AI Marketing Tools for CRM, Content, Analytics, and Email Automation

Artificial intelligence (AI) marketing tools can help you automate many tasks associated with marketing strategy, such as creating content, personalizing your email marketing campaigns, analyzing data from your website or social media pages, helping you conduct market research, and managing customer data.

AI tools use machine learning, natural language processing, and predictive analytics to understand data patterns and provide actionable insights or generate components of your marketing strategy, such as blog posts, product descriptions, images, and more. 

Explore how you can use AI marketing tools, including specific examples of tools to consider, as well as use cases for how major companies implement AI marketing tools. 

What are AI marketing tools? 

AI marketing tools leverage artificial intelligence to help marketing professionals automate aspects of marketing, such as scoring and qualifying leads, predicting which leads are likely to convert to sales, and drafting personalized emails to potential customers. 

AI marketing tools help marketers understand consumer sentiment—how a customer feels about a product or service—determine which prospects are most likely to buy their products, and create targeted content that motivates consumers to engage with a brand or make a purchase.

You can use AI marketing tools to generate marketing content, automate ad placement, conduct search engine optimization, and more. By automating these tasks, marketing specialists save time and mental energy. You can concentrate on the human-to-human aspect of marketing (strengthening customer relationships, brainstorming creative strategies) because you don’t have to spend so much time on tedious and repetitive tasks. This allows you to spend more time thinking about how to better serve your audience. 

How do AI marketing tools work?

AI marketing tools have three components: machine learning, natural language processing, and predictive analytics.

• Machine learning allows AI marketing tools to learn patterns within data, similar to how humans learn new information. Machine learning algorithms learn these patterns during training and apply what they learned to new ideas, allowing you to see patterns in your data that might not be immediately obvious. This enables marketing specialists to discover patterns in customer behavior, segment their audience—or separate their customers into distinct groups—and make data-informed predictions about future trends.

• Natural language processing allows AI marketing tools to comprehend, interpret, and craft personalized copy tailored to each customer. Natural language processing can help you generate marketing content, identify new leads, and understand how customers feel by analyzing the sentiment of their words. 

• Predictive analytics enables marketing teams to analyze large sets of consumer data, predict customer behavior, and adapt to emerging consumer trends. You can use predictive analytics to offer your customers recommendations about other products they might like or gain insights into advertising strategies that resonate with your audience. 

Using AI marketing tools, you can save time, make more accurate predictions about customer behavior, and reach your audience with the right message at the right time.

Types of AI tools for digital marketing

You can use AI marketing tools for customer relationship management (CRM), content creation, analytics and data insights, email marketing, and automation. Explore what AI can help you accomplish in each of these marketing areas. 

Customer relationship management (CRM) AI tools

CRM tools serve as hubs for all customer interactions. By compiling current and prospective customer data into one place, customer service specialists can work with a single, comprehensive view of each customer's journey—from their first contact with a business to additional, ongoing support.

These tools allow you to achieve the following:

• Compile customer data into one profile so everyone on your team works with the same information. 

• Forecast and anticipate customer needs and sales performance.

• Access customer data through the cloud.

• Create and use automated processes to increase productivity.

• Track and analyze customer journeys, from first contact to purchase and beyond.

• Generate customized dashboards and reports.

• Create customized marketing campaigns and emails based on audience segmentation.

Examples of AI marketing tools focused on CRM optimization include: Zoho CRM, HubSpot CRM, Jasper AI, and Salesforce Einstein. 

Content creation AI tools

Content marketing is a marketing strategy of providing your customers with articles, social media posts, and other forms of content that engage your audience, speak to their needs, and integrate your brand message to help customers understand your company and products. 

The difference between content creation and content curation lies in whether or not you are the author of the work you’re using for content marketing. When you provide original content to your audience, you’re creating content. When you share helpful content from other sources, you’re curating content. 

Content creation tools allow marketers to generate the following:

• On-brand blog posts 

• Personalized emails 

• Social media updates

• Feature-rich product descriptions

• High-quality ad copy

• Generate images for marketing content

Examples of AI marketing tools for content creation include: Copy.AI, Canva, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Write Sonic, and Jasper.AI. 

Analytics and market insight AI tools

You can use AI marketing tools to analyze your marketing resources, such as your website and social media profile, and obtain insights into your industry and market. Explore AI tools that can help you with both sides of marketing intelligence. 

AI marketing tools for analytics

The data you collect about users’ interactions with your website or social media profiles can provide you with considerable insights into the performance of your marketing campaigns. AI marketing tools can help you understand the sentiments of people discussing your brand online, understand which marketing channels drive the most leads, and help you make data-driven decisions about your marketing budget so you can get the highest return on your investment. 

Examples of AI tools for analytics include: Heap, Zoho Analytics, Google Analytics, MarketMuse, and Brand24.

AI marketing tools for market research 

You can use AI tools to automate your market research process and collect, analyze, and understand data about your industry. AI tools can automatically collect data from a variety of sources, such as social media, websites, and the latest research relevant to your industry. Then, you can automate the analysis and generate reports, allowing you to gain actionable insights in a fraction of the time. 

Examples of AI tools for market research include: Crayon, Quantilope, Pecan, and Glimpse. 

Email marketing and automation tools

As with AI-powered content creation and curation, CRM, and analytics tools, AI email marketing and automation tools work behind the scenes to ensure customers receive a personalized, on-brand experience.

By implementing these tools into their marketing strategies, marketers can achieve the following:

• Customize email marketing campaigns and emails using past data points, like past purchases and interests.

• Test multiple subject lines and email content to gauge which are the most successful and engaging.

• Write prompts to help you create the most relevant content for each customer and analyze overall campaign performance.

• Create professional, on-brand emails using pre-made email templates or customize templates with drag-and-drop email template builders.

• Determine optimal emailing times and frequencies to maximize audience engagement.

Examples of AI tools for email marketing and automation include: MailChimp, MailModo, Jasper AI, Brevo, and EmailOctopus. 

AI marketing tools use cases

AI marketing tools can help small businesses compete with larger businesses that have more ad spend, allowing marketing teams and e-commerce platforms to focus on providing better products and services using the large datasets at their disposal. Explore how marketing professionals at different companies are using AI marketing tools.

Grammarly

The marketing team at Grammarly—an AI-powered writing assistant—integrated Salesforce and its AI, Einstein 1, into their marketing strategy. Grammarly wanted to optimize the process of qualifying leads so that their marketing team had high-quality leads ready to convert. After implementing Salesforce’s Einstein 1, Grammarly could better screen its leads to determine who was ready to make a purchase, increasing its conversion rate by 30 percent [1].

Chubbies

Chubbies—a men's apparel and lifestyle company based in Austin, Texas—partnered with Siera to create a customized AI agent for their brand. Duncan Smuthers, an AI persona in the form of a customer service chatbot, is ready to assist customers with questions about the size and fit of Chubbies' products, returns, and exchanges, and even suggest other products to customers in real time. Instead of the same AI agent customers are used to interacting with on other websites, Duncan Smuthers has a personality that supports Chubbies’ brand messaging with every customer interaction. By implementing this AI agent, Chubbies has been able to increase customer satisfaction and maintain the strong brand identity that contributed to their commercial success [2].

Stitch Fix

Stitch Fix—an online e-commerce platform that offers personalized styling services—is using AI to recommend new products to its existing customer base. By analyzing data about a customer's past purchases and preferences, Stitch Fix's AI can curate tailored clothing recommendations, create new clothing combinations, and empower human stylists to make more optimized fashion decisions [3].

Explore AI marketing tools on Coursera 

AI marketing tools can help you create marketing content, understand your marketing data, and automate marketing processes to save you time and increase your return on investment.

If you want to learn more about using AI or improve your digital marketing skills, you can explore programs on Coursera to help you meet your goals. For example, you could opt for the Google Digital Marketing & E-commerce Professional Certificate to learn more about digital marketing and marketing analytics. You could also enroll in the Meta Social Media Marketing Professional Certificate to build job-ready skills for a career in social media marketing.