AI-powered personalization: The key to winning customers

The AI-Driven Future of Customer Acquisition

In the past, customer acquisition for SaaS was mostly manual. Marketers needed to comb through lists of target contacts, write multiple iterations of cold outreach emails, and then hope the SDR team would follow up diligently (which they always did, right?). This process was time-consuming and expensive, often resulting in low conversion rates.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the game. AI-powered marketing tools can automate many tasks involved in customer acquisition, including lead gen, campaign delivery, and email marketing.

AI-powered marketing can help you acquire customers quickly and efficiently, significantly increasing pipeline and revenue.

Okay, so you're ready to integrate AI into your customer acquisition process. Where do you start?

Here are three AI-powered customer acquisition strategies that you can use to grow your businesses:

• Automate lead generation. AI-powered lead generation tools can help you identify potential customers interested in your products or services. These tools can analyze data from various sources, such as social media, website traffic, and search engine queries. Once potential customers are identified, AI can qualify and prioritize them for outreach.

• Personalize marketing campaigns. AI is especially good at helping you personalize at scale, helping you create campaigns tailored to each individual. These tools can analyze customer data to understand their interests, pain points, and buying behavior. You can then use this information to create personalized content, offers, and messages that are more likely to resonate and prompt action.

• Target marketing campaigns more effectively. Once you have enough data to work with, you can use AI to help you target and identify the customer sets most likely to convert and the messages and creative most likely to convert them. It's a self-improving cycle - a beautiful thing!

Want to get started? Here are three good options to get you going:

Leadfeeder 

Leadfeeder is an AI-powered lead generation tool that helps identify potential customers visiting your website. Leadfeeder uses IP address data to track visitors to your website and give you their company name, job title, and contact information. You can use this information to qualify and prioritize leads for outreach.

• Leadfeeder offers a free plan for up to 100 leads per month. Paid plans start at $49 per month for 1,000 leads.

Braze

Braze is a customer engagement platform that delivers personalized experiences to customers across all channels, including email, SMS, push notification, and in-app. Its new AI tool Sage offers a writing tool, predictive events, and recommendations to build customer purchase and loyalty.

• Braze's pricing is custom, depending on your number of monthly active users, email, and SMS sends, but you'll need to commit at least $20,000.

AdRoll

AdRoll optimizes ad campaigns across various channels. Analyzing user behavior, it targets potential customers with personalized ads, boosting engagement and conversions.

• AdRoll's all-inclusive tier, plus your ad spend, starts at $36 monthly.

Overloop

With Overloop, you can run multi-channel outbound campaigns, including list building, contact management, and outbound tools. Their contact management includes a Chrome extension, LinkedIn import, CSV integration, and customizable fields. Overloop excels with personalized cold emails, LinkedIn automation, multi-channel campaigns, customizable templates, and email tracking.

• Overloop only has one pricing tier - $99 monthly.

How Virgin Red Aced Customer Acquisition with Braze

Virgin Red, Virgin Group's rewards program, paired Snowflake with Braze's Cloud Data Ingestion functionality, allowing them to personalize messaging to their members.

With Braze, Virgin Red could ingest attributes like where a member was from, their points balance, marketing consent preferences, and favorite products.

For their first campaign, they sent 469k emails, generating a 45% open rate, with 7K+ members clicking to learn more, resulting in a healthy number of new member acquisitions.

For the entire case study, visit the Braze website.

The Future of CRM is AI-powered 🤖

Managing customer and partner data is one of the most important tasks to tackle when you launch a business. It will help you automate tasks, personalize marketing campaigns, and build customer relationships. That's where customer relationship management (CRM) platforms come in.

With the recent surge in AI-powered platforms, there's a mountain of options to choose from - so which do you pick?

Here are a few budget-friendly AI-powered CRM tools helping startups grow their business:

HubSpot is a CRM, marketing, and services platform that offers a variety of AI-powered features, such as lead scoring, email marketing, and customer support. What to watch out for: pricing tiers jump aggressively when you add more users and contacts to the database. G2 rating: 4.4

• Hubspot offers a free version of their platform, or you can upgrade to their Starter Plan for US$18 per month for two users if purchased for the year.

Freshsales offers a variety of AI-powered features, including built-in chat, email tracking and engagement, and sales process automation. What to watch out for: your monthly cost will 10x once you hit 10,000 contacts. G2 rating: 4.5

• Freshsales offers a free version of their platform with 100 contacts, or you can upgrade to their Growth Plan for US$25 per user per month with a yearly contract, which includes 2,000 bot sessions.

Pipedrive employs AI-driven predictive analytics to forecast sales outcomes and trends and to analyze and prioritize leads based on their likelihood to convert. What to watch out for: you've only got 14 days to try it out before you're on the hook for the monthly fee and the add-on features will cost you. G2 rating: 4.2

• Pipedrive offers a 14-day free trial. Their Essential Plan starts at US$14.90 per user per month for a yearly plan, but you'll need the Professional Plan at US$49.90 for more AI features.

Attio offers a fully flexible and customizable platform targeted at startups. They have limited AI functionality but offer enhanced contact management and pipeline reporting. What to watch out for: you'll need to dedicate time to building out your instance, and functionality is limited compared to more established platforms. G2 rating: 5 (but their number of ratings is on the low side)

• Attio is free for up to 3 users, or US$29 per user per month for the Plus plan. They do offer a $5,000 credit to eligible startups.

If you don’t need all the bells and whistles, you can use the CRM templates in productivity platforms like Notion ($8 per month) and ClickUp ($7 per month with a $3,000 credit for qualified startups), but these aren’t great options once you start scaling, so be prepared to make a switch.

If you want a comprehensive list of all CRMs and their ratings, check out the G2 summary here.

Go Home AI; You're Drunk

The prompt was “salmon in the river”

Or how about this one… AI interpreting the prompt “fisherman catching a salmon.”

If you’re looking for a good Midjourney prompt guide, try this one.

Networking for Introverts

AI is transforming the way we work, but it’s not good at everything. It’s certainly not going to help you network your way to a better career. That you have to do on your own.

Lucky for you, if you find yourself in a roomful of people, Harvard Business Review has some handy tips for making it a breeze.

Here they are:

1. Focus on learning: approach conversations with curiosity and be open to new ideas.

2. Identify shared interests: common ground will help build authentic relationships.

3. Give back: if you share your expertise, people will appreciate the help and be more inclined to return the favor.

4. Think about the greater good: rather than focusing purely on personal gains, link your networking activities to a higher purpose that inspires you.

Read on at Harvard Business Review.