If you’re less than thrilled about using artificial intelligence (AI) for marketing, you’re hardly alone. Despite all the hype that AI was coming for everyone’s jobs, people were surprised to find that almost the opposite was the case — marketers and other professionals were disappointed by the limits of what AI could do. In fact, according to a 2024 Salesforce report, only 34% of marketing execs are satisfied with AI’s value-add.
But, maybe they were just doing it wrong. Many marketers still aren’t harnessing the full power of AI, and you can use this to your advantage by staying one step ahead of the competition in terms of using AI for marketing automation. Here’s why and how.
Why Marketers Should Use AI in Marketing Automation
AI Automation Tools Save Time and Money
Using AI tools in marketing automation will save you time, money, and labor. Let’s say you’re running a small- to medium-size media or e-commerce site and you want to provide three suggestions at the bottom of every article for those who want to “read more.” Until very recently, all but the very monied sites had to manually decide which articles to provide. AI automates repetitive tasks such as suggesting further reading, email campaigns, social media posting, and ad optimization, freeing up marketers to focus on strategy.
AI Automation Addresses Audience Saturation and Ad Fatigue
Advertisers spend around $25B a year attempting to achieve performance outcomes on DSPs (demand-side platforms) and niche AdTech solutions, according to estimates by Taboola, yet in many cases these channels lack the performance expertise, scale or data to get the results advertisers need. Since DSPs tend to focus on video and CTV, they can be great for branding goals, but not performance, while AdTech companies tend to lack enough scale for success. Taboola also estimates there is nearly $30B of social media spend suffering from equally diminishing returns due to a combination of audience saturation, rising costs, and ad fatigue. The latest AI marketing tools can help combat that, such as:
Personalized Ad Creative
AI analyzes a combination of user behavior, preferences, and demographics to generate customized ad variations tailored to different audience segments. This ensures that users see the most relevant version of an ad based on their engagement history. For example, if someone has been browsing t-shirts on your site that feature Iron Maiden and Slayer, the tool’s algorithm would recommend shirts featuring Metallica, rather than Ariana Grande.
Adaptive Ad Delivery
AI-powered tools adjust ad frequency to prevent overexposure, ensuring that users don’t get bombarded with the same message repeatedly. Additionally, you can pre-empt a common e-commerce customer complaint, along the lines of, “Why am I getting ads for the exact same swimsuit I just bought?”
Multi-Channel Distribution
AI optimizes cross-platform campaigns, ensuring ads are rotated across social media, search engines, display networks, and video platforms. This prevents fatigue by presenting ads in different formats and contexts.
AI Automation Tools Get You More Customers
AI can test and optimize content variations to maximize engagement. For instance, the most advanced AI marketing tools can generate and test different email subject lines, leading to higher open rates. Similarly, AI can optimize website content in real-time based on user behavior, improving conversion rates. This is especially useful for efficient budgeting and scaling performance marketing efforts.
Three Ways Marketers Should Use AI in Marketing Automation
You’ve been on the user end of AI-driven marketing automation for years, although you might not have realized the extent of it. Maybe you noticed that when you and a friend both searched for the exact same flights on a search engine, your lists and prices were not identical to one another. Was this a software glitch? Absolutely not: The search engine’s AI algorithm responds to your behavior, ranging from the geographical location of your IP address to the number of times you’ve performed the same search, and prices them accordingly. Thanks to the spread of generative AI, you now have access to similar tools as the search engines, travel sites, and airlines. Here are some areas where you should be using AI in marketing automation.
1. Personalized Email Campaigns
AI analyzes customer behavior, preferences, and past interactions to create hyper-personalized email content, subject lines, and send times. This dramatically cuts down on testing times and allows you to reach targeted, engaged audiences quicker than ever. The latest AI marketing tools can help you create variations, automate testing, and integrate with your email platform to identify the best-performing versions. This is a game-changer for predictive audiences and efficient budgeting.
2. Dynamic Content Creation
You can use AI to automatically create multiple versions of ad copy for A/B testing, or generate localized content for different regions. As a first step, tools like ChatGPT or DeepSeek can be useful. For example, I entered the prompt: “Come up with three versions of the following email text aimed at customers for our newest snowblower, the Iceblast 3000 — one aimed at people who already purchased a snowblower, one aimed at people who have a snowblower in their cart but have not completed the purchase, and one aimed at people who have only browsed without putting anything in the cart.” This is what it came up with (I’m including only the subject lines and the first sentences of the proposed emails).
3. Enhanced Personalization
AI enables marketers to automate highly personalized experiences for customers by analyzing vast amounts of data in real-time. Netflix and Amazon have been doing this for years with suggestions like, “You might also like” or “People who bought [product X] also bought this.” With the advent of generative AI tools, even SMBs now have access to this sophisticated personalization technology. These tools can help you leverage predictive audiences to deliver tailored recommendations and improve customer engagement.
How to Implement AI Marketing Automation
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the way marketers approach automation, enabling smarter decision-making, personalized customer experiences, and improved efficiency. Whether you’re a small business or a large enterprise, implementing AI marketing automation can help you stay competitive. Here’s how to get started.
Step 1: Define Your Goals
Before diving into AI marketing automation, identify your objectives. Are you looking to improve email open rates, increase social media engagement, or optimize ad spend? Clear goals will help you choose the right tools and strategies.
Step 2: Choose the Right AI Tools
Select AI-powered tools that align with your goals. For example:
- Use HubSpot or Mailchimp for email marketing automation.
- Leverage Hootsuite or Buffer for social media scheduling and analytics.
- Explore Realize or Google Ads for ad optimization.
Step 3: Integrate AI Into Your Workflow
Once you’ve chosen your tools, integrate them into your existing marketing stack. Most AI tools offer seamless integrations with popular platforms like CRM systems, email marketing software, and analytics tools. As Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, has said, “AI is the runtime that is going to shape all of what we do going forward.”
Step 4: Test and Optimize
Use A/B testing to experiment with different strategies. For example:
- Test email subject lines, CTAs, and send times.
- Experiment with ad creatives and targeting.
Step 5: Analyze and Refine
AI tools provide actionable insights through analytics. Use these insights to refine your campaigns and improve ROI. For example:
- Analyze email campaign performance with HubSpot or Realize.
- Track social media engagement with Sprout Social or Hootsuite.
Top AI Marketing Automation Tools
Those are some viable suggestions, but now what? How do you parse out which customers get which emails, and how do you exclude customers who live in places that never get snow? That’s where you should be maximizing your company’s full marketing potential by introducing tools specific to AI marketing automation. Some examples:
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a popular social media management tool that uses AI to schedule posts, analyze performance, and provide insights to improve social media campaigns. Its AI capabilities help in identifying optimal posting times and audience engagement trends.
HubSpot Marketing Hub
HubSpot’s AI-powered marketing automation tools help businesses manage email marketing, lead nurturing, and customer segmentation. Its AI features include predictive lead scoring, content strategy recommendations, and chatbot automation.
Marketo (by Adobe)
Marketo uses AI to streamline email marketing, account-based marketing, and campaign management.
realize:
realize: is a generative AI-driven platform based on over 17 years of first-party data. It helps marketers optimize content distribution and engagement, offering features like predictive analytics, automated A/B testing, and dynamic content optimization, making it a powerful performance marketing tool.
Leverage AI for your creatives, automate testing, scale your performance results.
Key Takeaways
AI automates repetitive tasks like email campaigns, social media posting, and content recommendations, freeing marketers to focus on strategy and creativity. By analyzing customer behavior and preferences, AI also enables hyper-personalized marketing, improving engagement and conversion rates. Using AI tools to generate, test, and optimize content variations (e.g., email subject lines, ad copy) in real-time, you can ensure higher performance and ROI.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Will marketing be automated by AI?
Yes, AI is increasingly automating repetitive marketing tasks like email campaigns, ad optimization, and content recommendations. However, human creativity and strategy remain essential for high-level decision-making.
How will AI be used in marketing?
AI is used for personalized email campaigns, dynamic content creation, real-time content optimization, predictive analytics, and automating customer segmentation and targeting.
How is AI used in automation?
AI powers automation by analyzing data, predicting customer behavior, and executing tasks like A/B testing, email scheduling, and ad targeting without manual intervention.
