14


Q2 • 2022


FEATURE


interacted with product recommendations spent 13 percent more than those who didn’t.


Marketing messaging


Marketers have used A/B testing for decades as a way of fine-tuning everything from the most effective time of day to send emails to the best color for a CTA button. Savvy marketers are now using AI to expand their multivariate tests and generate actionable results more efficiently than they could before. The nonprofit charity: water, which is dedicated to giving people worldwide access to clean water, turned to Persado’s AI platform to boost the effectiveness of its Facebook ads. The technology generated 1,024 permutations of 16 ads—far more than could have been created and tracked using more manual means. By testing these variations, charity: water was able to determine which combinations of imagery and messaging were most productive among a variety of audience segments. The most effective ad proved to have a 227.4 percent higher conversion rate than the least effective. Implementing the most productive ads resulted in a 20.6 percent lift in views of charity: water’s website content and a 32 percent jump in donors across all audiences. It also provided the organization with insights it could use in its other marketing efforts: for instance, messaging focused on community (“Together, we’re unstoppable”) was more effective than imperatives (“Click here to see how you can help us make history”).


Email segmentation


The death of email as a marketing tool has been predicted for years. Yet email marketing platform provider Litmus estimates that the medium generates $36 in revenue for every $1 spent, with ROI increasing to 45:1 among retailers, e-tailers, and CPG brands. If your email marketing efforts don’t generate similar returns, AI can help in several ways. Programs can


segment your email list in ways you might not have considered so that you can better personalize the messages individuals receive, rather than sending one-size-fits- none blast emails. AI tools can also facilitate multivariate testing, similar to what charity: water did with its Facebook ads. And content-focused AI applications can draw on algorithms to help you hone your subject lines, offers, and overall language. State & Liberty, a multichannel seller of


apparel for men with athletic builds, had been manually creating customer segments in hopes of determining the optimal send times, frequencies, and content to send to each. Once it implemented Retention Science’s AI-powered Cortex email platform, State & Liberty was able to quickly create well-defined audience segments based on where individuals were in the customer life cycle, among other traits, and could appropriately vary the emails sent. Not only did the AI tool save the marketing team time, enabling them to focus on other projects, but it also generated a 73 percent lift in revenue, a 26 percent rise in conversion rates, and a 25 percent increase in average order value.


Chatbots


Nearly one in four consumers used a chatbot to communicate with businesses in 2020, according to conversational marketing solutions provider Drift—almost double the 13 percent that did so the previous year. Chatbots are software applications that rely on AI to conduct online or text- to-speech conversations with individuals,


and they are most commonly used as virtual customer service agents. They can answer simple requests on their own as well as gather relevant information from a consumer to pass on to a human agent for resolution of more complex issues. Successful chatbot programs help organizations cut costs—by up to 30 percent, according to IBM—by reducing the number of human contact center agents needed per shift, even providing coverage during hours when there are no live agents. And because they enable consumers to “self- serve” regarding questions and issues, they reduce the number of call center requests. MSU Federal Credit Union implemented chatbots to improve customer service, but not in the way you might expect. Rather than have AI-powered agents interact with customers, the credit union worked with solutions provider boost.ai to program a chatbot to interact with its own live agents. In just 10 days the bot was programmed to answer questions about the credit union’s most popular topics. In the past, when customers asked questions that the live agents were unable to quickly answer, the agents put the callers on hold while searching their knowledge base or asking a colleague or a manager. Now the live agents could ask the chatbot and quickly get the answer. What’s more, machine learning enabled the chatbot to become even more effective over time. After one month, the credit union and boost.ai estimated that the chatbot was able to eliminate 2,000 employee-to-employee interactions, dramatically improving contact center efficiency.


Competitive analysis


The more competitive a market segment, the greater the need for competitive analysis—and due to the sheer number of competitors, the more labor-intensive conducting such research and analysis is. Upserve, which provides point-of-sale and management software to restaurants, implemented Crayon’s competitive intelligence solution to help it stay on top of the ever-changing market. The software uses AI and ML alongside human learning not only


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