In the rapidly evolving digital marketing landscape, small businesses are often at a crossroads, balancing the need for effective marketing with the demands of running a business. Recognizing this challenge, Constant Contact has launched a groundbreaking AI solution specifically designed to meet the needs of small to midsize businesses (SMBs). Ryan Burke, Head of AI at Constant Contact, is at the forefront of this innovation, bringing decades of expertise and cutting-edge technology.
Ryan Burke explains Campaign Builder, an AI-powered tool that promises to transform the way SMBs approach marketing campaigns. This pioneering solution isn’t just another addition to your marketing toolkit, it’s a comprehensive system that automates and optimizes your marketing efforts, freeing business owners to focus on what they do best: running their business.
From creating compelling email copy to choosing the most effective channels for outreach, Campaign Builder leverages Constant Contact’s extensive experience and sophisticated AI technology to deliver personalized marketing campaigns in seconds. This solution is ready to save time, increase campaign effectiveness, and instill confidence in small business owners who may otherwise be overwhelmed by the complexity of digital marketing. Join Ryan Burke as he dives deeper into the intricacies of this groundbreaking AI solution and its potential to transform the marketing landscape for SMBs.
Introducing AI Solutions:
Can you tell us about the new AI solution that Constant Contact is launching and why it is a pioneering tool for small to midsize businesses?
Most small businesses are marketers by necessity. They often don’t have the time to spend on marketing, and many small businesses lack the confidence and knowledge to get the most out of their campaigns. They need help creating the right message for their customers and understanding the best places to reach them with that content. That’s where Campaign Builder comes in.
Campaign Builder leverages our AI platform and best practices from nearly 30 years of digital marketing experience to automate the areas of marketing that SMBs often get stuck on. In just 90 seconds, we build a complete marketing campaign for you, including compelling copy for email, social media, and text messaging, branded email templates, and recommendations on where to best reach your customers. This saves SMBs time, helps them achieve their goals faster, and allows them to focus on other areas of their business.
Constant Contact is currently the only marketing platform that offers this level of automated multi-channel campaign creation for SMBs.
Target Audience:
Who are the primary target audiences for this AI solution, and how is it tailored to meet their specific marketing needs?
Campaign Builder is designed to help small businesses and nonprofits spend less time marketing and get better results from their campaigns. Our research shows that the biggest marketing challenges SMBs face are finding new customers, figuring out what works, and lack of resources. In fact, 56% of SMBs we surveyed said they spend less than an hour a day on marketing, and 73% felt uncertain about whether their marketing strategies were effective.
Campaign Builder empowers small businesses to market their business quickly and easily, reducing the time it takes to market, scaling your strategy, and giving you the confidence that you’re making progress toward your goals.
AI Features:
Can you elaborate on the capabilities of this AI technology? Specifically, how does it automate marketing processes?
Campaign Builder is a goal-oriented tool, so when you first open it, you tell your customers a little bit about what you want to achieve with your marketing campaign. It could be growing your list, promoting a sale, or even advertising an event. Campaign Builder then analyzes that goal and, in seconds, develops a set of recommended marketing tactics to help you achieve your intended results, including detailed recommendations on the best content, channels, and timing for each communication.
Behind the scenes, we leverage our AI platform and customer data platform (CDP) to do all the heavy lifting for you. Since Constant Contact was founded nearly 30 years ago, our AI models have been trained on past knowledge and data from real-world digital marketing campaigns. They learn what works best for different types of businesses and then provide recommendations that are more likely to result in success for our customers. We layer on OpenAI and other companies’ LLMs to help make the AI modeling experience intuitive and fast for our customers.
User Experience:
How does Constant Contact ensure that this AI solution is user-friendly, especially for small business owners who may lack technical expertise?
We want our customers to succeed because they have a great product or service, not because of their marketing acumen. Everything we build is designed to be intuitive, flexible, and powerful, because that’s what small businesses need.
Our customers don’t ask us to “buy AI” and they don’t care how the technology works under the hood. But they want to digest their marketing faster and easier, and they expect to understand what’s working and where to adjust. We designed Campaign Builder with that feedback in mind, creating a guided experience that helps them complete tasks in seconds that might otherwise take hours or days.
Not only can we recommend the best communications mix, we can also help you spread your message by suggesting channels you may not have used or considered before.
Integration with existing tools:
How well does this new AI solution integrate with Constant Contact’s existing suite of tools?
Our platform is built on AI. We’ve been using this technology for years in our customer-facing and backend applications (like personalization tools and spam protection) in addition to marketing automation. Campaign Builder simply builds on that foundation, giving our customers a new way to engage with the features and functionality within Constant Contact that they already use every day.
The recommendations made by Campaign Builder are designed to work seamlessly within Constant Contact’s small business workflow. Any email or text message can be edited using the same tools that customers use to manually draft messages, and it leverages the same SMS functionality and event platform that is already in the platform.
Customers can do all of this manually today in Constant Contact without the help of Campaign Builder. The benefit of starting with Campaign Builder is that the process will be significantly faster and your campaigns will feel more personalized, creative, and effective.
Future AI Development:
Can you share some insight into future AI developments or additional tools that Constant Contact is considering?
We have a strong vision of where AI can take us (and our customers) in the future, and we are already exploring ways to expand the use of AI to help solve more challenges that SMBs face. You can imagine what some of those needs are: everything from search engine optimization, online advertising strategies, reputation management, and everything in between.
We prioritize getting innovative ideas from our customers and building features that help attract new customers and keep them coming back.
Advice for small businesses:
What advice would you give to small businesses looking to adopt AI technologies for marketing purposes?
It may sound counterintuitive, but don’t worry about the technology itself. AI isn’t a tool, it’s simply a means to achieve better results—like writing a more witty subject line or knowing which customers prefer text messages over email.
Instead, focus on identifying areas of your marketing that need additional help. Maybe you’re struggling to write copy for your weekly newsletter, or maybe you feel like your customers aren’t engaging with your content. Or maybe you’re opening a new store soon and need to generate interest for your grand opening? This is where AI can help, and we tell our clients:
Look for partners like Constant Contact who use technology instead to build tools that help you overcome obstacles and get back to doing what you want to do.