AI Archives - Page 8 of 8

By Stankevicius MGM

AI-powered email marketing tools are revolutionizing the way email is built.

Business owners would agree: email still holds the crown as one of the most valuable ways to connect to customers. And rightfully so, as, according to the Direct Marketing Association UK, for every $1 spent, email marketing generates $30 in revenue. However, approaches to email campaigns remain largely outdated. The result: the more emails users receive, the more they are ignored, which has led to a decline in email use, at least among millenials.

Thus, AI has emerged as an increasingly important part of email marketing for businesses across the globe. And thanks to AI, email marketing is getting a revamp which solves many challenges that e-commerce business owners have been facing.

In today’s era of micro-personalization and increasing data protection demands, e-commerce business owners find it difficult to adapt to the ever-changing rules of email marketing. Too often, in order to maintain the competitive edge, entrepreneurs face the need to hire additional help such as marketing assistants or agencies. Now, with a new generation of smart and simple AI tools that support most e-commerce platforms, an e-commerce business owner can supercharge their email marketing campaign single-handedly. Instead of learning new rules or bringing on board new hires, AI does the work for the e-commerce business owner.

Here’s how AI raises the bar for e-commerce email marketing.

Predictive Personalization

Personalization means to email marketers what the Holy Grail would be to Indiana Jones — rare, elusive, seemingly unattainable. Not anymore, thanks to AI.

AI helps the business owner to identify the behaviors and events that should trigger email-based marketing communications, determining which offers will produce the desired results.

This level of personalization would be all but impossible to achieve without AI. “Machine learning helps AI-based email tools to understand what is most meaningful for a specific audience,” says Igor Solovyov, founder and CEO of Triggmine, an intelligent AI-powered email marketing platform.

Powerful Ambition

Triggmine’s goal, among others, is for the platform to segment and target audiences using “natural language technology to select the words for subject lines, body copy and calls-to-action. This way, the message not only sounds like it has been written by a human, but is also consistent with the language generally used by the e-commerce business”. While that ambition is certainly powerful, it is not unwarranted. When tech research firm Gartner gave its predictions for tech in 2018, its first was that machines would play a role in writing copy because of the unique insights big data can provide. Intelligent AI-powered email marketing platforms like Triggmine’s are paving the way for a revolution in the way E-Commerce is practiced.

Seeing the potential of AI for the E-Commerce business owners that they work with daily, Triggmine made the decision to switch to AI due to the speed, precision and specificity that an AI platform can provide its customers. For small and medium business owners who don’t have time to handle their marketing activities, this allows business owners to focus on running their business whilst optimizing their marketing campaigns, for minimal effort.

AI tailors messages for various segments of an email list and delivers suggestions precisely for a particular niche or person. AI-powered email applications use big data to suggest the type of content that complements each stage of the buyer’s journey. By analyzing behavior and clickstream, AI essentially replaces the function of not just the copywriter, but the marketer too.

Time It Right

For years, marketers have recognized that when they send emails has meaningful impact on open rates and click-through rates.

For example, an email recipient in Paris might be less likely to open an email that is delivered in the dead of night because the send time was optimized for subscribers in the U.S. Central Standard Time zone. For this reason, some email marketers segment their subscribers in an effort to ensure that their emails are delivered to each segment at a good time.

Besides, the attention span of customers is so short that if the message arrives in customer’s inbox at the wrong time, it gets buried or even deleted straight away. AI combats this peculiarity in a certain way. By determining when a particular customer is most active online, AI can judge when there is a higher chance of the customer reading and acting on the message. The AI-powered marketing tool then acts even more intelligently: instead of emailing large segments of email list, it optimizes send time on a per-subscriber basis. Doing this manually would be nearly impossible, but it’s easy work for AI.

Historically, email marketing has been mostly manual, strongly oriented towards campaigns. With the arrival of AI, email is laser-focused and single user-oriented. This of course begs the question, what‘s the next frontier for e-commerce email marketing? The answer is clear: optimizing the mobile experience. According to recent studies, by 2020 there will be 6.1 billion smartphone users worldwide. That’s nearly as much as the current population of the earth!

For this transformation, marketers need a helping hand and what will be better than a smart robot? Artificial Intelligence tools such as Triggmine are fundamentally reshaping different marketing channels such as email marketing — and there’s more to come.

Feature Image Credit: Courtesy of Stankevicius MGM

By Stankevicius MGM

Sourced from Entrepreneur

From Madison Avenue to Silicon Valley

It’s no secret that the advertising world goes giddy over any innovation in the tech realm. After all, a big portion of how firms gain an edge in their industry is by being up on the latest and greatest, as well as demonstrating a capacity to look at how new practices can be applied to client campaigns. And when it comes to AI, a lot of major agencies have already situated themselves ahead of the curve.

The interesting thing to note here isn’t necessarily that these agencies are using AI in general, but rather, how they’re using it. For example, the link above notes how a few firms have teamed up with AI firms to work on targeting and audience discovery. While these practices have been implemented long before, Artificial Intelligence has been accelerating the process. However, even with major players teaming up with the likes of IBM Watson, smaller agencies and startups have been on this trend as well.

An excellent example of this is the company Frank, an AI based advertising firm for startups. Frank’s goal is to use AI in the same manner of targeting mentioned above, only offering it to those businesses that could really use the savings. The platform allows you to set the goals of your campaign, as well as hones in on targeting and bidding efficiently. This saves time and money often devoted to outsourcing digital advertising efforts, as well as gives an accurate depiction of how ads are performing in real time. Expect players like Frank to make a significant change in how small businesses and startups approach how to use AI in their marketing.

Big Dollars For Small Budgets

One of the biggest news stories to hit about AI and advertising was Goldman Sach’s $30 million investment into Persado. If you haven’t heard about it yet, Persado essentially aggregates and compiles ‘cognitive content,’ which is copy backed by data. It breaks down everything, from sentence structure, word choice, emotion, time of day, and even can bring in a more accurate call-to-action. And for those that hire digital marketers and advertisers, this sounds like a dream come true in saving time and money. However, when it comes to writing, AI can only go so far.

While some content creators and digital copywriters might be a little nervous that AI will eventually take their jobs, that’s simply not the case. Writing involves a certain sense of emotional intelligence and response that no computer can feel. Moreover, the type of content that AI can create is limited to short-term messages. I’m not sure about you, but I’ll safely bet that no major marketing director is willing to put their Super Bowl ad in the hands of a computer. Overall, while Wall Street recognizes Artificial Intelligence’s potential impact in the creative world, it’s safe to say when it comes to telling a story, that human touch will never go away.

The Unexpected Players

Perhaps one of the most underrated things about AI is its potential to eliminate practices altogether. While we mentioned above that, yes, certain jobs in the creative field will never go away, there’s a possibility that certain processes in the marketing channel might change drastically.

For example, companies like Leadcrunch are using AI to build up B2B sales leads. While before B2B sales could rely on either targeted ads or sales teams to bring clients in, software like Leadcrunch’s is eliminating those processes altogether. Granted, this isn’t exactly a bad thing as a lot of B2B communications relies heavily on educating consumers, something a banner ad can’t do as accurately as a person. Overall, companies like this are going to drastically change how our pipelines work, potentially changing how the relationship between advertising and AI work hand-in-hand for a long time.

George Beall is a student at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He has a deep admiration for true innovation and has been involved in multiple in technology startups. He is currently an active angel investor. In his spare time he enjoys horseback riding, discovering upcoming music, and binge watching Netflix.

Sourced from TNW