Personalization has been an undisputed element of digital marketing effectiveness with proven ROI. Traditionally personalization was associated with simple elements of marketing messages, like greeting the person by their first name, but has now scaled to all elements of customer engagement, including creatives, timing, devices and content and product recommendations and more.
The Flywheel of AI and Data: Propelling Next-Gen Marketing with Personalization
BOOSTING ROI
The Flywheel of AI and Data
Over the last few years, rapid advances in AI algorithms, especially the introduction of transformer models, under the umbrella of Generative AI, have caught the imagination of users worldwide with their uncanny ability to generate human readable text and photo realistic images and videos. In particular, the release of chatGPT by OpenAI late last year was a key milestone that introduced the power of Generative AI to millions of users.
While there is a lot more work to be done to mitigate bias and ensure AI safety, the underlying technology puts the power of these innovations directly in the hands of everyday users to improve their work flows and productivity. The marketing practice is specifically poised to benefit from these innovations, empowering marketers to combine creative storytelling with AI generated content and customer data to deepen their customer relationships. The generative AI models will make available fast, cheap and bespoke content that marketing teams can immediately tailor to their campaigns. The flywheel of AI and data working in tandem with marketers is the engine that boosts marketing’s ROI.
GETTING RESULTS
Introducing GenAI for Personalization
At Blueshift, we recently launched Generative AI for Personalization to enable customers to use AI generated content to personalize subject lines and messages in email, push and SMS. We’ve seen some early patterns in how marketers are using AI generated content variations in their campaigns:
1. Marketers want to work together with AI. They choose to start with something they created and then find variations of their content 75% of the time vs 25% asking AI to start from scratch with given prompts.
2. Marketers want to engage with customers in a friendly tone. They choose to apply casual and cheerful tones 85% of the time followed by persuasive and assertive. About 15% of the time no tone was selected to indicate neutral tone.
3. Marketers focus on the subject line above all else. They choose to personalize subject line 83% of the time vs both subject line and preheader in their templates
4. Marketers want to get the attention of Millennials. Millennials are known to have their own lingua franca and top the list in choice for demographics followed by gen_x and gen_z.
These early results indicate that marketers like editorial control over the variations of content but use AI to further optimize among the approved variations suiting each individual’s style and tone.
INTELLIGENT CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT
A New Era for Marketing with AI
Blueshift AI marketing platform makes AI accessible to everyday marketers with easy-to-use creative studios. We have now extended them to match users with AI-generated content variations by inferring their preferences in tone and style based on all of their prior data. Combining this with our robust and comprehensive A/B testing, marketers can easily measure the effectiveness of these content variations and measurably improve their campaign metrics.
We believe this is the start of a new era of marketing automation where generative AI enables new and better customer engagement leading to more effective campaigns driven in turn by a better understanding of those end users. This flywheel of AI and data working in tandem with marketers and organizations who put user privacy and trust at the center of this wheel will be the engine that propels the next generation of brands.
Interested in learning more about how AI can transform your marketing strategy? Learn more here.
Manyam Mallela is co-founder and chief AI officer at Blueshift.
