Data and AI are today’s power couple. While customer data holds a wealth of insight, marketers have reached a point where their ability to capture data has exceeded their ability to take action on it. But coupled with AI, marketers have a way to make sense of the volume, velocity and variety of their data and use it to adapt marketing actions in real-time to drive relevance and impact across the customer journey.

Yet, there is a lot of confusion around AI because even though it’s been hyped with promises of breakthrough transformations, it’s remained largely black box. As a result, marketers are questioning AI’s credibility and are unsure where AI belongs in their marketing strategies.

AI: Unlocking ROI from Customer Data

To separate the hype from the real ROI, Blueshift set out to quantify the impact brands implementing AI-powered campaigns have realized in customer engagement, conversion and revenue. We analyzed 3.8B marketing interactions across channels and verticals, including e-commerce, media, consumer finance, and travel. Results of the benchmark study, published in the report, ROI of AI Marketing: 4 Levers for Cross-Channel Success, show that AI-powered marketing campaigns achieve:

• 3X revenue relative to their use in the marketing mix
• 3.1X-7.2X lift in customer engagement
• Nearly 2X greater impact on engagement for mobile push compared to email
• Continuous improvement in campaign performance as the AI engine learns from customer interactions, driving an additional 50% lift over initial results

Brands across industries are experiencing performance gains from incorporating AI into their marketing campaigns. For example, LendingTree saw a 35% lift in revenue per email by sending “Savings Alerts” that are personalized to each user based on their credit history and optimizing its send times for engagement. Tradera saw gross sales per session increase by 125% when deploying AI-recommended content.

Optimizing the Customer Experience with AI

People today want relevancy and expect immediacy, but marketers face challenges delivering that experience in today’s world of always-on consumers, channel proliferation, and fleeting consumer attention spans. Marketers need to act fast to deliver tailored, timely, cross-channel experiences and that requires a tool that scales insights, decision making and cross-channel automation. AI is that tool. AI is also the ingredient that advances Customer Data Platforms from a system that unifies and distributes customer data to one that truly activates that data by using it for real-time decisioning and dynamically orchestrating customer engagement.

At its core, AI helps marketers be smarter and faster about how they engage customers along the customer journey by optimizing the “Who, What, When & Where” of marketing:

• “The Who” with Predictive Audiences: Select the customers who should be targeted for a marketing campaign.
• “The What” with Predictive Recommendations: Determine the right piece of content, offer or product to show each unique customer.
• “The When” with Predictive Engage Time: Tailor campaign delivery to the times when each individual customer is most likely to engage.
• “The Where” with Predictive Channel-of-Choice: Deliver campaigns on each individual customer’s channel-of-choice.

Activate Customer Data with AI

Data can be a powerful competitive advantage when harnessed effectively. Companies that are able to successfully unify their customer data and translate it into improved customer experiences will be the winners in today’s dynamic landscape. But realizing data’s potential requires a tool built for its increasing volume, speed and complexity. Realizing data’s potential requires AI.

For the full set of findings of AI’s impact on the core components of marketing and real customer examples of revenue gains achieved by implementing AI-powered marketing, read Blueshift’s report The ROI of AI in Marketing: 4 Levers for Cross-Channel Success.