AI Marketing Automation - How AI Helps Increase Marketing ROI

With the powerful capabilities of artificial intelligence, businesses can now harness predictive analytics, personalized content creation, and intelligent task automation to optimize every aspect of their marketing efforts. By 2028, the market value for AI-powered marketing is estimated to reach more than $107.5 billion, highlighting the rapid adoption of AI technologies in the marketing industry.

In this article, we explore how AI transforms marketing automation, highlighting the benefits and real-life use cases of AI-powered marketing automation.

What is AI Marketing Automation? 

AI marketing automation refers to the use of artificial intelligence technology to automate repetitive marketing tasks that typically require human intelligence, personalize marketing outreach at scale, and optimize marketing campaigns in real-time. Unlike traditional marketing automation tools that strictly follow pre-defined rules, AI-powered marketing automation systems analyze data in real-time and learn from customer behavior to continuously optimize marketing efforts.

AI in marketing automation uses various types of AI technology to perform tasks, including:

• Machine Learning (ML) - enables systems to analyze data, learn from it, and improve over time.
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) - empowers AI marketing tools to understand texts written in a natural language.
• Predictive AI – analyzes vast amounts of data to forecast future customer behaviors, trends, and campaign performance.
• Generative AI (GenAI) - generates unique content including text, graphics, and videos for webpages, social media, newsletters, etc.
• Large Language Models (LLMs) - a subset of generative AI that specializes in understanding, generating, and personalizing text-based content at scale.
• Agentic AI – provides AI agents that autonomously make decisions to execute marketing workflows and automate tasks, with minimal human intervention.

Why Does Your Business Need AI Marketing Automation?

In this section, we’ll present the tangible benefits of AI marketing automation. According to a recent survey conducted by the Digital Marketing Institute, marketers see the biggest impact of implementing AI in the automation of routine tasks (68%), improved customer experience (46%), improved targeting and segmentation (45%), enhanced personalization (44%), and predictive analysis (39%).

Let’s explore these benefits of AI marketing automation:

Enhanced personalization at scale

According to Forbes, 46% of customers will buy more when offered a personalized experience. This is especially true nowadays, with 88% of marketers believing that client expectations regarding personalization are currently at an all-time high.

With artificial intelligence in marketing automation, you can offer personalized marketing outreach at scale, whether your client base consists of 500 or 5,000 clients. AI can quickly analyze vast amounts of data, including personal preferences, past interactions, and customer behavior on the website and social media, to derive valuable insights about each individual.

Using this information, AI can deliver targeted ads, adapt marketing communication, and personalize product recommendations to fit unique customer needs.

Improved customer satisfaction

AI-driven hyper-personalization enhances customer satisfaction by delivering tailored content and offers based on the analysis of individual preferences, behaviors, and past interactions.

Almost 90% of marketers surveyed by Mailchimp believe that to meet customer expectations and increase their satisfaction, their organizations must increase the use of AI-powered marketing automation.

Increased productivity and efficiency 

AI workflow automation autonomously handles repetitive tasks such as customer segmentation, lead scoring, product recommendations, performance analysis, and marketing campaign optimization, with minimal human intervention. While AI handles these repetitive tasks, marketing professionals can focus on creative work and developing marketing strategies.

Increased ROI and better cost management 

According to McKinsey, AI-powered personalization in marketing can help lower customer acquisition costs by as much as 50%, increase marketing ROI by 10 to 30%, and boost revenue growth from 5 to 15%.

AI-powered marketing automation also helps businesses better manage their costs by reducing inefficiencies, minimizing wasted ad spend, and optimizing resource allocation. For example, marketing professionals can use AI marketing automation tools to monitor ad campaign performance and optimize to achieve the highest ROI. AI agents can automatically adjust ad bidding strategies, ad placement, and targeting based on real-time performance data, ensuring that marketing budgets are spent effectively.

Data-driven decisions 

According to Mailchimp’s survey, over 70% of marketers believe that they’re wasting time manually pulling and analyzing data.

With AI marketing automation software, marketing professionals can quickly and easily obtain data-driven insights that help them improve the performance of their efforts. AI can analyze vast amounts of data from various sources and uncover valuable insights, patterns, and trends that support faster and more accurate decision-making.

By leveraging insights provided by AI-empowered analytics, marketers can optimize their strategies to improve performance, identify new opportunities, and tailor digital marketing campaigns to better resonate with their target audience.

AI in Marketing Automation Use Cases

AI can enhance many marketing efforts, from customer segmentation to lead scoring, and product recommendations with automation and personalization at scale.

According to Forrester, currently around 21% of B2B marketers use AI for marketing automation and 24% for personalization purposes.

Here’s a list of the most popular AI marketing use cases:

Customer segmentation

AI-powered marketing automation enhances customer segmentation by analyzing vast amounts of data from various touchpoints, such as browsing behavior, purchase history, social media interactions, and demographic information. Traditional segmentation methods often rely on basic attributes like age, gender, or location, which can lead to generalized targeting. However, AI takes segmentation to a deeper, more personalized level by identifying patterns and behaviors that may not be immediately obvious.

By utilizing machine learning algorithms, AI can segment customers based on their unique preferences, purchase intent, browsing habits, and engagement with previous campaigns. This allows businesses to create highly specific customer profiles, enabling them to deliver more relevant and targeted messaging. For example, AI can identify a segment of customers who frequently engage with certain product categories or content types.

Moreover, AI enables dynamic segmentation, continuously updating customer profiles in real time as new data is collected.

Lead scoring and nurturing 

AI analyzes lead data, past interactions, and behavior to prioritize leads with the highest likelihood of conversion. Unlike traditional rule-based scoring, AI continuously adapts its models based on real-time data, improving accuracy and helping marketers focus on the most valuable prospects.

For example, AI agents can analyze a contact form sent by a potential customer and gather information about their company. AI can pull out information about the industry, size, revenue, and location to assess the company’s fit. It can also analyze the prospect’s online behavior, such as website visits, content downloads, and email interactions to determine their level of interest. Based on these insights, AI agents assign a lead score and alert marketing team, helping them prioritize prospects that best fit their ideal customer profile.

AI marketing automation tools can also support nurturing efforts by automatically delivering personalized content at each stage of the customer journey. Instead of sending generic emails to all leads with an invitation to find out more about the offer, AI personalizes marketing messaging using gathered information to increase the likelihood of conversion.

Intelligent product recommendation

The key to success is suggesting precisely the right products at the right time. Traditional product recommendation software lacks the “intelligence” to adapt these recommendations to subtle changes in customers' preferences.

AI tools can constantly monitor and analyze customer purchases and online behavior. They follow customers as they switch between categories and products, read product descriptions, and add things to their baskets. They can even go beyond the online shop and check what customers research and scroll on social media.

After gathering all of this customer data, AI can accurately predict which products or services will be the most interesting and useful for each customer. AI can suggest complementary or upgraded products if it determines they will better suit the customer. For example, it can suggest a computer with more powerful graphic cards for passionate gamers or a helmet and gloves with wrist protection for people who are considering buying their first snowboard. As AI gathers more data, it can refine the recommendations in real time to better reflect current customer interests.

Personalized content creation at scale

AI tools can support personalized content creation in two ways. First, AI can automatically generate marketing content for ads, newsletters, social media posts, etc., and tailor it to individual customer preferences. Some advanced AI tools can generate whole graphics or create and edit videos.

Marketing teams can also use AI to repurpose existing content. Instead of generating whole articles and social media posts from scratch, they can use AI tools to refine the content.

For example, a marketing team might have created an amazing video for a YouTube channel with behind-the-scenes content. Instead of spending hours manually adjusting the content to fit different channels, they can use AI to create social media content for TikTok, Instagram reels, and Facebook ads with edited and shorter videos, pictures, collages, etc.

Some AI tools can also translate and localize content, including articles, emails, and videos, for brands that operate internationally.

Marketing campaign optimization

AI marketing automation continuously monitors KPIs, such as click-through rates, conversions, etc., and makes adjustment in real-time to boost the performance of marketing campaigns. For instance, it might identify that a specific ad creative is underperforming with one segment of the audience and automatically adjust the creative or messaging to better align with this group.

Thanks to AI, marketing teams can also streamline A/B testing. AI can create multiple campaign variations and run them simultaneously. It will identify the best-performing content, visuals, and CTAs for each customer segment and automatically optimize campaigns for better conversions.

Ad targeting

AI can enhance ad targeting, helping businesses reach their audience with the right message and at the right time. By leveraging data and machine learning, AI adapts targeting strategies, automates bidding, and continuously improves ad performance across multiple platforms.

AI marketing automation tools can track user behavior across websites and social media platforms to identify people who are most likely to engage with specific ads. They can also help marketers choose the best channels, times, and ad placement to ensure efficient budget allocation. To ensure ads reach the targeted audience, AI automatically adjusts bidding in real-time to maximize the ROI.

Email marketing

AI marketing automation transforms email marketing by making campaigns more personalized and efficient.

AI analyzes customer behavior, past interactions, and preferences to generate personalized subject lines, email copy, and product recommendations tailored to each customer segment or recipient. As previously mentioned, personalized experiences have a much higher chance of engaging clients, so having a tool that can automatically tailor emails to individual customers at scale is invaluable.

AI-powered marketing tools optimize email timing by analyzing individual user activity, time zones, and past open rates. By sending emails at the moments when each recipient is most likely to engage, AI maximizes open and click-through rates. It can also perform A/B testing and run multiple variations of an email to identify the most effective elements and automatically optimize future messages.

Best AI Marketing Tools for 2025

There are hundreds of AI tools that can be used to enhance marketing automation efforts from chatbots that write unique content to AI agents optimizing ads bidding.

We compiled a list of the 10 best AI marketing tools for 2025:

Creatio

Marketing Creatio is an AI-native omnichannel marketing platform to accelerate lead-to-revenue. By combining key AI aspects, including agentic, generative, and predictive AI, it empowers marketing teams with the most comprehensive AI tools to enhance and refine marketing workflows.

Creatio.ai supports marketing teams through the whole marketing lifecycle – from audience segmentation and lead scoring to content creation, and campaign optimization. Creatio.ai enhances efficiency and enables data-driven marketing strategies with a unified approach to AI, seamlessly integrating intelligent automation, powerful data analysis, and content generation capabilities in a single tool.

Transform your marketing strategy with AI—see how Creatio makes automation effortless

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Google Gemini

Google Gemini specializes in generating and editing marketing copy. It leverages natural language processing (NLP) to create engaging, high-quality content, including ads, social media posts, email campaigns, and blog articles.

Gemini Advanced offers role-specific AI agents called Gems, that can be used to perform specific tasks, such as editing text, brainstorming campaign ideas, etc.

Surfer SEO

Surfer SEO helps marketers optimize content for search engines. Surfer SEO analyzes top-performing articles and provides data-driven recommendations on how to edit content to improve search engine rankings. Surfer SEO can also generate content briefs that help writers create SEO-friendly content.

Smartly.io

Smartly.io optimizes social media and digital ad campaigns. It simplifies the creation, management, and optimization of digital ads across multiple platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. Smartly.io can also automate audience targeting, and performance analysis, helping marketing professionals optimize their campaigns.

Albert.ai

Albert.ai is an AI-powered marketing platform designed to automate and optimize digital advertising across multiple channels, including search engines, social media, display networks, and more. It autonomously manages advertising campaigns, optimizing budgets, adjusting bidding strategies, and targeting to maximize ROI.

Keyplay

Keyplay helps B2B marketers identify and prioritize high-value prospects based on firmographic data and predictive analytics. By leveraging AI and machine learning, Keyplay helps businesses craft targeted experiences that enhance lead engagement and drive conversions.

Midjourney

Midjourney creates high-quality images based on text prompts, helping marketers create multiple variations of visuals for digital marketing campaigns, social media, websites, etc. Midjourney is especially valuable for personalized marketing campaigns, allowing marketers to create tailored visuals that resonate with specific target audiences.

Brand24

Brand24 is an AI-powered social media monitoring tool that monitors online mentions, sentiment, and brand reputation across social media, forums, and news sites. It provides real-time insights into customer sentiment, helping businesses proactively address potential issues or capitalize on positive discussions.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is an AI-powered marketing automation platform that specializes in email marketing. It helps marketers create, automate, and analyze email marketing campaigns, leveraging AI to personalize emails and optimize send times to improve customer engagement. Mailchimp can also optimize audience segmentation and targeting to increase conversion rates.

AdCreative.ai

AdCreative.ai helps marketing professionals generate ad creatives for various platforms, enabling them to produce visuals and copy at scale. It can also optimize ads performance in real-time by analyzing the effectiveness of different design elements, historical ad performance, design trends, etc.

The Future of AI in Marketing Automation

According to Gartner, the future of AI in marketing automation is multimodal. Rather than relying on separate AI-driven tools for content generation, analytics, and automation, businesses will implement multimodal AI, which is a combination of different AI models that can process and analyze various types of data - text, images, video, and voice within a single platform.

AI marketing automation is evolving from isolated tools into fully integrated, multimodal systems that can work across different formats and channels, delivering greater efficiency, personalization, and ROI.

Gartner predicts that by 2027, around 40% of generative AI solutions will be multimodal.

The Potential of AI in Marketing Automation

Companies that integrate AI into their digital marketing operations can personalize marketing efforts at scale, optimize costs, improve customer experiences, and boost campaign effectiveness.

Creatio with an AI-native and unified approach allows businesses to execute hyper-personalized, self-optimizing marketing campaigns with minimal human intervention - bringing the future of AI marketing automation to life today.