When AI Handles the What, Your Team Can Focus on the Why

Marketing leaders are experts at juggling competing priorities. At any given time, there are dozens of big ideas and business demands vying for space on our to-do lists. But when done right, working toward multiple goals shouldn’t scatter your focus.

This year will be about understanding your customers on a granular level you may not have explored before. It will require getting comfortable with generative AI and automations, with an eye on how these tools can extend the work of your team members. And the most successful marketers will be those who democratize data across their teams, nurturing baseline understanding of the numbers and encouraging debate about their findings in service of marketing innovation.

Honing in on just three key practices can make an outsized impact on KPIs across your business. Here’s what will differentiate great marketing from best-in-class in a climate like no other. 

Harness your current customer base

You just acquired a wave of new customers at your Q4 peak—and those shoppers brought with them a fresh batch of data. It’s time to jumpstart those long-term relationships and create new loyalties, right?

As marketers, we’re often wired to chase new customers, both off- and in-season. Even though acquiring a user can run your company several times the cost of retaining one, many teams continue to spend a disproportionate amount of time measuring acquisition at the expense of tracking current customer engagement. 

This year, put communication—and revenue growth—with current customers at the forefront of your strategy, looking at acquisition as a secondary KPI. Setting this priority in Q1 allows you to leverage insights derived from your holiday acquisition data to upsell and increase retention. Start by getting granular on your data: You likely already have a handle on who’s buying your products or what triggers are most likely to result in a sale. Go beyond basic buying behaviors to understand and build on usage patterns.

One option is to compare the activities of your broader customer base with those of your best customers, looking for commonalities and challenging your assumptions. At Mailchimp, for example, our highest growth customers tend to use Customer Journey builder automations, which can help generate up to four times more orders than bulk email, or predictive segmentation, which can help marketers achieve up to 88% more revenue. Seeking look-alikes for those high-value customers at earlier stages, we can tailor educational content to encourage active use of those features—ones we know will drive growth for their business and in turn drive growth for ours. 

When you intimately understand your current audience, you empower your team to retain and expand it with precision and insight. 

Unlock personalization with automations and AI 

Just a few years ago, marketing teams were far more limited by bandwidth and budget when it came to personalizing campaigns. Consider a marketer looking to reach 20 different types of consumers at five different points in their journey: The task would have required creation and coordination of hundreds of assets, campaigns and measurement points—not to mention the time to analyze and act on the results. Plenty of target segments had to be left behind in the name of focus and efficiency. 

Today, with the likes of GPT-3 technology for text generation or automated email journeys and webhooks for timely contact, you can connect with consumers individually like never before. Think of artificial intelligence and automations first and foremost as enablers of personalization at scale.

Imagine you’re a direct-to-consumer specialty foods brand selling products with whole, natural ingredients. The same item might appeal to folks following vegan, paleo or keto diets—as well as those who don’t adhere to a single diet at all. To maximize your sales, you would market that product a little bit differently to each group. With a single input and an understanding of your various target audiences, ChatGPT or other generative AI tools can draft dozens of versions of the same message, each optimized for a specific audience, without exponentially increasing your team’s workload.

Segmenting and automation can deliver those targeted messages effortlessly and at just the right time, all based on real-time actions and data integrations. A travel booking company might use tags and automated email journeys to upsell customers with trip insurance or to offer timely, specific packing tips to ensure a great trip. They can offer additional excursions or remind customers to make restaurant reservations, increasing share of wallet through the journey. These workflows run on their own, proactively generating sales and increasing customer satisfaction while freeing up marketers to focus on big-picture strategy.

As you plan your resources, consider how you can implement technology to execute the what and free up your teams to focus on the why. By equipping your team with the advantages of automations and AI as a baseline, they can more effectively focus on the strategies that will differentiate your brand in the marketplace.

Make data hacking a team sport 

Data-backed marketing is table stakes. It’s no secret that following the numbers will lead you to faster growth and stronger brand loyalty. But to let data lead the way effectively, make structured debate a fun, gamified weekly ritual.

On our team, we bring marketing, business analytics and finance together weekly around a consistent scorecard. Using provocative hypotheses, engaging in passionate debates, everything is fair game. “Stupid questions” are common and welcome—and often, they’re not so stupid at all. The data always tells a story, and we find the most trajectory-changing information comes when we go beyond the obvious and take time to ask how others see the numbers differently.

This practice has yielded simple, immediate wins, like updating landing page copy for an immediate rise in conversion rates. It impacts long-term strategy, too, as we continue to analyze new user behavior and consider what innovative solutions we might offer to help marketers see results faster on our platform.

When you encourage unconventional and investigative thinking around a shared set of facts, you ignite bold experiments with outsized impact. Normalize debate and curiosity, and follow the outcomes to exciting results.

However you choose to implement them, these three principles all serve a common goal: to increase your ROI and deepen your customer connections without increasing your workload. Digging into first-party data allows you to be precise and efficient both in retaining customers and acquiring new ones. On a more human level, it allows you to get better acquainted with their specific needs, offering the opportunity to create compounding value. Setting aside time after your peak season to analyze behavioral data—and then, to create automated workflows that leverage the insights—will save you time and resources all year.

With an inquisitive, collaborative approach to customer data, you can empower teams to innovate based on the numbers, testing their theories and collecting immediate wins. You can foster a culture that balances short- and long-term growth, making real-time adjustments as the landscape changes. And you can continue to build on your success—or as we like to say on our team, “beat our best, together.”