Today’s marketers are all looking for new ways to find and attract their ideal audience. But in the fast-paced and ever-evolving digital marketing landscape, it’s getting harder and harder to reach your people and get results.
Enter AI in marketing.
What Is Artificial Intelligence Marketing?
Artificial intelligence marketing (AI Marketing) is a method of leveraging customer data and AI concepts like machine learning to anticipate your customer’s next move and improve the customer journey.
Artificial Intelligence advancements have made it easier for businesses to do so. AI can aid in the development of more effective marketing strategies, the enhancement of the customer journey, and the transformation of how firms attract, nurture, and convert prospects. The diagram below illustrates how AI and machine learning may be used at every stage of the customer lifecycle.
Many people think of AI in marketing as science fiction rather than reality, but it's not a far-fetched concept; it's already here. According to Salesforce, only 29% of marketing executives employed AI in 2018, but that percentage is expected to rise to 84% by 2020. Global spending on artificial intelligence hardware, software, and services is estimated to reach $340 billion by the end of 2021.
If you haven't yet evaluated AI's potential in marketing, now is the moment to do so. We've selected ten remarkable artificial intelligence marketing examples to get you started.
1. Magnolia Market Bridges Online-to-Offline
Magnolia Market, Joanna and Chip Gaines' brick-and-mortar store, is noted for its excellent customer service. Magnolia's physical site has the purpose of "inspiring you to own the environment you're in." To achieve this purpose, they designed an authentic brand experience that included food, activities, shopping, and a garden. Because not everyone can visit the Magnolia Silos, the team decided that its e-commerce operation should provide the same level of service. Magnolia collaborated with Shopify Plus to develop a storefront as well as an augmented reality app that allows customers to view things in 3D and "place" them in their homes. Magnolia was able to portray its items with the highest level of photo-realism imaginable thanks to AR. Magnolia's e-commerce arm, which is a significant engine of company growth, was strengthened as a result of the results.
2. Chase Achieves More Humanity in its Copywriting
Persado, a New York-based business that applies artificial intelligence to marketing creative, has secured a five-year partnership with Chase Bank. Chase discovered that integrating machine learning in their copywriting helped them attain more humanity in their marketing after trying Persado's solutions.
"Access cash from the equity in your home," for example, said one human-written digital ad. "It's true—You can unleash cash from the equity in your home," Persado's version said. With customers, the latter version did better.
Chase is the first company to employ Persado's technology for large-scale machine learning copywriting, but other companies are going to adopt it as well. Persado claims to work with 250 marketers in the retail, financial, and hotel industries.
3. Starbucks Uses Predictive Analytics to Serve Personalized Recommendation
According to Aberdeen Research, organisations who use predictive analytics to detect customer needs can boost organic revenue by 21 percent year over year, compared to an average of 12 percent without predictive analytics.
Starbucks is an example of a company that collects and analyses client data through its loyalty card and mobile app. In 2016, they announced intentions for personalisation.
Since then, they've created a fantastic app. It keeps track of purchases, including where they were made and when they were made. Starbucks employs predictive analytics to process this information and send targeted marketing messages to customers. When a user visits a nearby retailer, these messages include recommendations and special offers aimed at increasing the customer's average order value.
4. Alibaba Opens a Store for Fashion AI
Alibaba, the world's largest retailer, has launched a real "FashionAI" store in Hong Kong to use Artificial Intelligence to improve the fashion retail experience. Alibaba installed intelligent garment tags that detect when an item is handled, as well as smart mirrors that display apparel information and propose complementary items. Alibaba also intends to link the physical store to a virtual wardrobe app, which would allow customers to see the clothing they tried on in the store.
Alibaba's technological innovations are a response to changing consumer expectations. According to a survey conducted by the National Retail Federation, 80% of buyers believe that retail technologies and innovations have improved their online shopping experience, while 66% feel the same about brick-and-mortar shopping.
5. Unilever Assists Ben & Jerry's in Identifying the "Ice Cream for Breakfast" Trend
Unilever, a consumer goods firm, uses AI data centres throughout the world to synthesis insights from many sources, such as social listening, CRM, and traditional marketing research. Unilever discovered a relationship between ice cream and breakfast using this technology: at least 50 songs in the public domain have lyrics about "ice cream for breakfast," and businesses such as Dunkin' Donuts are already selling ice cream in the morning.
Unilever capitalised on this knowledge by creating a line of cereal-flavored ice creams for the Ben & Jerry's brand, including Fruit Loop and Frozen Flakes.
6. Amazon launches Personalize
Amazon was one of the first companies to use machine learning to provide personalised product suggestions. Extending these capabilities to firms that use Amazon Web Services has been a problem for the brand. Amazon Personalize, which delivers Amazon.com's machine learning capabilities to AWS clients for use in their apps, became generally available in June 2019. Since its original launch, the team has improved its functionality to the point where Personalise can now give 50 percent better suggestions across a variety of fast-changing product genres, such as books, movies, music, and news articles. Personalize is already being used by brands including Domino's, Yamaha, Subway, and Zola, a wedding planning firm, to emphasise musical instruments, in-store catalogues, offer ingredient and flavour recommendations, and create unique style combinations.
7. Chatbots from Sephora
Chatbots are growing faster than any other brand communication channel, according to Drift's current State of Conversational Marketing research, with usage jumping by 92 percent between 2019 and 2020.
Sephora was an early adopter of artificial intelligence. In 2017, they started giving beauty tips via a chatbot on Kik.
Beginning with a questionnaire about their product preferences, Sephora's chatbot assisted customers in narrowing down their options. In the cosmetics sector, where the selections might be overwhelming and impossible to purchase without trying in person, product preferences are especially useful. Sephora acquired useful data from their chatbot, and the experiment resulted in enough interaction that the company has now created additional chatbots on Messenger.
8. eBay's Email Marketing Success is Fueled by Brand Language Optimization
E-commerce marketplace with a global reach eBay is constantly looking for new ways to engage its customers. That implies it'll be able to offer us plenty of AI marketing examples.
Since 2016, the company has worked with Phrasee, an artificial intelligence-powered customer experience platform, to improve its marketing text, with an emphasis on email.
Optimizing email marketing performance is quite simple for the ordinary brand. A/B test a few alternative subject lines or CTAs to determine which one works best, and then use that one more often. However, for a firm of eBay's size, things become a little more complicated. Crafting compelling subject lines to increase open rates is a massive task with over 101 million email subscribers in the US, UK, and Germany alone.
eBay resorted to Phrasee, which employs a combination of natural language generation and deep learning to write copy at scale while dynamically optimising speed, to take the creative burden off its internal staff.
eBay's language models were created by Phrasee's computational linguistics team, allowing the e-commerce giant to generate personalised copy related to its brand tone, consumer needs, and special deals with the press of a button.
eBay has seen significant improvements in key email marketing KPIs in the years since it originally partnered with Phrasee, including:
The average open uplift is 16 percent.
Per campaign, 700,000+ additional opens are generated.
More than 56,000 additional clicks per campaign
The average click uplift is 31%.
9. Tomorrow Sleep Drives 100X Increase in Organic Traffic
Nike, Alibaba, eBay, and BMW are just a few examples. Many of the companies included in this article are international conglomerates and household names, with marketing budgets that dwarf the bottom lines of most businesses.
However, as mattress company Tomorrow Sleep has proved, you don't have to be a multibillion-dollar firm to reap the benefits of artificial intelligence in marketing.
Tomorrow Sleep was launched in mid-2017 and just started using content marketing a year later. While it was well aware that organic traffic would be critical to its long-term success, the company quickly learned that its more established competitors had the organic search industry firmly in their grasp. Because it lacked the resources and scalability to produce infinite amounts of material, it had to concentrate on the most significant, intent-driven phrases.
That's when it turned to MarketMuse, a content research, insight, and writing tool powered by artificial intelligence. To track gaps and opportunities, MarketMuse first selected the primary and associated subjects on which Tomorrow Sleep needs to develop content, then analysed the top 20 search results for each primary topic.
The outcomes were stunning. Tomorrow Sleep was suddenly able to outrank much larger competitors such as Casper for important themes, and its organic traffic increased from 4,000 per month to 400,000 per month in just a year.
10. Marketing AI Helps AMA Boost Newsletter Engagement
It can't be simple to work as a marketer for the American Marketing Association (AMA). When the majority of your audience consists of marketing experts, you simply cannot afford to send low-quality communications.
Everything must be tailored to the specific requirements of each individual member. However, given the AMA's wide spectrum of topics – ranging from written content production to UX design — meaningful personalisation for each of its 100,000+ newsletter readers was nearly impossible.
That is, impossible without AI in marketing. The AMA was able to take advantage of an AI engine that generates personalised subject lines based on member interest data by partnering with artificial intelligence-driven customization platform rasa.io, showcasing the most relevant and engaging information to each newsletter receiver.
The AMA's monthly subscriber engagement rate has increased by an astonishing 42 percent since partnering with rasa.io. "Our members and readers cover numerous industries and specialties," Molly Soat, editor-in-chief, stated, "so not every post about marketing will be useful to all of our subscribers." It's priceless to be able to tailor this newsletter for individuals among such a large audience."
AI in marketing is already generating some of the most significant advancements in overall consumer experience, from insightful insights to personalised product suggestions and technology-enabled help. What recent examples of AI in marketing have piqued your interest?
