Artificial intelligence is now part and parcel of our everyday lives. In our survey of over 1,200 marketers, 91% say they’re already using AI in their jobs, and 62% use AI outside their jobs as well.
Google Trends showing the search popularity of “AI” over the last five years. Source: Google Trends.
But even though the initial hype of AI may have dipped slightly, we still have plenty of insights to gain from it. We’ve scoured the internet for the latest information on AI and how marketers are leveraging various tools to level-up their customer communications.
Read on for four ways you can use AI to take your campaigns up a notch, and find out how Iterable’s AI Suite can unlock the most optimal in-the-moment messaging.
1. Let AI Pick the Right Communication Channel
Expanding your channel mix greatly enhances the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. In fact, cross-channel shoppers spend three times more than single-channel shoppers. And brands with effective cross-channel customer engagement strategies retain, on average, 89% of their customers compared to 33% for companies with weak cross-channel customer engagement.
More channels means a better bottom line, but how can you optimize reach across more platforms without sacrificing efficiency?
AI-powered marketing platforms can remove analysis paralysis—the feeling of being unable to make a decision due to overthinking—by selecting the right method of communication for every single customer. Iterable’s AI Suite, for instance, includes Channel Optimization, which maximizes the value of each send by analyzing historical data and automatically determining which channel a user is most likely to engage with.
Additionally, generative AI tools, like Iterable’s Copy Assist, make it easy to customize the creative for each channel to achieve greater results. This way, you can not only power a more effective cross-channel experience but also create 1:1 messaging that resonates with customers wherever they are.
2. AI Puts the Data in Data-Driven
Everybody loves to talk about data-driven marketing, but it all depends on the quality of that data. Incomplete data can lead to inaccurate results, which degrades the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns over time.
AI, however, is making marketing smarter by scaling and automating content generation, streamlining the customer experience with assisted workflows and deriving deeper insights. When asked what draws marketers to use AI on the job, 47% say AI enables them to work more effectively and 43% report AI fostering more accurate work.
The key to making smarter marketing decisions is to ensure that the technology you use is powered by Explainable AI. Explainability establishes trust by infusing transparency in the AI model’s decision-making process. Unlike the opaque, black box of certain AI solutions, Explainable AI provides a more ‘glass box’ experience that clearly shows what powers its predictions.
With Iterable’s AI Suite, you can rest assured that nothing is a mystery. Our platform was designed to empower data-driven marketing by putting you in the driver’s seat with built-in intelligence. Whether you’re using Iterable AI to predict which users are most likely to convert with Predictive Goals or analyzing what’s the Next Best Action to take, the insights you receive will be crystal clear.
3. AI Makes Your Messages Literally More Memorable
New research shows that customer recall is driven by a variety of factors, including the quality of the creative, the channel selection and media environment, and the clarity of the surrounding content.
To maximize recall, marketers are advised to heighten customers’ emotions, mix short-form and long-form ads, and deploy campaigns across multiple channels. Gen Z tends to have the highest recall, so repetitive is key to being recognized by older consumers. But how many touchpoints are optimal to get your messages to sink in?
Marketers are often hesitant to increase the frequency of their sends because they’re concerned about message fatigue, but Iterable’s Frequency Optimization is exactly the AI-powered reassurance they need to keep customer sentiment high.
With Frequency Optimization, marketers can set their preferred capping range per channel, and then AI determines the ideal quantity of marketing messages a user should receive in a given week or month across all channels.
Knowing that older consumers may need more repetition to induce recall, you can use Frequency Optimization to test the impact of frequency among users by age or generation. And in a world of declining attention spans, we need all the recall help we can get.
4. The Future of Digital Commerce is AI Agility
Staying on the cutting-edge of AI technology can make or break your brand in the long run. As Eric Pearson, CIO of International Hotel Group (IHG) once put it, “it’s no longer the big beating the small, but the fast beating the slow.”
AI is revolutionizing brands’ approach to digital commerce through hyper-personalized campaigns, predictive demand forecasting, optimized marketing strategies, and more. Generative AI, in particular, is disrupting ecommerce content creation, and nearly 9 in 10 marketers believe they will have to learn how to use AI to maintain their value as a marketer.
Fortunately, the future of digital commerce is now. AI platforms are empowering marketers to personalize products and promotions at scale, vastly exceeding historical attempts to customize campaigns.
The agility that AI offers will give marketers a competitive advantage. For instance, Iterable’s AI Suite allows you to identify meaningful commonalities among shoppers and activate that data fast. Copy Assist also enables more creativity by quickly providing new copy suggestions based on the content you create for new variations to test.
Be the Tortoise and the Hare
With the right AI technology, you don’t have to choose between being slow and steady and winning the race.
As we’ve discussed, AI can take your marketing campaigns to the next level by making them more data-driven, agile, and memorable. You can use AI to reach more people across more channels—without burdening you with more effort.
Let AI boost the great work you’re already doing—and make it even better.
Convinced to let Iterable AI take the wheel? Reach out and schedule a demo of our suite today.
