insights on when to send campaigns, who to target, and what content to include. And by using automation, they can do all this at scale.
With these new capabilities, organizations can better drive customer engagement and loyalty, and tailor messaging to those consumers who will get the most out of it—all while automation helps employees focus on creativity and strategy rather than laborious legacy tasks.
In that way, AI and automation could drive better business results and give the marketers that use them an edge over their competition.
Higher Open Rates Through Automation
Jopwell is a New York–based career advancement platform for Black, Latinx, and Native American students and professionals. Its success depends on its capability to connect the right job seekers with the right employers based on its robust database of candidates and companies.
To do so, Jopwell uses tags to automatically organize and convert vast sets of audience data into immediate insights, so it can then send its highly targeted campaigns to specific demographic and behavioral audience segments—the type of time-consuming work that has long distracted marketers from the bigger picture.
After launching an email campaign, Jopwell uses reporting tools to understand what performed best––and what it needs to improve for next time. And it has scaled its process for transparency, so all teams at the organization can easily exchange reports, view predictive demographics data, and see where its subscribers are engaging (and even what types of devices their subscribers are using).
In the recruiting and staffing sector, with an average email open rate of just over 21%, the automation-powered company’s open rate of nearly 30% stands apart.
Speaking the Customer’s Language (Any Language)
AI tools can help marketers use performance data to optimize the results of their messaging before they launch an email campaign. Using AI, an organization can quickly crunch millions of data points from its most successful campaigns to help it recommend changes in messaging, imagery, and layouts for pending emails.
Today, the rapidly evolving Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, a large language model AI tool known as GPT-3, can even offer an organization its recommendations for email subject lines or headlines. That type of powerful AI can help an organization focus on the valuable work of optimal decision-making and developing business strategy.
MovingWaldo, a one-stop digital concierge based in Montreal, connects professional movers and other service providers with customers. That means the organization interacts with three groups: a B2B audience of service vendors, another B2B audience of real estate agents who refer their clients to the platform, and a B2C audience of the people who are moving—all in French and English.
The company delivers more than 100 highly targeted emails a month. To do so, it relies on AI-powered tools to quickly determine audience segments based on data points such as the expected timing of a moving date, how a referral has moved through its user network—even whether a prospect or customer has visited its French or English website. MovingWaldo uses automated, scalable A/B testing to determine the best moments to offer vendors’ services to its consumer audience.
And by integrating marketing automations into its processes, the company can effortlessly create personalized data-driven emails using pre-built customer journeys to help convert more customers at key moments and at scale.
The key to MovingWaldo’s messaging is the data integration that helps it communicate at scale in ways that feel personal to its audience. Sophisticated AI can provide vital help on language and tone; what works for a customer in Toronto may not connect the same way in Montreal, and the company needs to reach them both.
Automation and AI are changing the game for growing organizations, improving their business results as they communicate individualized messaging at scale while helping their teams focus on creativity. When an AI-powered organization can more easily and efficiently produce that kind of effective creativity, it can focus the real brains—its workforce—on bigger ideas, bigger innovations, and bigger ambitions.
Learn more about Mailchimp’s powerful AI tools to get personalized recommendations to improve marketing.
