Power Couple

What if you could predict the future...of your marketing campaigns? Of course we can’t know exactly how customers will react, but we can make a pretty near-accurate guess. How? Enter predictive analytics—the practice of combining mathematical algorithms and historical data to calculate the likelihood that something will happen. Now what if I told you you can pair all of that with the automated power of artificial intelligence (AI)? Yep. It’s marketing magic and it’s your ticket to faster, smarter, and more actionable insights.

How It Works

Let’s take a typical marketing campaign: a series of emails meant to drive traffic to your landing page and get people to purchase whatever it is you’re selling. With predictive analytics, you can easily access key metrics such as your customer’s lifetime value, propensity to buy, propensity to engage, and offer cross-sell recommendations. All this information helps you build better segmentation, create more relevant user flows, and ultimately personalize your communications to deliver the right content based on individual behaviors and unique interests.

Okay, but where does AI come in? Using artificial intelligence as part of your marketing strategy opens a door to a whole new world of customer data. In the case of the email campaign above, introducing AI into the mix allows for more data to be analyzed in a shorter amount of time. Because AI’s sole purpose is automation, the speed at which you’ll get actionable insights is something out of a science fiction movie (with a lot less galactic warfare).

Intimidated? Don’t be. AI is quickly becoming an industry norm—streamlining “intelligent” human tasks like problem solving, decision making, and learning—and providing unprecedented growth and scalability to businesses. Even with predictive analytics, you’ll still need to do most of the optimizing by hand. So instead of having Jessica, your marketing manager, manually pull KPIs and determine how best to improve your campaign, AI can do it for her (and at twice the speed).

“Using artificial intelligence as part of your marketing strategy opens a door to a whole new world of customer data.”

To put it into perspective, most artificial intelligence applications can analyze up to 1 million opportunities per second and evaluate billions of pieces of information in real-time. I know you love Jessica’s enthusiasm, but 1 million opportunities per second? For a human, that’s impossible. With AI, it’s just the beginning.

 AI in Action

This level of automation goes far beyond simple email campaigns. You can also use predictive analytics and AI for real-time decisioning. Say a user searches for your product, a pair of leather boots, on Google. Based on the user’s past and present searches, activity, and interests, you could serve up an ad for a similar product (jeans) or related content (an article on how to care for leather boots) — all before your product page loads. Creepy or not, your customer will most likely be influenced by this subtle dose of personalized advertising and will be more apt to purchase your product.   

The Bottom Line

Using predictive analytics and AI can give you a huge advantage when it comes to personalized marketing. How you use the power of customer data is up to you, but I recommend tapping into your inner robot, digging deeper, and using the latest technology to give them more of what they want, how and when they want it. As far as I'm concerned, it’s a win-win.