Maximizing every asset available to get the most out of a marketing or digital PR campaign is the wish for all CMOs. The reality is that not every wish is granted because of inadequacies or failures in the strategic plan. Time and cost also play roles, and converting visitors to a brand’s website to become customers. A recent survey by email marketing company Litmus revealed that only 25% of marketers currently feel confident about their communications plan. This was particularly acute during the pandemic because many marketers were unsure about the content, timing and frequency of their messages. Those are all areas where AI can be invaluable.
Conversion Intelligence
Partnering with AI can be powerful in getting the most out of a marketing campaign and converting leads to customers. What’s the difference between AI and what brands have been doing?
Copy on brand landing pages is twice as important to conversions as it is to design according to Canadian landing page company Unbounce. The firm began collecting and analyzing more than 180,00 visits to 34,000 customer landing pages starting in 2017. What’s important is the length of copy and readability. Writing to a middle school audience and keeping content to less than 300 words is also recommended to increase conversion rates. These are all good goals in a normal world, but things have changed since COVID-19.
Design is still important but Unbounce says it’s not equal among industries. According to the firm, design is less important to the media and entertainment, catering/restaurant, and finance/insurance sectors than it is to software as a service (SaaS), ecommerce and legal industries.
Most good marketers rely on past experience, best practices, and their own market research and creativity to craft strategies. Employing AI affords brands the potential to streamline testing, automate customer personalization, consider and use insights that are machine powered.
Sentiment Analysis
Today’s AI can review and analyze consumer responses to messages to determine if they were positive or negative, favorable or unfavorable or even neutral. CMOs can even define the tones they wish their AI to capture, whether it be anger, love, surprise, frustration, disgust, etc. Recognizing these tones and adjusting messages that address consumer feelings via appropriate and different sentiments and the right language can make a tremendous difference in not just open rates, but also future consumer loyalty and business.
Best Time
By employing send time optimization, AI can not only determine the best time a brand’s customers are online, but also send out personalized messages. By utilizing engagement frequency, AI will also analyze past customer engagement and recommend the frequency at which messages should be sent out to minimize any potential alienation. Another plus is that AI can determine which customers are over engaged and which aren’t.
Validation
Some successful marketers and digital PR pros often used intuition to guide them. Properly used, AI can help validate these hunches to create even more powerful campaigns. In addition, validation not only adds to the value of a campaign without extra or increased cost but can result in more and quicker conversions.
Ronn Torossian is CEO of 5WPR.