We recently partnered with Blueshift on their annual Marketing Martech report, which sheds light on the data, technology and AI marketers are turning to in 2020 to improve efficiencies. The results, which showed that the vast majority of marketers are missing a crucial element in their strategies and tech stacks, were picked up by many outlets including Forbes, Yahoo News, Markets Insider, and KPVI!
“Blueshift is at the forefront of building tools that drive substantive customer engagement, leveraging artificial intelligence to allow marketers to achieve true 1:1 personalization with current and prospective customers. We are excited to see Blueshift use our insights to illustrate the value marketers can experience in using AI to create real-time, individualized connections with consumers.” — Joe Valenza, Kelton’s Associate Director of Insights & Strategy
Check out their recent coverage in Forbes:
2020 Is The Year AI Goes Mainstream In Marketing
By: Louis Columbus
- Looking to improve the accuracy, speed, and relevance of responses to customers, marketers, are selectively adopting more AI-based apps into their tech stacks in 2020.
- According to a recent Kelton Global study, 60% of marketers plan to increase their use of AI in the next 12 months.
- Marketers have high expectations for AI’s ability to help improve data usage levels, break data silos, and improve marketing effectiveness.
These and many other insights are from Blueshift’s study published in collaboration with Kelton Global titled Marketer Martech in 2020: An annual look at tech stack weak spots and wins. You can download a copy of the study here (13 pp., PDF, opt-in). The methodology is based on interviews with 514 B2C marketers distributed across several industries, including e-commerce and retail, digital media & publishing, consumer finance, career development & education, hospitality & travel, arts & entertainment, and real estate. 76% of the respondents are in senior-level positions in B2C marketing companies.
What’s noteworthy about the study is the finding that marketers are relying on more integrated tech stacks combined with AI applications to increase real-time responsiveness with customers across multiple channels.
Key insights from the study include the following:
- The need to improve real-time personalization of every customer interaction is a proven catalyst for driving marketers to adopt AI. Marketers are focusing on how to improve real-time responsiveness across every channel while striving to optimize campaigns and strategies. To accomplish those goals, they’re relying on AI to provide more in-depth and contextually relevant insights than existing data collection, and analysis techniques provide. 86% say their organization currently faces challenges creating personalized experiences across all channels, another factor helping to drive AI adoption in marketing.
- Improving speed and the quality of responses customers receive across multiple channels is also a powerful motivator promoting marketers to invest in AI. 44% of marketers say that their investments in AI have allowed them to act more quickly on customer behaviors and deliver a better customer experience. Marketers aren’t getting enough accuracy, speed, and responsiveness from their existing tech stacks, which is further accelerating their adoption of AI-based apps. The following graphic reflects how AI is making contributions across ten different dimensions of customers’ journeys.
- 58% of marketers say adopting AI helps their organizations achieve higher revenue, followed by greater customer engagement (57%) and higher ROI (49%). The greater the expertise an organization attains with AI versus their peers who have intermediate to basic data analytics skills, the stronger they are competitively. Marketers with AI expertise far outdistance their peers. AI-literate marketers are earning an 81% ROI on their AI spending and a 49% increase in revenues compared to their peers, according to Kelton Global’s analysis shown below.
- Marketers who take on the challenging work of improving customer experiences using AI are 22% more likely to see revenue gains – some as high as 30%, according to Kelton Global. Marketing leaders investing in AI are making their investments pay off by enabling more consistent, coordinated cross-channel experiences, driving greater revenue as a result. The research team finds marketers who excel at using AI to improve cross-channel personalization by making better use of transactions, past behavior and marketing campaign data are generating higher revenue than their peers.
- AI is proving its value by enabling real-time cross-channel personalization first, followed by making solid contributions to optimizing marketing campaigns based on transactional and production interaction data. 75% of marketing leaders are using AI and predictive Modeling to improve the accuracy and speed of cross-channel personalization first. By stabilizing and scaling cross-channel personalization first, marketing teams can act more responsively to customer preferences and behaviors (44%). They are also more effective at planning and executing campaigns and customer experiences (41%) that matter to those they serve. Best of all, marketers with AI expertise are reducing the lag time of aggregating data to the point of being able to use it (23 days on average before AI is implemented; real-time results after implementation).