Artificial intelligence (AI) is completely changing the joint marketing and advertising worlds. For one, big data capabilities make it perfect for analyzing and drawing conclusions from, well, large chunks of data. Second, it can detect patterns in purchase and browsing behavior that serves to better tailor product recommendations.
The gist is that we have many AI-powered tools at our disposal that can be very beneficial in the pursuit of higher revenue. And because email is one of the biggest aspects of business today, it makes sense that some of these tools come in the form of intelligent virtual, or AI email assistants. Using these tools—and Keap—can help small businesses take the next step toward powerful client communication.
Let’s take a look at four different ways these AI tools can help boost your revenue.
1. Ever-updated contacts
Seeing as how more than 40 percent of the average address book changes within three months, it makes sense to have a tool that can automatically update your contacts as soon as they change. If such a tool existed, you would save an untold amount of time and money—because time is money—as this tool would take over the burdensome task of scrolling through mountains of emails for that one darn contact you missed.
Such a tool would also be perfect for the sales funnel and generating leads because it could pull content such as name changes, new titles, jobs, email addresses, phone numbers, faxes, and addresses from emails. Thankfully, tools like this are readily available for you to use and benefit from.
Evercontact is a wonderful application that updates your address book with contact information taken straight from the email signature. It works with Gmail, Outlook, Office 365, and can be integrated with various CRMs.
Evercontact works in the background, so you’ll always ahead of the game without lifting a finger, and with the help of a branch of AI called natural language processing (NLP), Evercontact will either create a brand new contact or update an old one. There’s also an additional feature you can get, called ContactRescue, that turns your email archives into a complete and up-to-date address book—good stuff all around.
2. Auto-scheduled meetings
Scheduling emails usually requires a lot of back and forth between all parties involved—and by back and forth I mean really long email chains that begin to feel like a maze of replies. Thankfully, a second way AI email assistants can help us out is by doing all the scheduling for us. The best part? Thanks to machine learning, these assistants get smarter over time as they learn your preferences. For example, if you’re wont to skip early morning meetings, the assistant can pick up on this and opt to schedule meetings later in the day.
By allowing you to bypass the struggles of scheduling and getting everyone on the same page, these assistants will also let you devote your time to more pressing tasks that require greater attention. That’s what I call efficient.
x.ai is an AI and NLP-powered virtual email assistant that does all the scheduling for you. Instead of wasting valuable time finding where and when everyone can meet, you leave everything up to Amy and Andrew, x.ai’s virtual personal assistants you’ll grow to love. As you can see from the image above, the whole process is pretty simple and goes like this:
- You receive a request for a meeting
- You reply and CC Amy or Andrew
- Amy/Andrew emails your guests with possible timeframes
- Your guests reply, possibly saying something along the lines of, “X doesn’t work but Y does”
- Amy/Andrew sends a meeting invite to all parties
Therefore, all you need to do is CC your AI personal assistant and you have a meeting scheduled and peace of mind.
3. Personalized follow-up emails
Virtual assistants can also analyze your customers’ purchase behavior to make data-backed predictions about which products they’re more likely to buy, and then take the extra step by sending personalized follow-up emails that are especially useful in the e-commerce industry because they get the right products in front of the right people.
For example, instead of spending hours picking products for your newsletter, virtual assistants can handle everything; when they detect new products on your site, they can promote them to customers every week. They can also generate weekly newsletters to cross-sell products that go well with previously bought products, and if someone bought something can be bought in cycles, such as skin care products, the assistant can create emails to target this specific person for that specific product.
4. Sorted and triaged emails
As it is, we already spend a big chunk of our time looking and sorting through emails, which is why a time-saving tool that reads, routes and responds to emails is a must have for those who receive dozens or even hundreds of emails per day. Lucky for us, such tools exist in the form of email assistants. By doing all the sorting for us, we won’t have to waste time opening emails just to mark them as unread when we realize that they’re a low priority. Instead, the assistant can take the brunt of the work and do everything for us.
The Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant for Email, another AI-based tool that uses NLP to understand email messages and the sender’s intent, automatically triages incoming emails for you. The Pega Assistant picks up relevant information as it detects intent, automates the processing and then replies in a way that, even though is automated, reads more like a real response. And as the site says, it can:
- Understands human: Emails don’t need to come through in a pre-defined format. Your assistant is smart enough to understand the intent, context, and automatically map vital information regardless of how long or unstructured a message may be.
- Gets real work done: Whether it’s changing an address, requesting a new card, or entering additional information - your assistant acts as an extension of your team, relieving them of the redundant and time-consuming task so they can focus on more important tasks.
- Constantly learns: Every Email is captured and can easily be fed back into Pega’s machine learning algorithms to improve natural language processing until it’s ready to provide full self-service automation. This isn’t just an email processing tool—this is the backbone of an automated intelligent system.
- Knows your users and spans channels: Pega’s assistant keeps the context of the user’s journey including prior interactions and preferences. No matter how or where your users have chosen to interact before or after, rest assured that a consistent experience and service will be delivered through email.
Let’s take a second look
There you have it—four ways intelligent virtual assistants can give you a much-needed revue boost. If you’re too busy for the full read but are still interested in these four wonderful benefits, here’s a second look:
- Ever-updated contacts without lifting a finger on your part
- Auto-scheduled meetings that save you valuable time and money by taking over the burden of continuous back and forth
- Personalized follow-up emails that get the right products in front of the right people
- Sorted and triaged emails based on the sender’s intent
Matthew J. Fritschle is a creative content writer with a passion for marketing and all things digital. He works for Aumcore, a digital agency based in NYC, and specializes in e-commerce web development.
