AI and automation are proving to be far more than tools to quickly generate email copy. They can redefine your small business marketing strategy, increase the impact of your marketing dollars, and help you craft efficient, effective, and deeply personal customer journeys. Here are some ways you can use AI and automation to do more than just generate content.
Bringing Sales, Service and Marketing Together
To make the most of your marketing efforts and ensure no lead slips through the cracks, it’s essential that customer insights and tracking get passed along to sales and then customer support. Marketing automation can make this valuable data visible to sales, service and marketing teams, so marketers can tailor messages to meet customer preferences and behaviours, pass higher quality leads to sales, and engage them more effectively at every point on their journey. This integrated approach can shorten your sales cycles and boost revenue by aligning marketing efforts with sales goals.
Breaking down barriers between departments starts with removing silos in your data. Leading B2B payment and rewards platform pay.com.au has experienced a 10x increase in new customer verifications since implementing Salesforce Data Cloud to provide its teams with relevant customer insights at every touchpoint.
“We reduced the time to verify customers from days to hours. This was a major win because no matter how many leads we have coming through, if we drop the ball on getting people up and running on the platform, they’ll lose interest and go somewhere else or not engage in this space altogether,” says David Walsh, Head of Digital, CX and Marketing at pay.com.au.
Hitting the Right Communication Frequency
No matter how good your product or service is, nobody likes to be bombarded with emails and messages without regard for their communication preferences. AI can automate the timing of communications, selecting the optimal moment to send an email based on when a customer is likely to engage. Subsequent communications are automatically tailored, shifting across channels like email, SMS, or WhatsApp based on how leads engage with your initial outreach.
Finding the right channels and timing for each customer makes communications feel more personal and less intrusive, improving the chances that your messages will be well-received and reducing the risk of ending up in the spam folder. That’s why pay.com.au plans to use AI to test the timing of communications and optimise subject lines, increasing customer engagement and, ultimately, lifetime value.
Making Every Marketing Dollar Count
Knowing if your marketing spend is leading to sales and where you should direct your budget is a perpetual challenge for every business. AI uses multi-touch attribution to track which marketing strategies and channels drive the most conversions and revenue. It can even guide you with automated recommendations on where to reallocate or increase your spending and provides a rationale so you understand why. This helps you allocate your budget more effectively and removes the guesswork from growing your business.
AI-powered CRM makes it faster and easier for businesses to surface and ask questions about their data. When employees at pay.com.au walk into the office, the first thing they see is a large screen with a dashboard showing the week’s performance to date, encouraging a culture of data-driven decision-making.
Scaling Personalisation
True marketing personalisation goes beyond ‘first name’ tokens. AI can analyse customer data and adapt content dynamically to match individual customer profiles, suggesting products or services aligned with their interests and previous interactions. By integrating data and AI into the flow of work, pay.com.au can efficiently provide personalised experiences to each customer. For example, if a customer has recently redeemed points for a business class flight, they may then seek accommodation. Knowing this, pay.com.au uses Marketing Cloud to automatically trigger an email promoting relevant hotel options.
65% of consumers say they’ll stay loyal to companies that offer a more personalised experience. Still, only 26% of marketers are confident that their business has the right strategy to deliver this personal touch. AI stands to help you match the growing desire for personalisation, so your marketing team can increase conversion rates without increasing workload or headcount.
Increase the Efficiency and Effectiveness of Your Marketing Efforts
With AI and automation, you can make smarter decisions with your marketing budget, increase the effectiveness of your marketing strategy, and ultimately, grow your business faster. Join the workshop, How Marketers Can Do More with Less, at Commbank Smallbiz Week to see how these tools can help you streamline your operations and connect with potential customers in more meaningful ways.
