A new study analyzing 3.8 billion marketing interactions across several industries, including e-commerce, consumer finance and travel, suggests that marketers may want to consider implementing artificial intelligence into their marketing efforts.
The study, from customer data-based marketing platform Blueshift, finds that marketing campaigns that use Blueshift’s artificial intelligence marketing platform increased customer engagement by 310-720% and revenue by 300% over campaigns that didn’t use the technology. It also found that mobile push notifications using artificial intelligence have two-times greater impact on engagement than e-mail campaigns that used the technology.
Artificial intelligence is the ability for a machine or program to learn over time when it’s exposed to new data instead of being explicitly programmed by an individual.
The study analyzed 71 million clicks, 582 million opens and more than 2.5 million transactions across email, mobile push notifications, SMS messages, website interactions and Facebook custom audience advertisements from December 2017 to September 2018. Blueshift helps companies mine customer data to create automated, AI-based marketing campaigns that employ personalized recommendations.
Sweden-based online marketplace Tradera.com says using AI and Blueshift for recommendations led to an 80% increase in clicks on recommended products compared with using manually created recommendations.
Voucher Cloud, a U.K.-based deals and voucher site, says using Blueshift and AI in email campaigns to determine the best time to send messages and to provide personalized messages based on a consumer’s behavior and location led to an 81% increase in revenue from email in six months.
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A separate February Adobe survey of nearly 13,000 marketing, creative and technology professionals finds that organizations using artificial intelligence tools to create personalized experiences for their customers were 50% more likely to significantly exceed their business goals, and 46% expected to adopt AI to support the customer experience by the end of 2018. However, 40% lacked the required knowledge and resources to implement it.
Marketers are investing in AI because it can automate marketing processes and automatically improve them as the systems learn, saving companies time, manpower and resources. For example, Blueshift’s Predictive Audiences AI algorithms surface the best customers to target by scoring each customer’s likelihood to respond based on customer attributes, including the products and marketing campaigns they’ve interacted with. The scores consistently update so campaigns are constantly learning and improving. Automated marketing using AI eliminates the need for marketers to wait for data teams to create segments or devote resources to tracking and maintaining segmented audiences, Blueshift says.
Retail represents 17% of the $13.4 billion in total global marketing automation spend, according to Forrester Research Inc.—the largest share among the verticals it analyzes. However, retail marketing automation spending is growing at an 11.5% compound annual growth rate—less than the total market compound annual growth rate of 14%.
“We’re seeing higher growth in sectors like consumer goods and wholesale, where these firms are trying to engage directly with consumers and have historically suffered a retail blind spot because retailers have owned the customer relationship,” says Rusty Warner, a Forrester Research principal analyst.
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