Can artificial intelligence become your greatest salesperson? According to Oracle, yes.
Earlier this week, the B2B software company announced the launch of Oracle Fusion Marketing: a new A.I.-powered platform that offers to help businesses automate their marketing campaigns and lead generation. The technology is expected to analyze first-party user data, such as the purchase history and email interactions of customers with the business, to determine what kind of content they’ll be most likely to engage with in the future. Sales teams can then target the consumer most likely to convert, and use the A.I. analysis of existing customers to better hone outreach to potential new customers.
More personalized ad targeting leads to higher open and click-through rates on emails, which translates into a better chance of making a sale. This can have a real impact on your bottom line: Personalized marketing–say, an email that’s directed to customers with a particular budget or an ad that targets a niche demographic–can reduce acquisition costs by 50 percent, increase revenue from 5 to 15 percent, and increase the efficiency of a marketing spend by up to 30 percent, according to research by Harvard Business Review.
Because A.I. simplifies the task of data collection, it also takes busy work out of the hands of businesses, so that employees can focus on idea generation and strategy building, Inc.com columnist Amanda Pressner Kreusner, co-founder of Masthead Media, has previously written.
Of course, if you think this sounds like third-party cookies by another name, you might be right. Concerns about consumer privacy have led internet providers to quash these cookies (Google Chrome will be the last to do so by 2023), which advertisers have long used to target users. If A.I. marketing leads to individual tracking of potential consumers, it could face a similar fate.
What’s more, an increased reliance on A.I. for marketing generation means marketers themselves will have less hands-on experience analyzing and understanding consumer behavior. That could lead to a skills loss in the marketing community, at some point. Ultimately, it’s best if A.I. can help you work smarter, but it’s not a replacement for human ingenuity.