7 Examples of AI in Marketing Automation
mohit vyas

Marketing automation has advanced with the development of artificial intelligence (AI), shifting from rule-based systems to highly intelligent, adaptive tools.

90% of marketing professionals use AI tools to automate customer interactions while 88% say the technology has helped them personalize the customer journey across channels, according to a Statista survey.

As AI continues to evolve, there will be more opportunities for marketers to use automation to create personalized, efficient, and scalable campaigns that convert.

In this blog, we examine 7 key ways you can use AI-powered marketing automation to optimize your marketing efforts.  

1. Predictive Analytics & Customer Segmentation

The most powerful element of AI is how it can analyze huge amounts of data. This not only saves time and money but it helps use that data to make predictions, known as predictive analytics. 

For example, you could get insights into customer behavior by analyzing past purchases. This can be done on an individual level to see if there’s a pattern: for example to see if an interaction was triggered by an email or if it was due to a promotion on social media. 

These insights can help you segment customers based on behavior or interests and predict future buying times or preferred offers. With this knowledge, you can target customer segments at the right time with the right offer on the most likely channel to convert.

Brand example - Natural Cycles

Natural Cycles is a birth control app that uses an algorithm to gauge a woman's fertility status based on body temperature. 

To get more granular in its targeting and create more personalized messages with users, they used the AI-powered marketing automation platform Optimove to analyze user data and behavior patterns.

By segmenting users through real-time activity, the app could tailor messages to each customer category. They could also schedule more campaigns in less time and with fewer people.

2. Hyper-Personalized Content & Recommendations

ChatGPT has shaken up the marketing world, particularly for those creating content or companies wanting to create content formats at scale. 

Many other tools are now on the market, including Claude, Perplexity, Google NotebookLM, and Midjourney, all able to create content based on clear prompts. 

Recent advances in text, image, and video generation help marketers develop targeted ads, product descriptions, or email campaigns. AI-powered tools like Adobe Creative Cloud Express and Canva can help marketers generate graphics from text prompts.

Some marketers are even creating content that adapts in real-time and responds to context and audience sentiment to enable hyper-personalization.

Brand example - Spotify

Spotify relies on AI algorithms to build playlists and artist recommendations based on a user’s listening activity. 

This means the audio streaming service can provide customers with more of the music they love and recommendations based on their taste. 

Spotify also has an AI-powered DJ for premium subscribers and a pilot AI voice translation for podcasts.

3. Chatbots & Conversational AI

By leveraging conversational AI, businesses across industries can provide more personalized and efficient customer service and free up the time and resources of their human agents. 

That’s why, according to Gartner research, chatbots will become the primary customer service channel for roughly 25% of businesses by 2027.

And chatbots are evolving. AI chatbots with advanced NLP can handle complex queries and adapt responses based on customer tone and intent. They can also help provide 24/7 customer support around-the-clock without compromising quality.

Brand example - Lemonade Insurance

Digital insurance company Lemonade developed a chatbot, named Maya, to guide users navigating the insurance-buying process. 

Maya can collect information, provide quotes, and handle payments. The bot makes sure the customer gets insurance within 90 seconds and paid within three minutes. 

Maya also chats with customers to provide customized answers to difficult questions but helps the company make changes to existing policies. As a machine learning system, the more customer service Maya provides, the smarter it gets as each interaction helps it to learn.

Lemonade reports that Maya now handles a quarter of their inquiries and has sold 1.2M insurance policies in just three years from its launch.

4. Improved Campaign Optimization & Performance Measurement

The ability to optimize a campaign and monitor its performance is crucial for marketers. While this could be a laborious process, AI-driven tools can not only track KPIs but they also provide real-time feedback and actionable insights.

With this level of understanding, marketers can optimize campaigns to discover the top performing channel (e.g. email) and get insights on trends or roadblocks to get the most out of any campaign.  

There are also AI tools that can automatically adjust campaigns based on KPIs like engagement, click-through rate, and conversions such as Google Analytics 360 and Zoho Analytics.

Brand example - The North Face

Exploration brand, North Face wanted to understand what consumers looked for in each market to optimize the consumer experience to those preferences. The company often does this by constantly monitoring how consumers search for items on its website.

By using Google Tag Manager 360, in combination with Analytics 360, the brand discovered that their customers were searching for a new term - “midi parka.” To tap into this, the company renamed one of its products and drove a 3X increase in conversions and revenue.

5. Lead Scoring & Enhanced Sales Automation

According to Salesforce’s State of Sales report, 98% of sales teams think automated lead scoring improves lead prioritization. 

AI lead scoring uses algorithms to track and assess user or client interactions. This information is then used by the AI scoring model to forecast which leads will result in more profitable sales or clients and can improve handoff to sales teams.

Sales teams can also automate lead nurturing by setting up AI-triggered campaigns that adapt based on a lead’s actions making them more personalized and likely to drive engagement.

AI can also be used to get greater insights into customer or client behavior and automate customer-facing processes such as sending emails or automating sales or customer reports.  

Brand example - U.S Bank

U.S. Bank wanted to use predictive lead scoring to help its sales team focus on the most promising leads and opportunities. 

To do this they use Salesforce’s Einstein, an integrated set of AI and machine learning technologies.

Using Einstein’s predictive lead scoring helped U.S. Bank see a 25% increase in closed deals, a 260% increase in lead conversion rates, and a 300% increase in marketing qualified leads.

6. Visual Recognition for Social and Ecommerce

AI can now analyze images to identify brand-relevant content, user-generated content, or product matches. 

As a result, visual search engines are seeing significant demand due to their applications in the retail and e-commerce sectors, meaning that the global AI-powered ecommerce market is expected to reach $16.8 billion by 2030. 

For example, image classification for mobile commerce and social commerce are becoming more popular as people use phones to search for a product or service. And facial recognition could be used to detect the emotion of the person to help enhance sentiment analysis.  
Automated image recognition can help marketers analyze their visual content to measure its quality and relevance. It can also be used to optimize your visual content to enhance your images and generate tags or keywords to improve SEO and accessibility

Brand example - L’Oreal

L’Oreal has developed a generative AI-powered personal beauty assistant, Beauty Genius, to offer personalized diagnostics, beauty routine recommendations, and Q&A sessions.

The tool uses advanced technologies like augmented reality, computer vision, and Gen AI to provide an immersive and secure experience. The aim of the assistant is to provide customers with an experience that “resembles a natural conversation with a beauty expert”.

Customers can also use a virtual try-on feature that uses augmented reality to experiment with new looks in real-time and get suggestions tested by makeup artists. a

7. Ethical Considerations and Transparency

When you use AI in your marketing activities, you allow the technology to access a vast wealth of customer and company data. This means you have a responsibility to protect that data. 

To address these and other AI-related ethical concerns, businesses need to be transparent and accountable when they use AI in their automation processes. Be honest with consumers about the fact your company uses AI and outline what you use it for so they have information and can opt-out or consent. 

Brand example - O2

In an effort to boost awareness of the U.K mobile network’s scam protection technology and ramp up its customer centricity, O2 created AI grandma. 

This campaign created Daisy, an AI ‘Granny’ to answer calls in real-time from fraudsters to keep them on the phone and away from customers for as long as possible.

Daisy has her own phone number, which O2’s anti-fraud team added to contact lists used by scammers. She combines AI models to listen to a caller and transcribe their voice into text and then uses a custom large language model to respond.

It’s a great example of a brand highlighting the dangers of AI and providing a solution along with boosting brand awareness.