How to Use AI Marketing to Scale Your Marketing Efforts

The average person hears and sees millions of messages, advertisements and communications each and every day. A lot of this is tuned out, just like background noise in a busy restaurant. But when someone hears a message relevant to them, such as their name or order number, they perk right up.

The same thing works for Marketing and Sales outreach. The more personalized your messages, the better able you are to cut through the noise to engage and convert your contacts.

Mike Madden (Head of Commercial Demand Gen at Marketo) and Jan Sijp (Senior Director Product Marketing at Conversica) discuss how each company uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to assist with personalized marketing at scale in a recent webinar.

Tips for Scaling AI Marketing Efforts

In that spirit, here are a few tips regarding personalization, email outreach and AI.

By the Numbers

There’s a pretty solid case to be made for personalizing everything you do. Here’s a handful of findings to convince you of the efficacy of personalized email marketing:

• Personalized emails deliver six times higher transaction rates than non-personalized emails.
• Emails sent from an individual’s address (rather than a business’ email address) see a 31 percent higher click-through rate.
• Emails with personalized subject lines are 26 percent more likely to be opened by recipients.
• Personalized email messages improve click-through rates by an average of 14 percent and conversion rates by 10 percent.
• Including a signature in your email improves response rates by 22 percent.
• Emails resembling personal letters are opened 137 percent more and enjoy a 129 percent higher click-through rate than graphics-heavy emails with generic “To” and “From” fields.
• A third of Marketers say if given the chance, they would prioritize personalization in the very near future.

These findings lay out a strong case for personalized outreach and email marketing which includes messages from Salespeople, Marketers and automated sales enablement tools. But no matter how you optimize your messaging, personalization requires a great deal of thought and time.

Sure, it’s easy to write a personalized email for five contacts a day. But what if you have hundreds or even thousands of incoming leads? How could your team possibly develop personalized and effective communications for each and every one? How many unique emails do you think that your Inside Sales team is capable of writing before they burn out or get bored?

Clearly, the aim of personalizing everything you do is more of a burden for organizations dealing with excessive lead volumes.

How Personalization Helps to Scale AI Marketing Efforts

Marketing and Sales teams struggling to balance personalized outreach alongside their regular duties ought to consider a solution powered by AI. AI is infinitely scalable and can handle many of the repetitive, albeit necessary, tasks that occupy your employees.

One such example is the Conversica Sales AI Assistant which autonomously engages leads through personalized, polite and persistent two-way conversations at scale. This is extremely helpful for a few reasons. The first is that personalized and unique messages are produced by the AI without Salespeople or Marketers having to write each outgoing message. Second, these conversations are built to perform and are always consistent and on message. Third, and most important of all, the Sales AI Assistant identifies handraisers and brings them to the attention of your Sales team; thus, unlocking more opportunities from your existing lead pool.

The Conversica Customer Success AI Assistant works in much the same way, delivering personalized engagement at scale, but aimed at existing customers instead of prospects. And rather than asking contacts if they want to book a Sales meeting, the Customer Success AI Assistant pushes customers to complete quarterly business reviews (QBRs), fill out surveys or investigate upsell opportunities.

But how do you know an email or text message is properly optimized and personalized? Conversica recommends that outreach emails contain at least five personalized elements each. These might include the name of your contact, the sender’s name, unique subject line, mentioning the contacts role within the organization and a clever sign-off. This is just one set of examples, of course. There are plenty of ways to personalize outreach a more individualized feel.

Whether you leverage a Conversica AI Assistant or manually write each and every communication, personalization is key to engaging customers and leads in two-way conversations.

For more great tips and tricks watch our webinar → Using AI for Personalized Marketing at Scale.

dive into the Fourth Annual Sales Effectiveness Report for more insights into prompt, persistent and personalized lead follow-up.