It’s no secret that AI is driving the growth of the marketing industry. As a writer in the marketing industry, I’ve seen it myself.
AI can help with everything from brainstorming to content creation. But another marketing task where AI excels? Personalization.
I’ve received a lot of personalized marketing materials, and it’s obvious when something uses superficial personalization and when something is tailored to my specific interests and behaviors – and the latter always gets my attention.
If you’re interested in using AI personalization in marketing to reach your customers, I’ve put together this guide to help you.
Table of contents
Why use AI for marketing personalization?
In my experience it is The main reason to use AI to personalize your marketing is that it allows you to scale your personalization efforts.
Its use is no stranger to marketers Marketing automation Tools to personalize emails, generate leads, or set up workflows. Automation tools are great for streamlining recurring marketing tasks.
But the difference with using AI for marketing personalization is this AI is dynamic. AI can collect and interpret data, identify opportunities and adapt to the data presented.
This means that AI is not a tool to streamline personalizations, but can help you personalize your marketing on a deeper level.
Not only does personalization help increase sales, but 96% of marketers also say a personalized experience increases the chances of buyers converting into repeat customers.
Benefits of AI Personalization Marketing
If you’re like most marketers I know, you already have reliable marketing automation in place. However, if you’re interested in improving your automations even further, consider adding AI personalization to the mix.
According to marketers I spoke with, these are just some of the benefits.
Personalization at scale
This shows that AI is not a replacement for your current personalization efforts, but rather a tool to help you scale. If you give the right prompts and have a clear idea of what type of data you’re looking for, AI can help you reach more customers in a personalized way.
As James BrooksMarketer and founder of Journorobosums it up: “AI gives us the opportunity to scale the unscalable.”
Brooks adds: “The key is to use this creatively and thoughtfully and put in the effort up front. If you put in the effort on the front end and create a great, thorough prompt, it will serve you on autopilot every day for months or years.”
Lauren PetrulloCEO and founder of an award-winning digital marketing agency Mungo Mediaadds to this opinion: “The personalization you can use with AI makes the consumer or subscriber feel like you’re talking to them one-to-one rather than one-to-many,” she says.
Improved marketing automations
As I mentioned earlier, every marketer uses marketing automation to streamline their tasks. AI tools can improve your current automations by making them smarter and more data-driven.
Let’s say I have an automation that segments my audience. AI can go one step further by recognizing patterns and predicting the behavior of this audience.
This can help me make more informed marketing and business decisions.
Greater customer benefit
Ultimately, greater personalization leads to greater customer value.
The more details you know about your target audience, the more tailored your marketing will be. This results in them receiving more value than they would have through generic marketing tactics.
Challenges of AI personalization marketing
AI personalization tools are not without their flaws. Let’s break down some of the challenges and how marketers can overcome them.
Craft prompts
The most common challenge I hear about when using AI – and have experienced it myself – is prompting.
AI is intelligent, but it is still learning. In fact, most tools require time and a lot of practice (such as receiving prompts) to adapt to your voice, tone, and needs.
This can be a challenge when using AI for personalization. Brooks suggests being as specific as possible to generate better prompts:
“Think of a language learning model (LLM) as a person – a VERY intelligent and knowledgeable person, but still a person,” he says.
“It can’t read your mind. Set very specific prompts. Tell the LLM exactly what you want: how you want it to write, what you want the result to look like, how you want things to be formatted, what you want and what you don’t want.”
Technical knowledge
Another challenge marketers face is a lack of technical knowledge.
Personalizing marketing at scale requires a little more technical expertise than, say, using ChatGPT.
You may need to understand APIs and have a deeper understanding of how AI works to create personalization workflows and automated outputs.
“Fortunately, with the proliferation of no-code tools, it has never been easier to leverage APIs and automate your marketing,” says Brooks.
“I recommend looking at tools like Make.com and Zapier that connect natively to your favorite marketing tools and AI platforms like OpenAI. A little YouTube viewing can also go a long way toward learning these things.”
Top 5 Use Cases for AI Personalization Marketing
1. Email marketing
Sending personalized emails is nothing new. We’ve all received a marketing email directed at us or reminding us of the item we just viewed while shopping online.
But AI tools can help marketers take things a step further.
Using AI, you can collect customer data such as birthday, hobbies, professional expertise, and even passions. Then enter this information into an LLM before sending your marketing emails.
This way, you can send emails that actually speak their language, suggests Brooks.
“You can do this automatically using various no-code tools,” he says. “I personally use Bento for my emails. “It can make an API call for every email it sends, meaning you can send unique emails per person, even if you’re effectively sending a ‘broadcast’ to thousands of people.”
2. Thought leadership
Yes, you can use AI to identify thought leadership opportunities.
Let me explain.
When researching use cases for this article, I reached out to X and asked marketers for examples of how they were using AI for personalization.
I connected with Brooks, the founder of Journorobo, through this tweet.
He was notified of my tweet through his AI tool, which searches for journalist requests (like the one I shared) and cross-references his user database to send personalized emails to users that match the request.
It even offers recommended talking points based on users’ bio.
Using AI tools like this can help marketers discover thought leadership and PR opportunities immediately.
Instead of waiting for a journalist to come forward and cover your company or interview your marketing leaders, you can be proactive with your thought leadership strategy.
Pro tip: AI can also help you capitalize on opportunities far ahead of your competition. Brooks was one of the first to respond to my query and I have no doubt that he was able to move forward thanks to the personalized AI email he received.
3. Chatbots
AI can also be used to personalize your chatbots.
Whether you have a chatbot set up on your website or for Facebook or Instagram, chatbots are essential for personalizing customer interactions.
You can use AI to create one customizable chatbotlike this one from HubSpot to scale customer support, generate leads, and book more meetings.
An AI chatbot streamlines this process and makes the conversation even more personal thanks to its dynamic memory and adaptability.
“AI provides a reminder of the conversation that you can incorporate into future messages,” says Petrullo. “You can also have the AI read the tone of a person’s responses, so you can respond based on the energy level someone is typing.”
4. Landing pages
Another great way to use AI is with programmatic SEO.
Programmatic SEO is all about creating landing pages (usually hundreds, sometimes thousands) to automatically target keywords. This process is done in bulk, meaning it could take hundreds of hours if you were to do it manually.
AI can help you do this at scale. Using AI, you can create hundreds of programmatic landing pages that meet search terms based on industry or location.
Upwork is a great example of this. You can search for any type of freelance service in any city and Upwork has a landing page. For example, I searched for “freelance graphic designers Austin” and found this.
I then searched Google for “freelance copywriter Los Angeles” and the results showed an identical landing page from Upwork.
“I have sites with a broad audience and lots of different niche interests,” says Brooks. “I used AI to create thousands of landing pages that speak very directly to these niche audiences, make relevant cultural references, and use the vernacular of these niches (even if I know nothing about them!).”
5. Localization and translation
As you expand into international markets, you can use AI to localize your content by translating it into different languages for your different target markets.
This can be done for programmatic landing pages, as mentioned above. You can also localize ads, product marketing assets, and SEO content.
You don’t necessarily have to expand into different countries to benefit from localization. If your audience is global and you want to adapt the ads or landing pages to their language, AI can automatically translate for you.
It can take years for someone on your team to learn a new language to the point where they can translate marketing content. Even if you have translators on your team, it’s difficult to scale personalized content when translating manually.
“Although the AI is not capable of full empathy mapping and empathy matching, it has strong language skills,” says Petrullo. “You can use it as a common language interface at scale.”
Scale your marketing personalization with AI
After speaking to marketers and exploring various use cases for AI for marketing personalization, my main takeaway is that it is essential if you want to scale.
Personalizing your marketing efforts goes beyond targeting your audience by name in emails. Marketing personalization is about getting to know your customers on a deeper level.
It’s about understanding their interests, behaviors and the way they speak so you can market your products or services in a way that resonates more with them.
Using AI personalization in your marketing means you are more data-driven. Using AI tools, you can identify marketing opportunities, predict customer behavior, localize your content, and tailor your messaging.
And if you want to do this at scale, using AI is a must.