How Will AI Benefit Retailers in Marketing Automation in 2020?

By: Retail CIO Outlook | Friday, January 17, 2020

Artificial Intelligence empowers retailers to execute actions that they perform already but in a more efficient manner.

FREMONT, CA: Artificial intelligence is the current topic of interest as the marketers have high expectations from the technology. It plays a crucial role in marketing efforts and takes marketing automation to the next level. Yet, marketers can leverage AI for automating their marketing strategies and flows. AI-based technologies derive enormous benefits from data. Specifically, Machine learning (ML) algorithms are smart enough to identify patterns and essential variables on which a visitor gets the right recommendation. Here are a few methods by which retailers can utilize AI in marketing automation.

Relevant Product and Content Recommendations

Product recommendation has been there for decades where salespeople were recommending products to customers one-to-one, and now with technologies like AI and ML, it has attained a new level. Page-level personalized merchandising was popular before the technology advancements. While this method of recommending products has great potential, a number of improvements can be made. It only requires the right training data. Brands can utilize AI to automatically tag images and text for its ability to understand the meaning and group products that will go well together.

Auto-optimization of Marketing Messages and Email

AI-technology helps improve the performance of existing email marketing campaigns. Messages can be more personalized for driving more sales. While an automated pricing campaign is already existing, the automated messaging campaign has personalized the subject lines, sub-headers, messages, products, and discounts based on micro-segmentation and automated optimization with multivariate testing. This will help to identify all possible combinations. This technique has reported an increase in email open rates, sales, and purchases of featured products.

Predictive Analytics

While predictive analytics take advantage of data to forecast future trends, it also enhances customer service and experience on a one-to-one scale. Using AI’s learning capability, predictive analytics can effectively model and analyze retail customer’s purchase behavior better than before. Also, marketers can embrace this technique to “reverse engineer” customer segments, offers, actions, content, and touchpoints to find which marketing strategies had the most positive results.