Artificial intelligence (AI) is a top trending topic. Everywhere you look, people are talking about innovations in AI and how it’s going to affect business, art, and everyday life.
With the launch of our new AI Content Generator (AICG), I wanted to dive into our history with this technology and tell you about the latest ways we’re leveraging it in our tool to help you grow your business.
From fiction to reality
For a long time, the common understanding about artificial intelligence came from science fiction novels or what we had seen on the silver screen. A theoretical concept, fiction painted AI as what powered robots and operated spacecraft.
Now, with the accessibility and advent of ChatGPT, we’ve entered an age in which artificial intelligence is no longer an artificial concept, but a definite reality.
Artificial intelligence has made its way from personal assistants and other consumer tools to a business asset with the advent of AI content generation, spam filtering, and fraud detection, to name just a few uses for the technology. Now, for the first time, we have an opportunity to give Main Street small businesses access to the same technology that big enterprises have used to get ahead. And, that’s exactly what we’re doing.
The AI revolution is here, and Constant Contact is proud to be a part of it — but we’ve been part of it for much longer than you might think.
Investing in AI
Our own journey to bring the power of AI to our customers’ marketing efforts began nearly four years ago with the internal development and introduction of a tool specifically to detect and prevent spam emails. This tool, which utilizes an open-source machine learning model from Google, scans billions of emails each month to help protect against suspicious email behavior and improve the safety, quality and deliverability of the more than 80 billion emails our customers send each year on average.
But that wasn’t all we brought to market — later in that same year, our engineering team launched another tool that you may not have realized is powered by AI: Subject Line Recommendation. This tool helps small business marketers hit upon just the right subject line to get their email opened, and it worked — more than 70% of our customers who use it accept the subject line recommended by the tool and implement it in their email.
While AI in business marketing seems to be a hot recent topic, Constant Contact has been deliberately investing in both AI and the engineering talent required to innovate with it for years — and that has provided us with a strong foundation and a top-tier team focused on helping our customers do more with less.
Learn more about AI in marketing your business.
Our AI Content Generator
Armed with our learnings from the past several years and a wealth of growing capability in the technology industry, we’ve been able to respond to the needs of our customers, building the AI Content Generator from the ground up specifically for the small businesses and nonprofits we’re here to empower.
So how does it work? Without taking up too much of our small business marketers’ precious time, the AI Content Generator uses proprietary data and algorithms to recognize the types of content that engage consumers the most and then extrapolates the best messages to send them. Then, it layers on the power of ChatGPT to automatically draft copy that can be used across email, SMS, and social media.
You can find the AI Content Generator within the Constant Contact dashboard, allowing you to generate content for announcements, product promotions, and newsletters (SMS is located in another part of the platform, more on that later). All you have to do is enter a description for your selected type of content and click the button to “generate content.”
In a few seconds, you have multiple content options that you can copy, edit, rate with a thumbs up or down, or select to see more options. And of course, because this is a developing technology, we want to hear what you think and how to improve, so there is also a space for you to give feedback.
Looking for text messaging? The SMS content generator lives in the SMS Campaigns section of the product, where you can generate content for announcements, product promotions, or reminders that adhere to SMS content requirements.
A smart solution for small business
Of course, the goal of using AI for content generation is not to let the AI write everything for you. The goal is to get you off the blank page and to give you back time to focus on the big picture for your business. AI can give you options, and it’s what you do with those options that matters.
And once you combine AI content generation with other digital marketing capabilities, like marketing automations, third-party integrations and more, you’ll be delivering more engaging messages to your customers with minimal effort.
And while it can be daunting to try something new, we know that AI is working — 79% of sales and marketing leaders say AI has helped their companies increase their revenue (Zippia). That’s a huge success rate, so you can be sure that AI has the power to benefit your company.
Join the AI revolution
Access to artificial intelligence is a game changer for small businesses and nonprofits. I am excited to see our customers begin to use this powerful technology to grow their businesses and am confident that our AI tools will help take your business to the next level.
We’re not going to stop here. We have a strong vision for where artificial intelligence can take us (and our customers) in the future and are already exploring how to expand its use to do what we do best — help the small stand tall.
Sell smarter, not harder.
AI Marketing
