How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Online Advertising in 2021

Email advertising and artificial intelligence

Email advertising is a staple of the online advertising world. With over 300 billion emails sent each day, it isn't a surprise that marketers want to get a slice of the pie. While email advertising used to be painstakingly slow and tedious, artificial intelligence makes it not only faster but also more effective in turning your recipients into customers.

AI helps you personalize your emails

Personalization is a huge driving factor in getting your email offered and read. After all, which email are you more likely to read, a generic sales pitch, or one that opens with your name and a subject you're interested in?

Personalizing emails by hand can be done for small businesses, but it's a painstaking and tedious process. However, a larger company has no hope of personalizing all of their mail by hand.

AI and machine learning services can help accelerate this. And we're not talking about just putting your recipient's name in the email. By using your advertising data, AI uses algorithms to calculate the chances of your email getting read from how effective its subject and opening lines are. AI can even incorporate the recipient's interests and acquaintances into the email to ensure that your message interests them.

It finds the best time to send it & follows up

By analyzing customer behavior, AI can ascertain when your recipient is most likely to check their email. For example, a person working the night shift will be much more likely to open their email at 11 AM than they would at 9 PM.

This is impossible to track by hand. However, for AI it takes just a couple of seconds. This technology can also use its knowledge on the recipient's habits to not only send it when they check their email but the time at which they open most of their emails.

Many leads are lost because marketing teams are only people, and some customers simply won't be followed up with even if they're interested. Whether this is because their contact slipped through the cracks, or because of simple forgetfulness, AI can avert this.

How AI revolutionizes social media advertising

Social media has been at the forefront of digital advertising ever since MySpace. Because of this, businesses must have a cohesive social media advertising campaign in order to succeed. AI's biggest contributions in the field being post-optimization and maintaining cohesion among different social media platforms.

Maintaining consistency throughout platforms

There are many platforms that you'll need to target to garner enough attention for your brand. It can be difficult to make an ad campaign feel cohesive across TV networks, social media, online streaming services, etc.

AI can help you guide your campaigns according to the user base of your chosen social network. For example, Facebook's average user is older than the average TikTok user. These two audiences demand completely different approaches, so it can be hard to keep brand identity cohesive across them.

Localizing campaigns for better impact

Many businesses will face issues with proper localization for their social media campaigns. Doing surveys to determine what the local populace in your area is interested in is slow and can often provide inaccurate data.

On the other hand, AI can do this quickly and optimize your content for different locales too. AI’s today are excellent at optimizing calls to action according to where your customer is located. Because the CTA is crucial to the success of ad copy, this leads to an increase in sales.

This is even more important if you're targeting a new location where you've already got competition. Misjudging what the locals want can spell doom on your marketing efforts. Thankfully, AI is adept at tracking minor cultural nuances which people might miss at first glance, helping you get an edge over local competition.

Writing ads and social media copy

This is a relatively new field, but AI has already shown promise and that it’s capable of writing ad copy, and simple social media posts and product descriptions.

Let's check an example: can you tell which of these two slogans were written by AI?

• Access cash from the equity in your home. Take a look.
• It's true--You can unlock cash from the equity in your home. Click to apply.

Not only was it the 2nd line that was written by AI, but it also scored an almost 100% improvement over the first one.

In fact, AI has performed better than human marketing professionals in terms of writing short ad copy. It's worth noting that as of right now, AI isn't well suited for long-form, or overly niche-specific ad copy. However, it does an excellent job in short-form copy, product descriptions, and shorter social media posts.

This stems from AI's capability to:

• Detect trends in customer behavior
• Find the most opportune time to post the copy
• Understand the best ad placement for that specific copy
• Optimize ad copy for customer location and interests