Personalized Marketing with AI

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Let’s try something fun: open your Netflix account and search for a movie. Now, ask a friend to do the same on their account. Notice anything different? Yup, the thumbnails you both see are probably not the same, even for the same shows! Netflix customizes them just for you, based on what you’ve watched and liked. This is all thanks to AI using techniques like content-based filtering to figure out what thumbnail will catch your eye. Pretty cool, right?

This is Louis, co-founder of Towards AI. In today’s post made in collaboration with ActiveCampaign, which I’ll introduce later, we’ll explore why the old one-size-fits-all strategy in ads and marketing is obsolete, and how AI is revolutionizing marketing by making it personal and engaging.

Ok, now think about the tools you use every day…

Grammarly, for example, uses natural language processing (NLP) to suggest writing improvements and check for originality. For visual content creation, there are tools like DALL-E and MidJourney, using diffusion models, another type of AI system to create stunning images from text prompts. Even Canva has jumped on this, making design processes easier thanks to the many AI tools that have been implemented. And when it comes to managing your social media strategy — from creating content and writing captions to analyzing trends and timing your posts — AI tools like Hootsuite, Typefully and Buffer have got you covered. They use machine learning to figure out the best times to post and what kind of content will get your audience buzzing.

Ever wondered how designers and product teams understand what users really want? Tools like FullStory use heatmaps and session replays to analyze how users interact with your app or website. This helps pinpoint what’s working and what’s not. These insights often come from unsupervised learning techniques like clustering, which segment users based on their behaviours.

Chatbots have come a long way too. From simple scripts to smart AI-driven systems using NLP and machine learning, they can now understand past interactions and personal data to create really personalized experiences. Take chatbots from Drift and Intercom, for example. They handle customer inquiries and provide tailored responses, making your customer service shine. Sentiment analysis tools like MonkeyLearn and Lexalytics use NLP to assess the tone of social media posts, comments, and conversations. This helps brands keep an eye on their reputation and respond to feedback quickly, keeping their image intact. AI also automates workflows, ensuring your marketing processes are smooth and effective. Machine learning can also personalize email content, optimize send times, and segment your audience, boosting engagement and conversion rates.

Talking about email campaigns, you don’t want a dozen email suggestions. This is also why I didn’t talk about ChatGPT yet or all other general bots. Suggestions are cool, but what you need in marketing is a suggestion that will work. It is the best alternative that AI helps you find thanks to analyzing tons of data for you. This is what all the tools mentioned up to now allow you to do, and it’s also what ActiveCampaign does. For example, they have an email marketing assistant that takes your campaigns to the next level by leveraging advanced AI techniques to personalize your emails through recommendation engines and NLP, analyzing past interactions and customer data to tailor content and find the best recommendation for you to send.

ActiveCampaign’s Dynamic Content feature for emails swaps out subject lines, preview text, and images to find the best combinations. It also groups contacts into meaningful segments based on their behaviours. This is super useful if you want to target specific groups with tailored campaigns. Such segmentation and tagging are often handled by unsupervised learning techniques like K-means clustering and graph-based algorithms. It’s not just a chatbot plugged in.

You can also use ActiveCampaign to maintain consistent and personalized messaging across various platforms — email, social media, direct mail — you name it. It helps grow your leads by automating follow-up emails and updating contact information based on interactions. Plus, with event-based triggers, your sales team gets notified instantly when a lead shows interest or takes a specific action, ensuring timely and relevant engagement.

ActiveCampaign’s analytics leverage machine learning models to compile and analyze data from various sources. This provides actionable insights that help refine your marketing strategies without the heavy lifting. AI also assists in content creation, aligning email copy, ads, and social media posts with your brand’s voice and tone, saving you time and effort.

Obviously using the best LLMs and many other advanced techniques and engineering, all those tools, including ActiveCampaign, increase engagement mostly through personalized and dynamic content, automate processes to save time, and provide clearer insights into campaign performance. ChatGPT cannot do all that for you, and building such complex systems is where companies can bring their piece and why those tools are worthwhile to us. Many of them aren’t just “GPT wrappers.”

Video marketing is another space where things are booming. And they for sure don’t only rely on ChatGPT again. Tools like Opus Clip uses AI to scan your longer videos and identify the most engaging segments. It uses various criteria, like viewer engagement metrics and content analysis, to pick out the highlights. Then, it stitches these segments together into short, compelling clips perfect for sharing on social media. It doesn’t just create one video; it optimizes each clip for different platforms. Whether you’re posting on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube, it adjusts the format and style to fit the vibe of the platform. We’ve come such a long way in so little time…

While these tools are amazing and cater to all your needs, they do come with significant challenges and considerations. First, of course, the results are not perfect. These are not perfect super intelligence that will replace your work or workers. They are useful tools to help you be more efficient or more creative. But remember the keyword that they are there to help you. They are tools, not replacements.

For all those who will make the move and use any of these tools, balancing automated interactions with personal touchpoints is also crucial to maintaining genuine connections with customers.

We also need to be careful with the data collected from our users and use it ethically. Marketers must prioritize data security by implementing robust encryption, securing access, and complying with regulations like GDPR and CCPA. Respecting customer privacy and being transparent about data collection and usage for AI is key.

So, it’s already pretty clear that the possibilities for the future of marketing are endless. I’ve mentioned a dozen tools that already leverage state-of-the-art LLMs and AI techniques to help in various parts of the marketing workflow, and we are just at the start of the transition curve. Are there any tools you are using that I missed in the article?

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more insights on how AI is transforming the world around us!