Artificial Intelligence at the Service of the Marketing Team

A branch of computer science, artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the set of theories and techniques implemented to create machines capable of simulating human intelligence and performing tasks that normally require human intelligence: reasoning, learning, planning, perceiving, communicating.

Artificial intelligence encompasses various technologies, including machine learning and deep learning, which allow machines to learn from data, identify patterns, and make decisions.

There are three main types of artificial intelligence:

• Weak AI, also known as Narrow AI (ANI, Artificial Narrow Intelligence), is specialised in performing specific tasks with efficiency that can surpass humans in certain precise areas such as image recognition, speech recognition, or product recommendations. Unlike more advanced forms of intelligence, it does not have the capability of general reasoning beyond its programmed tasks. This form of AI is currently the most widespread. It offers targeted and optimised solutions for specific problems.

• Strong AI or General Artificial Intelligence (AGI)

  aims to match human intelligence. It is endowed with the ability to learn, understand, and autonomously apply knowledge across a variety of domains. This AI is conceptually capable of solving problems, acquiring new skills, and transferring its knowledge from one context to another. Strong AI remains theoretical for the time being.

• Superintelligent AI (ASI) refers to an AI that surpasses human intelligence in all aspects, including creativity, decision-making, and emotional intelligence. This form of AI would be capable of offering solutions to problems currently insoluble for humans. The development of ASI raises significant ethical considerations. Here, we are still in the realm of science fiction. The advent of ASI is not for the near future.

An important point to remember: The AI solutions that exist today, in 2024, and are used in marketing belong to the first category of AI, the weak or narrow AIs. It is these that we will discuss in the article.

The use of artificial intelligence offers several advantages for marketing teams. AI not only saves time and increases productivity, thereby reducing costs, but also stimulates creativity.

1. Saving Time and Increasing Productivity

The primary benefit of artificial intelligence for marketing teams lies in the time and productivity saved through the automation of repetitive and time-consuming tasks.

A broad scope of tasks managed by marketing can be fully or (more often) partially handled by AI. For example:

• Segmenting contacts (prospects and clients) based on rules and “intelligent” segmentation criteria.

• Creating content: emails, blog posts, advertisements, social media posts…

• Creating personalised templates (email templates, popup templates, etc.)

• Managing advertising campaigns, for instance, deciding to stop or continue a campaign based on its performance or managing A/B tests.

• Handling simple customer requests (AI chatbot).

• Producing reports and analysing performance.

• Recommending products to customers.

In most of these activity areas, automation is partial. It does not replace humans but assists them, whether by providing ideas, content, automating low-added-value tasks that can be automated, or optimising processes. AI thus allows the marketing team to focus on more strategic and creative tasks.

The time saved through automation is transformed into productivity gains for the marketing team.

Cost reduction is directly correlated with the time savings and productivity gains enabled by artificial intelligence. The reduction in time spent on content production, for example, translates into a reduction in the time spent by teams and thus the cost of producing such content. Similarly, AI's handling of simple customer requests (through a chatbot) reduces the human time needed to manage these requests.

It should be noted that this automation does not necessarily lead to a reduction in human resources (and thus costs). The time freed up by AI can be an opportunity for the marketing team to spend more time on more creative tasks.

In fact, the main reason AI reduces marketing costs is found elsewhere: in the improvement of campaign targeting. Predictive analysis and AI segmentation significantly improve campaign targeting and marketing scenarios.

Improving the targeting of marketing actions means only sending certain solicitations to customers who are most likely to buy or convert. This mechanically reduces the volume of solicitations, and therefore the cost of campaigns.

Thanks to AI, the marketing team becomes capable of better allocating its marketing budget and reducing waste on less effective initiatives, actions, and campaigns.

While the cost reduction made possible by AI is often associated in the imagination with a reduction in human resources, or a replacement of humans by machines, it is likely the improvement in the efficiency of marketing actions that will lead to the most significant savings of financial resources in the long term.

Artificial intelligence not only has the capability to automate all or part of routine tasks, but it can also assist humans in the design and production of tasks with higher added value. AI can thus act as a collaborative partner in the creative process.

Artificial intelligence can be used for example to:

• Brainstorm a marketing strategy. Unsure about launching a loyalty program? A solution like ChatGPT can be very useful in helping you explore this idea, its implications, implementation conditions, key success factors, and the preferred earn/burn mechanisms. The relevance of the advice provided by ChatGPT will depend on the level of context you provide.

• Generate ideas or drafts of content (texts, images, videos) capable of stimulating the creativity of content creation teams. AI can help writers outline articles, for example.

• Create innovative campaigns based on trends detected by AI and predictive analysis. AI aids in uncovering original ideas for content, campaigns.

Additionally, relieving the marketing team of routine tasks leaves more time for producing more creative tasks. Therefore, in the end, the three main benefits of AI for the marketing team intersect.

Data

Data is the fuel of marketing. Yet, it is still largely underutilised by companies, despite the existence of technological solutions that facilitate the centralisation, unification, and analysis of data. Artificial intelligence is radically changing the situation.

Artificial intelligence can be used to:

• Analyse large volumes of data, generate ad hoc reports, answer specific questions (for example: the average basket size of customers in segment X and its evolution over the last 12 months), detect trends, and behavioural patterns.

• Segment and score contacts in an intelligent and dynamic manner, based on real-time data analysis.

• Optimise the targeting of campaigns and marketing scenarios again based on the analysis of customer data and real-time performance data.

Artificial intelligence is at home in the world of data; it is not surprising that many of the use cases of AI in marketing involve better exploiting data.

We previously discussed the benefits of AI for the marketing team and for the company. Artificial intelligence also offers advantages for the customer by enabling an improvement in customer experience.

Here's what AI can offer in this area:

• Advanced personalisation of customer journeys, that is, sequences of messages and solicitations sent to the customer.

• Better management of marketing pressure. AI can be used to manage the frequency of solicitations based on customer typologies and the level of customer responsiveness/engagement (based on real-time data).

• Better personalisation of the content of marketing messages, websites, and product recommendations.

The use cases of AI are not limited to strictly marketing. All functions involved in managing customer relationships can be assisted, "augmented" through artificial intelligence. This is particularly true for customer support and contact centers, which are areas where AI offers very advanced applications.

Chatbots powered by AI and trained on company data can handle the most basic customer requests or pre-qualify requests before being handled by customer support.

AI can also be used to produce:

• Summaries of phone conversations and generate prospect/customer knowledge from voice data.

• Sentiment analyses from customer verbatims or even from the tone used by customers.

The success of advertising campaigns is linked to the quality of message targeting. This is true for all marketing campaigns.

By analysing user behaviour, their browsing history, artificial intelligence can automatically optimise the targeting of impressions and help achieve the goal of every advertising campaign manager: to solicit the right prospects/customers at the right time, on the right channel, and in the right context.

Most retargeting advertising technologies incorporate AI components.

For many, AI brings to mind large language models (LLMs), with ChatGPT being a prime example. These technologies offer numerous use cases around content generation, as is well-known.

A tool like ChatGPT, when used intelligently, can be very useful in content marketing, in the content creation process for marketing campaigns, whether for email campaigns (email subjects, pre-headers, content) or blog articles, for example.

Predictive analysis is used to identify trends, needs, and behavioural patterns from an analysis of historical data. Its interest in marketing is based on this truth: what determines a customer's buying behaviour is much more their past behaviour (behavioural data) than the intrinsic characteristics of the customer (socio-demographic data).

AI technologies, by analysing vast volumes of data in real time, can predict future customer behaviours, build hypotheses, and improve marketing decision-making, i.e., the content of messages and offers to propose, the opportune moment to send solicitations, the most appropriate channel, etc.

Artificial intelligence is not a cure-all. While it's true that AI can in many cases help marketing teams work better, it's also important to be aware of the limits and challenges posed by artificial intelligence. We will mention two of them.

Data Protection and Privacy Respect

AI implies Big Data. Data is the raw material of artificial intelligence. In marketing, the use of AI means granting third-party technologies access to the personal data of your contacts, prospects, and clients.

This can lead to problems, or at least challenges, in a context where the protection of personal data has become a major issue. Challenges in terms of confidentiality, consent, and security.

Companies planning to massively integrate AI must address these challenges and ensure that their use of AI complies with data protection regulations (GDPR and others). This legal aspect must be on the agenda in all AI projects.

Training and Implementation Costs

While AI can indeed reduce certain costs, its implementation requires investments that can be significant depending on the target use cases and technologies deployed.

It's important to anticipate these costs before launching an AI deployment project. Beyond the cost associated with subscribing to AI technologies, the calculation must also include:

• The potential consulting fees, for instance, from a consultancy firm.

• The cost of deploying these tools or technologies within the company's marketing and data ecosystem.

• The cost of training the marketing team.

Artificial intelligence is becoming an increasingly useful tool for marketers across many areas, which is why Actito offers a variety of AI services directly within your license.

Email Campaigns

The subject line of an email campaign is an important step in creating a campaign. It's this text that captures your audience's attention and entices them to open your email.

After writing your email, you can choose a subject line and pre-header based on your email content from three suggestions made by OpenAI's services to enhance the performance of your campaigns.

SMS Campaigns

Short and clear messages have a better impact on your audience. Thanks to OpenAI's services offered by Actito, you can easily condense your messages.

When drafting your content, you can choose from three rewriting suggestions made by OpenAI to reduce the size of your content.

Engagement score

The engagement score is a visual indicator that allows you to quickly check the degree of a profile's engagement with your brand.

This figure alone will enable you to distinguish between highly engaged profiles and those that should instead be targeted with a reactivation campaign.

More than just the current level of engagement of your profiles, this indicator will allow you to measure the impact of your campaigns on this engagement by tracking its evolution.

Predictive scoring

Actito Predictive Scoring is an optional module that provides easily actionable insights by assessing your customers' profiles using AI.

This module will enable you to:

• Increase return on investment by focusing your efforts on clients whose potential has been identified.

• Eliminate the uncertainty of decision-making and send the right offers at the right time.

• Find your ideal customer profile (ICP) based on data rather than intuition.

• Use AI insights to improve automated customer experiences.

• Leverage artificial intelligence without the need for IT department intervention.

Email Deliverability

To maintain an optimal reputation, it's recommended to regularly clean problematic email addresses after sending a campaign. Actito has implemented an intelligent filter designed to improve your deliverability.

This "Intelligent Filter" uses a shared knowledge base on the history of routing, which includes the inbox placement rate, permanent blocks due to complaints or hard bounces, repeated temporary quarantines, and much more.

Thanks to this knowledge base, Actito's artificial intelligence will determine whether it's relevant to include the targeted address when sending your email campaign.

When it comes to the deliverability of your email campaigns, the behaviour of your recipients is an important component that should not be overlooked.

Sending a message to the most engaged profiles first allows for optimising positive traffic at the start of the campaign and building a good reputation.

Actito automatically takes care of this for any marketer because its sending optimiser natively does this with every email campaign send.

RFM Activation Matrix

Do you want to prove that activation is a profit center? Actito helps you visualise and demonstrate how much revenue is generated by its profile database, based on their purchase frequency, recurrence, and monetary value.

Are you looking to analyse your data, confirm your hypothesis, and then act? Actito provides intelligent reporting that makes data actionable. You will be able to analyse and visualise your data and take action by selecting the target corresponding to the activation program you want to launch.

Signals

Actito Customer Signals (ACS) is an optional module that provides real-time signals for timely, relevant, and useful customer experience orchestration:

• Utilise rich website signals to engage customers at the right moment and increase conversion chances.

• Drive customers to conversion by meaningfully re-engaging them through programs triggered by abandoned carts, product interest, or price drops.

Product Recommendation for Email

Actito Product Recommendations for email Powered by Raptor is an optional module that aids in creating personalised up-selling and cross-selling opportunities by leveraging artificial intelligence.

It will enable you to:

• Enhance up-selling and cross-selling through personalised product recommendations.

• Revive lost opportunities with smart alternative recommendations.

• Easily drag-and-drop recommendation blocks into the email builder.

Forms

In its optional Actito Engage Powered by Qualifio module, Actito offers a question generator that automates the process of creating questions using artificial intelligence. You will be able to generate between 1 and 15 questions, with 2 to 5 potential answers each.

A/B Testing

Test, learn, and iterate... smart A/B testing will be your best ally!

Play with these different parameters:

• Sample size for versions: a slider allows you to choose the distribution between the test version and the winning version. If you have more than 2 versions (A/B/C/D testing), each version will automatically have the same sample size.

• Optimisation criteria: you can choose the criteria used to determine the winning version, either the open rate or the click-through rate.

• Period: determine the test period after which the winning version will be designated. It can be set in hours or days.

Artificial intelligence is a valuable tool for the marketing team. It would be a shame to miss out on the opportunities these new technologies offer. The important point is to successfully identify the opportunities that make sense and the technologies suited to your company - the risk being to disperse in poorly qualified and poorly managed use cases.

For AI to become a true corporate culture and not just a quickly abandoned gimmick, it should be approached as a company project and favor a gradual deployment approach, prioritising the use cases to deploy.

Are you looking to understand the extent and levels at which AI could quickly increase the efficiency of your teams and your marketing performance? Do not hesitate to contact us to discuss it.