Small Businesses Trust AI With Marketing. Their Customers Do Not

Segmented email campaigns can produce up to 760% more revenue than traditional batch-and-blast sending. AI makes it easier to generate many personalized message variations quickly and cheaply, but the main challenge becomes identifying the right audience. Small businesses often have customer data across purchase history, email activity, CRM notes, support tickets, social comments, and event attendance. This data can reveal customer types, interests, and purchase timing. AI tools can automate targeted campaigns using that information, but the data must be provided to the platform. First-party data platforms are associated with substantially higher revenue than relying only on third-party data, and small businesses may need to build customer data flows to use their data effectively.

"Klaviyo benchmark data show that segmented campaign emails can generate as much as 760% more in revenue compared with traditional batch-and-blast send strategies. This is nothing new marketers have known about segmentation for over a decade. With AI, what has changed is that now it's possible to create hundreds of personalized versions quickly and inexpensively. Now that we've made writing easy, the difficult part isn't writing. It's knowing who you're writing to."

"Most small businesses have access to large amounts of customer data which will be used by their marketing department. The purchase history in QuickBooks, email exchanges in Gmail, notes from a CRM, support ticket entries, social media comments and event attendees tell us exactly what type of customers we have, what our customers' interests are and at what point our customers are likely to make a purchase. An artificial intelligence (AI) tool can take all of this information and build an automated, targeted AI-based marketing campaign. However, one must input the customer data into the AI platform."

"Forrester's report stated that those companies using first-party data platforms had revenues 2.4 times higher than companies using only third-party data. For larger corporations with dedicated full time data teams developing a customer data flow is typically considered a normal project. Developing a customer data flow for a small business with 12 employees is different as it requires having some employee commit time to identify where the company stores its customer data, in what form the customer data is stored and how to move the customer data into the tools needed to utilize it."

Read at Forbes