Joydeep Bhattacharya
July 15, 2020

Best Marketing Analytics Tools That Use AI To Improve ROI

Tools That Use AI For Marketing Analytics

Marketers have access to more customer data than ever. It would take days, if not months, to leverage the information to fuel successful marketing campaigns manually. That’s where AI marketing analytics tools can help. 

AI-powered tools provide the insights that you need to understand your audience, automate your campaigns, and proactively engage with every sales opportunity to generate the maximum profits. 

If you want to skip the explanations and go directly to the recommended tools, please click here.

What is Marketing Analytics?

Marketing analytics refers to the method of measuring and analyzing the performance of your marketing strategy. Marketing analytics help determine the ROI and areas for improvement. 

Apart from showing you the number of leads and sales generated, marketing analytics gives you insights into customer behavior and preferences. 

An effective marketing analytics tool collects data from different channels and consolidates into a single dashboard. 

Here are some key reasons why you need marketing analytics:

  • Understand your target audience in detail. 
  • Determine which of your marketing efforts are making a difference. 
  • Monitor customer trends over time and predicts future trends. 
  • Analyze what best resonates with your target audience and what doesn’t.  
  • Decide the next course of action in marketing. 

What is AI?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a technology capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. The most advanced AIs operate on the self-learning model, meaning, it continually fine-tunes its algorithms to provide the most accurate results possible (e.g., chatbots). 

The most common implementation of AI in businesses include:

  • Automation: To conduct repetitive tasks. For example, updating records, transferring data from call record systems to CRM, etc. 
  • Cognitive insight: To provide insights into customer behavior, buyer preferences, personalizing advertising, etc. 
  • Cognitive engagement: To answer customers’ queries even after the business hours.  
  • Content creation: To create content with simple rules and formats, such as profit and loss charts, hotel descriptions, sports game recaps, and business reports. 
  • Churn prediction: To determine which customers are about to churn or leave for a competitor. It can also indicate what stage of churning a customer is in, e.g., quick-churn (those who abandon products shortly after starting to use it) or late-churn (those who have been associated with your brand for a long-term). 

Why is AI Important for Marketing Analytics?

By some time this year, 1.7MB of data will be generated every second for everyone on the planet. Processing such a huge amount of data is difficult for humans. 

Artificial intelligence can significantly reduce the time required to process tons of information. 

Some of the top reasons why AI is important for marketing analytics are: 

  • It can analyze your site visitor’s behavior and identify key pages that have the potential to increase conversions.   
  • You can better identify prospects who are more likely to convert. 
  • It provides deep insight into each visitor on your site, enabling you to deliver the right message at the right time. 
  • AI can learn about a customer’s past engagement with your brand and determine their probability of churning. This enables you to create personalized marketing strategies to prevent those customers from leaving and increase their lifetime value. 
  • It helps determine the reason why a specific marketing campaign failed or succeeded. 

Best Marketing Tools Leveraging AI to Boost ROI

AI-powered marketing analytics tools are capable of providing actionable insights within minutes that can help create campaigns that are likely to generate a higher ROI. 

Let’s take a look at the five best marketing tools that use AI to boost ROI. 

1- Looker

Looker is a business intelligence platform that provides a 360-degree view of your customers. From identifying upsell opportunities to creating tailored messages for your prospects, Looker aims to increase your revenue. 

Here are some key features of Looker:

  • It helps determine customer preferences and suggest changes that will drive results. 
  • Recommends optimizations for under-performing ads and lets you change bids without leaving Looker. You can see various metrics related to ad campaigns, such as return on ad spend, cost per conversion, cost per click, and click-through rate. 
  • Identify trends in consumer behavior across all your marketing channels. 
  • Provides a complete view of a visitor’s experience on your site, from every click to conversion. 

looker dashboard

The below example shows how Looker solves a real-world problem using AI. 

Roti, a Mediterranean restaurant chain in America, wanted to leverage data to grow both footprints and profits. They found that Chicago’s food preferences were totally different from those in New York or Washington D.C. Drowned in manual reports, Roti was unable to determine the individual restaurant performance and improve customer experience. 

By partnering with Looker, Roti was able to combine data across departments and generate actionable insights. Looker highlighted things that result in poor experiences on Thursday and Friday evenings, which is when they had second-tier shifts. The marketing team used real-time feedback to understand the correlation between customer experience, shift scheduling, and sales to increase footfall in Roti’s restaurants. 

They also used Looker to forecast how much protein and cold sides they should be preparing each day. As a result, Roti was able to save over $1 million in food cost and waste. 

Key Takeaway: Use Looker to understand how customers behave on your website and get recommendations on improving marketing campaign performance. 

2- Finteza

Finteza is one of the most sought-after marketing tools that use AI to help businesses evaluate their campaign performance. Finteza predicts which marketing campaigns are likely to generate better results. It also shows the best-performing channels, so you can eliminate the ones not bringing desired results and focus more on the ones that are generating sales.

Here are the key AI features of Finteza:

  • The platform’s AI compares values (impressions, CTR, and conversion) using 15 criteria and provides recommendations for each stage. 
  • It enables you to create goal-based funnels that provide behavioral analysis of individuals at each phase of the sales process. This helps you determine where and why you are losing customers, enabling you to optimize those stages. 

  • The conversion optimization capabilities of Finteza analyzes the conversions based on channel, event, and the position of the CTA on the page. It then provides suggestions to improve sales. 
  • Finteza gives in-depth detail of your website traffic. The platform’s AI monitors your traffic to show you the exact percentage of high-quality and inferior-quality coming from different channels.

Here’s an example that shows how Finteza works in real-world scenarios. Let’s say you want to launch Google and Facebook ads in Canada. You can use Finteza to predict what type of campaigns will perform the best. 

You can create a goal-based funnel in Finteza that tracks the key actions (e.g., site visits, registration, add to cart, and purchase). 

Finteza will then quickly identify the most cost-effective (green) and cost-ineffective (red) channels, so you can remove the ones that are wasting your budget. The platform’s AI learns and improves itself by comparing the prediction and actual data to provide better forecasts. 

Key Takeaway: Use Finteza to determine which marketing campaigns are effective and get an in-depth report about your website visitors. 

3- Emarsys

Emarsys is a customer engagement platform that uses AI and predictive analytics to enable data-driven planning of future campaigns and revenue predictions. Emarsys helps marketers understand the customer’s preferred channel to deliver tailored messages and maximize engagement.

Here are some key AI features of Emarsys:

  • Forecasts when a customer is about to churn, become inactive, or intend to make a purchase, enabling you to create hyper-personalized campaigns.
  • It helps deliver one-on-one personalization by segmenting customers based on their past engagement, selecting their preferred channels, and letting you know the right time to run campaigns.

  • Predicts each customer’s probability of taking action and determines how much revenue you are likely to generate from them, enabling you to craft the right messaging.
  • It helps match the best content for each customer with product recommendations to maximize results. 

This example of City Beach using Emarsys AI shows how effective the platform is. 

City Beach, Australia’s premier youth fashion retailer, used Emarsys to deliver 1:1 omnichannel engagement and prevent customer churn. The platform’s AI helped City Beach predict where people were churning or defecting at a one-on-one level. This enabled them to send tailored campaigns based on a customer’s individual life cycle. As a result, City Beach saw an 18.3% rise in leads converted into first-time buyers and won back 48% of customers from defecting. 

Key Takeaway: Use Emarsys to deliver one-on-one personalization, predict the likelihood of conversion, and provide the best content to each prospect. 

4- Adobe Sensei

Adobe Sensei is an AI tool that integrates with Adobe Experience Cloud to provide a comprehensive view of your customers. Adobe Sensei helps predict customer behavior based on various attributes, differences, and conversion factors. It amplifies your ability to create and deliver personalized experiences by anticipating customers’ needs in real-time. 

Here are some of the great AI features of Adobe Sensei:

  • Provides customized spend recommendations, enabling you to allocate your advertising budgets across different campaigns to increase your ROI. 
  • Forecasts the impact of varying budget scenarios on outcomes, such as clicks, conversions, and revenue. 
  • Finds new high-value audiences by mapping users, sites, and categories, based on your current customer base.
  • Identifies potential causes for significant changes in customer trend data and anomalies. 

Let’s take a real-world example of how Adobe Sensei helps improve ROI. 

Suppose you want to launch an email marketing campaign to entice subscribers to convert. Your primary aim would be to get your emails opened. Adobe Sensei can help you predict the best email subject lines to increase open rates. As you can see in the below image, it shows what words you should include in your subject line and the predicted open rate. You can easily test your subject lines and send the one with the highest predicted open rate.  

Source

Key Takeaway: Use Adobe Sensei to find high-value audiences and get suggestions on how to improve marketing campaigns. 

5- Tellius

Tellius is an AI marketing analytics tool that helps marketers understand the “why” behind the data, enabling them to create revenue-oriented campaigns. 

Here are some great AI features of Tellius:

  • Provides performance patterns, trends, and outliers with automated data analysis. It can help you understand the “why” behind the data. As you can see in the below image, when asked about “why did apparel sales increase from Q1 2019 to Q2 2019?” Tellius tells, “this was because of an overall increase in content engagement when the channel is Instagram or time of day is 9 PM-12 AM EST.”

  • Reveals new marketing opportunities using machine learning to empower businesses to increase conversions instantly. 
  • It allows marketers to ask questions about their data using natural language. For example, if you are an eCommerce retailer selling products of multiple brands, you can ask questions like, “what are the top 10 selling brands in New York?” Tellius will then display a graph highlighting the top ten selling brands. 

  • It helps marketers improve the audience targeting by offering recommended search terms based on relevance and historical searches. 

Consider this case study to better understand how Tellius works in real-world scenarios. 

A global law firm wanted to create a data-driven culture. With the vast amount of data they had, analysts would spend hours each day manually analyzing data and creating actionable reports. Using Tellius, they were able to find underlying patterns, segments, and outliers in the data within seconds. The platform identified spikes in certain types of cases and sent alerts to the business development team to acquire them. 

Key Takeaway: Use Tellius to get useful insights by asking questions in natural language to uncover hidden patterns in customer data. 

Conclusion

AI in marketing analytics tools help businesses gain actionable insights from customer data and use them to boost ROI. AI can process tons of data faster than humans and separate the ones that matter to your business. The five tools mentioned above are some of the best marketing analytics tools that use AI to improve ROI. Have you been using any of them already? If not, which one are you going to try? Let us know!

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Joydeep Bhattacharya

Joydeep Bhattacharya is the author of the SEO Sandwitch Blog where he shares his latest tips and tutorials to learn SEO and Digital Marketing. He is a regular contributor to publications like SEMrush, Search Engine Watch, Smartinsights, ClickZ, and many others.