• by Ray Schultz , March 6, 2019

Consumers not only want personalized communications, they demand them, judging by A Marketer’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence, an infographic from KoeppelDirect. 

People are 1.3 times more likely to consider personalized messages as important versus unimportant, and they are 1.9 times more likely to see them as important at all. 

What’s more, 51% of consumers expect companies to be fully in gear by 2020, anticipating their needs and offering relevant recommendations. In addition, 70% expect brands to understand how they use products, and that’s a condition of their willingness to buy.

According to Koeppel, BMW achieved a 10% increase in “optimization” when it began fielding AI-driven recommendations.

That doesn’t mean all marketers have risen to the challenge of using artificial intelligence to drive targeted marketing and sales.

Koeppel reports that 80% of the world’s data is unstructured, and that 87% of firms say data is their most underutilized asset, limiting their effectiveness in just about every channel. That would include email.

Yet two-thirds strongly agree that data-driven marketing is essential to their success.

Another benefit of AI is that it increases employee contentment. Sales increase by 37%, productivity by 31% and accuracy on tasks increases by 19%.

Which are the top AI marketing platforms to adopt? Koeppel reports that they include: 

• Lightning AI — a tool that optimizes interest groups for Facebook and Google ads
• Node — streamlines data for use in personalized, multichannel campaigns
• Narrative Science — relies on AI to interpret data and create clear stories
• MarketMuse — crafts SEO-driven content
• Luminar — helps brands design marketing collateral with AI photo-editing software

On other fronts, the report also states that:

• 47.3 million consumers have access to a smart speaker or digital assistant
• 50% of all searches will by done by voice by 2020
• 80% of firms want chatbots by 2020
• They anticipate that chatbots will reduce their business expenses by a total of $8 billion by 2020