AI-Powered Personalization: How Automation Improves Engagement & Conversions

Speaker 2: 00:08 
And welcome to our next installments. We've been talking about automation and holistic marketing, building holistic marketing systems and how to use automation in that process. Today specifically we're going to talk about AI powered personalization. So ways we can use automation to improve our engagement and conversion rates and yeah, how AI content, AI driven content and automation can create better customer experiences and help us increase our conversions, improve our conversions, get more people into our pipeline, all those good things. So wanted to start off Seth, by asking you, in terms of the customer journey, how can AI help us there? How can AI help personalize the customer journey?

Speaker 3: 00:58 
Yeah, you know, we've got more and more data about the customer each day. Right. So utilizing things like Clearbit, which HubSpot just acquired a few months ago, to understand things about the customer, whether it's their industry or you know, their, their company that they're associated with. So getting that enriched data and then we can personalize the webpage or the form or whatever it is. Now some of this personalization is maybe more advanced than some companies want to tackle or are able to tackle. It takes time and resources. But if conversions really matter. Right. This advanced personalization can be very powerful. So yeah, usually utilizing the customer data and making sense of it, building micro groups of users or customers and assigning very specific messaging to them either on the web page or experience or whatever it is or via email. Right. The more personalized we can be, the more niche we can be, the more effective our messaging and conversion rates usually if it's done right and then predictive analytics, you know, can tell us what time to post on social media for better engagement and things like, you know, which lead is more likely to convert. There's data like this being built into the tools that we use every day like HubSpot and you know, social media platforms, things like that.

Speaker 2: 02:44 
Yeah. One fun thing I've done specifically with predictive analytics or social media analytics, stuff like that is use like Sprout Social or something that tracks the analytics that helps you keep, keep an eye on the numbers, but lets you export that data into like an Excel spreadsheet. And I'll take that and feed it into chat GPT and say give me some insights about my posts. Which ones did well, like tell me some actionable things I can improve on or personalize like what's working here and what's not. That's been pretty helpful. I, I, I, I would imagine it would, you know, you could do that for a number of things. You could do that for email, send Outs and any numbers you have and you can feed into these large language models and have them pull out kind of insights or little nuggets for you like oh this, you know, your posts do better on Thursday than they do on Friday or in the afternoon rather than the evening. Just helps get you in front of people a little bit better of that.

Speaker 1: 03:42 
If I may add as well, right? I mean on the customer journey. And I think it's a good exercise as a business, right? I mean to get to know your icp. If you have it down, you can ask for suggestions, right? How can I improve a customer journey? Give me ideas, how can I get these sort of ICP engaged And then that'll allow you, like Seth say it right? I mean segment your distribution of content or your marketing channels. And then on the predictive analytics side, it's a little bit more, you know, technical at this point, but if you have the ability, you can build regression models, meaning you can build models that can tell you how to get to a point from the goal itself. So just reverse engineer from a desired outcome. And I think AI with again, data being, I would say it right, Data is a new oil. If you have it, you're rich because you have everything there. I mean that's why everybody, it's after data. So if you do your due diligence as a business and you have the data, you have all the power to do all the kind of predictive analytics you want. And again, you have very practical ways to create progression models and that'll make the job easier for everyone, right? So yeah, I think the sky's the limit. But again, you got to be intentional and really know what you want out of this. You don't need to know the journey necessarily because that's what AI is going to teach you. It's going to augment you to know. But like where you want to get at least and then reverse the engineer from there. You have to know every single part of the journey, just at least what you want and who you're after. And I think everything else is just like a journey, like a lesson. So yeah, I just want to add 2 cents there.

Speaker 4: 05:06 
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Speaker 2: 05:42 
Yeah, it's, it's pretty incredible. I've been pretty impressed with just AI's ability to come up with ideas. They might not all be great, but you might see a golden nugget or two in there like oh wow, I never would have thought of that or consider that option. So as a, as a, like a research assistant or someone who can just spit out a lot of ideas quickly is pretty helpful. So going on based, you know, continuing off that, what are some helpful AI tools that can help us create content for our buyer Personas without again feeling too robotic or too weird or. Right. With AI generation, some of that is pretty, pretty noticeable. But what are the things that can help us create content without, without losing that authenticity?

Speaker 3: 06:29 
Yeah. So you know, there are a lot of commercial tools out there. Jasper is one of the ones that's pretty popular also Copy AI and some of these others for having that user interface in front of content generation. Right. Like, you know, even Semrush has, has a tool like this now at this point and it's being built into editors. But that's, that's a good start, right in investigating some of these tools if that's for you. Also you can custom engineer prompts. That's maybe not for everyone but you know, custom engineer content generation prompts in ChatGPT, feed it your buyer Persona information, right. Your, your, your brand guidelines and, and then have inputs that help you generate. Canva has some AI tools for creating, creating content. A lot of these AI content generation functionalities are being embedded even to, you know, into like WordPress editors or things like that as you're writing. They can enhance and generate content for you or clean it up or edit it, that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2: 07:46 
Yeah, great. Awesome. So how can businesses use AI tools and products and AI content to increase. Let me restart that. How can businesses use AI products and AI content to help increase their conversion rates? How does that play into all of this?

Speaker 3: 08:10 
Yeah, things like predictive lead scoring which we talked about in the previous episode, when AI can kind of tell which leads are most likely to convert. Right. Whereas in the old days, so to speak, you had to have rules and manual priorities for scoring a lead, AI can kind of take that data and be a little bit more intelligent about what lead is most likely to convert. With HubSpot, it's their AI powered lead scoring. I think they call it Breeze and Einstein from Salesforce are some of those examples as well as automated follow ups, you know, like building email sequences for folks who have attended a webinar, downloaded a lead magnet from your website or have shown behaviors like clicks and other activity that demonstrate that they're engaged and interested in your brand or your newsletter or whatever it is. You know like lead magnets. That's, that's, that's something that you can have these automations and conversations going. That AI can help improve the personalization or even the messaging itself if, if you want to get that advanced.

Speaker 2: 09:31 
Yeah, yeah. And I would say going back to like the, the sales and marketing handoff can be clunky sometimes when this, when that's not tracked correctly. So in the, in marketing's eyes they have all these qualified leads that are ready to be, you know, to be handed off to the sales team. And the sales side, they're frustrated because they feel like they're not getting enough leads or the ones that they're getting aren't the right ones. And there's a disconnect and that handoff process I've seen often and it leads to frustration which is, and, and those, you know, marketing sales team's not getting along. Which is funny because they have the same goal. Right. Is to grow the business. So yeah, you tracking that and, and getting that smoother sales to marketing handoff process is. Yeah. Keeps everyone calm and happy. But, but make sure people aren't getting lost in your pipeline and that it's progressing and you're not reaching out too, too soon or too late. Yep.

Speaker 3: 10:29 
Yeah, there's, you know, there's, there's deal. It depends on how you think about a conversion rate. Right, right. Like a deal conversion rate. That's, that's a great example on the website itself. You know, AI chatbots for real time intelligent interaction that, that can definitely help in the, you know, in 2020 chatbots became a thing. Now people expect a little bit more intelligent responses which can help people get the answer more quickly. Right. Rather than waiting for a human or browsing through a bunch of web pages which could increase conversion rates on the website. We are also developing a tool that kind of analyzes your webpage, whether it's your homepage or other principal page on your website. Just for the messaging value proposition and user experience. We're going to Launch that soon at 08 Agency Analyze if you want to check it out there.

Speaker 2: 11:31 
Perfect, thank you. So when we're doing this, when we're, we're trying to use AI and automation to help, you know, Speed along our process, get more efficient, get more effective. What are some of the biggest challenges when we're implementing these AI and automation processes?

Speaker 3: 11:49 
Yeah, I would say one sometimes to be a little basic is fear. Fear of AI or unknown or the fact that you maybe don't have the expertise you think is needed. And of course some of that is very real. Right. Lack of expertise is a thing. AI is new. Everyone is essentially inexperienced with it to a degree. Of course I should qualify that. AI itself is not new. It's been around since the 70s, probably, probably before that with video games and basic things like that. But this generative AI and the way AI is being used today is very new. So there's that training and getting your team to get traction on it and then to learn best practices. There's tons of resources out there, but getting people over whatever it is psychologically, I think is a big challenge. Like AI is going to replace my job or I'm scared of it, whatever. The myriad reasons that folks have for not adopting it are a real thing and some of it is psychological. I've had writers hate AI because it's their craft and they want to hold on to writing. And yes, of course there's truth to that, but for certain types of content or certain types of situation, lack of resources, embrace AI and use it to enhance writing or increase our efficiency. So that's kind of one series of issues. And then another challenge is the over reliance on AI. Like oh, let's just, you get C level folks that are just like, let's automate everything or use AI for absolutely everything. All, all humans are going by the wayside, right. And then you can really end up with lackluster, subpar content or marketing. I always say that AI is a great way to 10x bad marketing or good marketing. Right. Like you could. It's about the strategy and how you use it. It's a powerful tool, but far from perfect.

Speaker 1: 14:19 
And if I may add something very quickly to this, it's maybe a not very traditional way to use AI, but I found it's very successful for people to start adopting it. You don't have to have AI do things for you, but it can train you to be better in your craft. Right? I mean you can find inspiration for your own capabilities there if you're a salesperson. A lot of these companies don't do dtc, right? It's not direct to consumer. You need a sales team. So have an AI, you know, test, you have like a mock call. Right. Have like a mock conversation for A sales call and have it, you know, get back to you and how you can be better. And it's not replacing you, it's just augmenting you. So always maybe see AI at the very beginning, that is the enemy. But maybe just as an asset, right? As a resource for you to become better and become more powerful. But I think it just goes back to mindset and how you can transition in. I totally agree with you, Seth. Like a. Let's just like automate everything and save money. It ends up being more expensive for a business. And if you actually can train your talent and be more capable, then they'll know how to manage an AI, right? I mean, if you know what you're doing, it's easier to kind of go back to the drawing board and improve because that's the end. At the end, what everybody wants at a company, right. Grow, but also scale. And I think it helps you scale from a very human standpoint, like making you better, making you feel more comfortable with your craft and your own capabilities. And again, earn inspiration for our creatives out there. Right. Marketers out there. It's not replacing you, it's probably just giving you more ideas to like amplify your genius. So that's kind of what I like to always say out there. Don't be scared of it. It's just like trying to augment you, trying to help a little, you know? So, yeah, that would be like my 2 cents here.

Speaker 2: 16:01 
I love it. Thank you. And then last question. How can businesses measure ROI from AI powered personalization? How do we measure the results of the return on our investment there?

Speaker 5: 16:14 
So it goes back to data and tracking those KPIs that matter most to your business. And if we're talking conversion rates, if you implement more personalization, are more people buying? Are more people going through your sales funnel? And what about engagement? You know, are they spending more time in your site? Are they having longer chats, Are they doing this, are they doing that? And then we just want to make sure that the again, the CX is continuing to go up. So customer satisfaction is huge. Are those, you know, net promoter scores going up, our survey scores going up? And obviously, is revenue growing? We can't just throw, you know, martech tools or automation or AI and expect a fix for a bad system. We need to build those assets over time. So beyond just general tracking of what it's doing, we need to make sure we're consistently AB testing, divide a specific audience, give one group a personalized experience, the other the current version, and see which performs better try to always try to find ways to implement better personalization, whether it's just through the human with asset, the AI, the automation. And you just want to make sure that that experience continues to go up and it's quicker and more seamless each time. AI implementation and automation to me doesn't make sense unless it's helping streamline the omnichannel marketing through sale to a conversion and then obviously just roi. It's much bigger than just the top end of personalization. It can also obviously automate tasks, make things more efficient. So are you seeing a cost savings in customer support? Is AI handling more inquiries? Is your marketing more efficient because you're targeting the right people with the right message? If you add that all up, you'll get a much clearer picture of the return on your AI powered personalization.

Speaker 2: 18:22 
Perfect. Thank you. All right everybody, thanks for listening or watching. Next episode, we're going to dive into holistic marketing and what it takes to fix fragmented strategies. Thanks again and we'll see you soon.