The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) technology has been among the most exciting developments in electronic advertising — but it hasn’t been without its own concerns. By now, nearly everyone online has been subjected to an AI program, from chatbots to product recommendations, advertisement targeting and serving, and dynamic content. On the one hand, AI guarantees a more personalized net ; however, on the other, there’s the potential for job losses via automation and the resulting restructuring of our economy.
Carl Schmidt, Co-Founder and CTO of all Unbounce
I spoke with Carl Schmidt, Co-Founder and CTO at landing page program provider Unbounce, to discuss the present state of AI, where and how we’re likely to see it used in the digital advertising and marketing world in the future, and if we should worry about our soon-to-be machine overlords.
AI in Marketing
AI is a much-discussed topic generally, but its software in advertising are especially exciting — both in the way that it’s already used that you may not realize, as well as its possible in the future. Simply put, AI is technology that mimics human thought; in the electronic marketing world, this may mean anything from text and picture recognition to machine learning, predictive content generation, and semantic search.
As Robert Allen, Digital Content Manager at CITU, clarifies, different techniques can be considered AI at a wide sense, however they generally lead to AI applications that”do tasks one would usually associate with an individual operator like answering customer questions or writing fresh content.”
In fact, a recent experiment conducted by Schmidt and his team shows Unbounce’s machine learning algorithm significantly outperforms people in optimizing landing page text. At their yearly Call to Action Conference they pitted 437 human marketing professionals from Unbounce’s AI algorithm to attempt to predict which optimized solution would function far better. Eighty percent of this moment, the computer guessed better compared to humans.
Not Only for Large Corporations
AI is no longer the exclusive domain of those few big corporations that can afford it. In fact, it’s very likely that you have already benefitted from AI applications online, either as a customer of articles or a marketer . Hubspot lately surveyed over 1,400 consumers and found that 63 percent of respondents were using some sort of AI technologies — they just didn’t recognize it.
Unbounce is not only making AI technology available to small companies, but they’re also able to share the huge amounts of information from their community of users. By assessing the content on their client’s pages, they are able to identify what contributes to successful campaigns — and also to make this information available for everyone’s benefit. Schmidt says they’re the furthest and text, but they’ll be able to expand this to colors, pictures, and other page elements soon too.
Unbounce takes benefit of AI technology and millions of data points to enable marketers to rapidly create, launch and examine high-converting landing pages and site overlays with no necessity for an in-house improvement group. Presently, this relies on their library of over 125 high-converting templates, but Schmidt has just carved out a specific group to focus on bringing the capability to automate this process and create optimized campaigns which Unbounce customers will be able to deploy with the click of a button.
This is hugely beneficial for smaller companies that would not otherwise have access to the very same data to inform their marketing and advertising choices.
The Harvard Business Review tells the story of the telecommunications supplier, CenturyLink, that employed using an AI sales assistant to qualify hot leads. The assistant, named Angie, would send about 30,000 targeted emails each month and translate the answers to spot who had been a hot lead. CenturyLink’s sales representatives, who may manage up of 300 accounts, became more effective because Angie would then route the right leads to the ideal reps. CenturyLink quotes that they’ve earned $20 in new contracts for every $1 spent Angie.
AI for Conversion Rate Optimization
The Content Marketing Institute reports that exceptionally personalized website experiences provide better conversion speed optimization. These intelligent algorithms, such as those used by Unbounce, can help customize:
- Website encounter — by assessing hundreds of data points on a single user (like location, demographics, apparatus, interaction with the Site, etc.), AI may display the best-fitting Offerings and articles
- Push notifications — thanks to behavioral modification, push notifications can be specific to individual users, delivering them the right message at the right time
As your customers are conditioned to anticipate increasingly meaningful experiences, Unbounce can automate much of the personalization process. Your site can provide the most relevant content, notifications, and offers based on information such as demographics, location, and surfing history to capitalize on objective and interest.
Unbounce eliminates any prejudice and generates entirely data-driven solutions that will have the greatest impact on conversions. In the future, this kind of AI-driven conversion automation will power most marketing tasks. Digital interactions will be optimized based on customer insights and conversion data, creating a personalized experience for each exceptional visitor that presents the ideal message at the ideal moment.
Along with knowing which content to serve, AI can automate the production of it also. In reality, Gartner predicts that 20% of all business content will be authored by machines by the end of 2018. We’re already seeing this as more data-based news articles, such as sports scores, weather reports, and real-time stock market reports are being”written” by resources like Wordsmith and Quill, but AI-powered advertising tools like Unbounce can also create what was traditionally creative content, like landing pages and calls to action.
Leveraging Unbounce’s Data in Your Promotion
Powering Unbounce’s AI is that the information they’ve lately revealed for everybody’s use inside their Unbounce Conversion Benchmark Report. By analyzing the behavior of 74,551,421 traffic to 64,284 lead generation landing pages created in the Unbounce platform, it enables your business to compare your conversion rates which of tens of thousands of landing pages within your industry. For this, you are able to observe how your efforts compare to your competitors.
A few of the research’s findings showed that the words companies use to promote their product and services may have a quantifiable effect on their conversion prices. The analysis discovered that the emotion, sentiment, and reading complexity of words may significantly influence a business’ potential to convert their website’s traffic into customers.
Key findings in the study included:
- Expressions that communicate joy can negatively impact a campaign’s conversion rate for businesses in the home improvement businesses . Landing pages at the house improvement, vocational studies, and travel businesses that contain less than 1% of duplicate that communicates feelings of pleasure, appear to 35% higher conversion rates than webpages with more than 1% of comparable copy. Words such as”safe,””friendly,””clean,””relaxation,””exceptional,””joyful,””achievement,” and”confidence” are examples of phrases that can negatively affect conversion rates.
- Copy composed in a 6th-grade reading level is more likely to drive traffic in the real estate industry. The study found that within the real estate industry, landing page copy composed in a 6th-grade reading level (using easy and accessible language ) connected with a 200% higher conversion rate compared to replicate written at the university level. Six out of the ten industries the analysis analyzed showed better conversion speeds once the reading level was suitable for a 9th-grade reading level or lower.
- Expressions associated with fear and trust have the biggest impact on conversion rates across three from the ten industries the analysis looked at. Fear-inducing words used on landing pages in the travel, legal and wellness businesses can negatively impact conversion rates by around 5%. By way of instance, words used on landing pages within the legal sector such as”problem,””risk,””hard,””emergency,””alter,” and”stress” were shown to negatively impact conversion prices.
The report shares what you can expect good and poor conversion rates to look like over ten different businesses, in addition to information from the Unbounce group of information scientists and conversion advertising specialists for how your business can improve your conversion rates by making simple tweaks for your own copy.
Handle with Care
All this begs the question, of course: is AI going to turn us daily and destroy the world? Schmidt was measured in his response, siding with visionaries like Elon Musk and cautions that”It would be reckless to compose the possibility that we’d create something which is a portion of itself”.
