10 Best AI personalization tools for websites, apps, email, and more
Updated on 14 Aug 2024
At their core, personalization solutions powered by artificial intelligence (AI) analyze lots of data — like browsing histories, purchases, and social media interactions — and automatically produce useful insights. Brands can use these insights to deliver tailored experiences to customers at different points in their journeys.
However, beyond this standard functionality, AI technologies are very diverse depending on the use cases they’re built for. We can differentiate between three broad types of AI used by online businesses:
- Traditional (or legacy) AI. This type of AI is built for well-known use cases like personalized product recommendations, dynamic website content, and tailored site search results. These techniques remain an essential part of delivering personalized customer experiences, especially for eCommerce stores.
- Conversational AI. Conversational AI solutions use natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to understand the meaning behind users’ questions and provide relevant answers. They’re crucial for businesses that provide customer service at scale via chatbots like Zendesk and Intercom or apps like WhatsApp.
- Generative AI. The newest addition to the mix, generative AI tools focus on creating new content — like articles, subject lines, or images — from simple text prompts provided by marketers. Most teams today use generative as a way to speed up campaign creation and work more efficiently.
While plenty of tools and platforms use some sort of AI technology, almost none offer a comprehensive version of all three types. As a result, most marketing teams can’t tap into the full potential of AI personalization without using a hodgepodge of disconnected systems and solutions.
In this guide, you’ll learn exactly how AI can be used to personalize your customers’ experience. We’ll also cover 10 of the best AI personalization tools and platforms for different channels, use cases, and business types, including:
- Insider
- Braze
- CleverTap
- Adobe Target and Adobe Campaign
- Dynamic Yield
- Klevu
- Monetate
- Intellimize
- Lyne
Lastly, we’ll use Insider — our AI-powered cross-channel personalization platform — to show you how AI can individualize every touchpoint in the customer journey and make marketers more productive.
Insider can help you aggregate your customer data and tap into the full potential of AI personalization. To learn more, visit our website or schedule a demo with our team.
How AI can be used for personalization (7 use cases)
AI has been used in different ways over the years across various industries. The following seven personalization use cases have proven to be great applications of AI — both in terms of user experience and results for brands.
- Website and mobile app content personalization. Advanced AI website and app personalization tools can tailor pretty much all elements to different users, including categories, banners, pop-ups, and more. When done well, this can make customers feel like the entire site or app was built specifically for them.
- Relevant product recommendations. AI algorithms can automatically match each individual user with relevant products based on their interests, preferences, previous purchases, and other key data points. If you’ve ever shopped on sites like Amazon, Walmart, or eBay, you know the power of these AI-based product recommendations.
- Predictive segmentation. Traditional segmentation enables brands to use known characteristics like locations, devices, demographics, or purchase histories to divide customers into groups. AI takes this process to a new level by predicting future behaviors, such as how likely customers are to buy, churn, or respond to a discount.
- Omnichannel personalization. Omnichannel marketing is the practice of creating consistent customer experiences across all touchpoints. AI can simplify this complex process and improve results by automatically delivering personalized content and product recommendations on each channel.
- AI-powered journey orchestration and optimization. Journey orchestration is the process building of consistent and engaging experiences across all customer touchpoints. AI-powered platforms can automate and optimize key parts of that process by triggering messages at the right times, using the best channel to contact each customer, surfacing key insights into customers’ journeys, and more.
- AI-led experimentation and self-optimization. Running A/B tests at scale can be very time-consuming. AI can take a lot of the work off your plate by analyzing the results of each test and automatically optimizing your campaigns based on them. This saves you time and effort as you don’t have to manually review each test and constantly make manual adjustments.
- Automated two-way customer conversations. Conversational marketing is a powerful way to engage customers in real-time and move them toward a purchase. Today’s AI algorithms can understand the intent behind many user queries (thanks to NLP), allowing brands to automatically engage in consistent, human-like conversations with thousands of customers at the same time.
Lastly, we also have to mention the expanding role of generative AI, fueled by ChatGPT’s exploding popularity. While not typically used for personalization, generative AI solutions can make marketing teams much more productive and efficient by enabling them to build, automate, and launch campaigns incredibly fast.
10 Best AI personalization solutions for different channels and business types
In this section, we’ll take a close look at 10 of the top AI personalization solutions:
- The first five platforms can use the power of AI to personalize most (or all) customer touchpoints, including websites, mobile apps, email, SMS, and more. This makes them a good choice for larger organizations that want to deliver tailored, consistent, high-converting experiences across different channels.
- The next four solutions are mostly focused on website personalization. They’re not as versatile as the first five platforms but can still produce good results for companies mostly focused on improving website conversions and revenue.
- The final option is a simple but powerful tool for one specific use case — AI-powered cold email outreach personalization.
#1 Insider
Main AI personalization use cases: Advanced website and mobile app personalization, product recommendations, site search, predictive segmentation, cross-channel customer journey personalization, and automation of two-way conversations.
Insider brings together the most extensive set of personalization capabilities for websites and mobile apps, as well as for channels like email, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, and more.
Brands like Samsung, Coca-Cola, CNN, and Lexus, use Insider to reduce acquisition costs, boost conversion rates, and increase revenue by creating personalized experiences across all channels with the help of AI.
Thanks to our suite of AI tools and features — called Sirius AI — you can:
- Personalize each touchpoint in your customers’ journeys. Insider enables you to deliver individualized content, messaging, and product recommendations to the right audiences, on the right channels, at the right times.
- Automate the entire customer experience and campaign creation process end-to-end. You can use simple text prompts to build segments, create campaigns, automate flows, optimize journeys, engage in two-way customer conversions in WhatsApp or chatbots, and much more.
- Launch campaigns incredibly fast and work more efficiently. Our patent-pending Generative AI can save you time, effort, and resources by generating campaign copy, images, and customer journeys, as well as optimizing campaigns without the need for manual intervention on your end.
Insider is also a versatile solution that you can use according to your needs. For example, you can personalize and automate the entire campaign creation process or lean on our AI just for specific channels and use cases (e.g., website and email personalization).
Insider has been ranked as the best and easiest to use personalization engine by G2.
As a robust solution for midsize and enterprise businesses, Insider also ranks at the top of other key categories like:
In the next sections, you’ll learn exactly how Insider’s powerful AI capabilities can help you generate more revenue, create exceptional customer experiences, and maximize your efforts and budget.
Maximize your conversions, revenue, and marketing budget with advanced website and mobile app personalization
Insider is a modern platform built specifically for the personalization era. Unlike legacy marketing platforms and clouds, Insider is designed to automatically collect all customer interaction data and use it as a foundation for successful personalization.
AI has also been an essential part of Insider for years and our algorithms have been trained on billions of data points. As a result, Insider offers some of the most advanced AI-powered website and mobile app personalization capabilities on the market.
For example, you can use Insider to easily show personalized product recommendations to each website visitor. Our platform makes it easy to choose where you want these recommendations to appear:
- On all website pages.
- On product or article pages.
- On category pages.
- On cart pages.
You can also choose between different AI personalization strategies:
- User-based personalization. With this strategy, our AI algorithms automatically match each user with relevant products based on their unique behaviors, interests, and preferences.
- Most popular items, most-searched items, items that are often viewed or purchased together, manual merchandising, and many other strategies.
In short, Insider’s AI can do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to showing relevant products but you can still tweak the recommendations to your preferences. This level of personalization is available for other website elements, including banners, pop-ups, categories, and much more.
For example, Philips used Insider personalization capabilities on their site to achieve a 40.11% conversion rate uplift and a 35% increase in average order value (AOV). For more details on their approach, check out the complete case study on our site.
Insider also enables you to drive even more engagement and revenue with:
- Personalized site search results. Customers often make three to five searches before abandoning a site. EUREKA — our AI-powered site search tool — lets you automatically show highly relevant results based on past actions, purchase histories, and predicted user behaviors. It also helps searchers find what they need faster with advanced filters and search previews.
- Mobile stories. Insider has a special product for adding engaging, Instagram-like stories to your mobile site or app, called InStory. Again, our AI algorithms can automatically personalize each story to the user who clicks on it. Dover Saddlery was able to generate $1.7 million in incremental revenue by showing personalized stories to web and mobile users.
If you’re interested, we explore Insider’s website and mobile app personalization capabilities in our guide to the best personalization engines.
Ensure an engaging and consistent experience by scaling personalization across all touchpoints
As we mentioned, Insider supports a wide range of external channels — including email, push notifications, SMS, WhatsApp, and more. This means you can scale your personalization efforts across all touchpoints without needing any third-party solutions.
Email and SMS
Email and SMS are still the most popular marketing channels for eCommerce businesses worldwide. As a result, standing out in customers’ crowded inboxes requires you to be extremely timely, relevant, and contextual with your messaging.
Insider helps you do just that. You can fully personalize your email and SMS messages by tailoring their subject lines, body text, and images using a simple drag-and-drop editor.
You can even scale your AI-powered product recommendations across your email communications. That way, you ensure a consistent experience for all email subscribers, which can lead to higher engagement, conversion rates, and revenue.
Push notifications
Insider enables you to build different types of web and mobile app push notifications — like recurring notifications, cart recovery prompts, location-based pushes, and many more.
Just like with email and SMS, you can easily personalize each push notification based on the categories and attributes users have shown interest in. For example, you can include a product carousel full of items that are often purchased together with ones they’ve bought before.
You can even send personalized web push notifications to anonymous visitors (i.e., those who haven’t shared any contact info with you). All you have to do is get them to agree to receive notifications before leaving your site, which is a small commitment that doesn’t require any personal data.
After that, you can bring them back to your site with web push notifications that are personalized based on the categories, products, price ranges, and other attributes they’ve shown interest in.
This can help you drastically reduce acquisition costs, convert more visitors, and recover abandoned carts. For example, Lenovo used this strategy to lower cart abandonment rates by more than 10%.
WhatsApp is one of the most exciting marketing channels today, with over 2.5 billion users and incredibly high open rates. Insider is a Meta-verified BSP that can enable you to take full advantage of WhatsApp’s marketing functionalities.
For example, you can use Insider to send personalized promo messages, price drop alerts, and event reminders to the right audiences at the right times. You can also design end-to-end shopping experiences with WhatsApp conversational commerce.
This new capability enables customers to browse your catalog, find products, add them to their carts, and complete their purchase — all without leaving WhatsApp. And, thanks to our AI, customers can engage in two-way conversations with your brand via WhatsApp.
For example, they can choose from different preset options or opt to start conversations with your brand. Since our AI can understand their intent and take into account their behaviors, interests, and preferences it can quickly point them to the most relevant content, products, and services for their needs.
Chatbots
Just like with WhatsApp, you can also use Insider to engage customers in personalized two-way conversations via chatbots. Again, our AI uses NLP to understand intent and relies on accurate customer data to deliver the most relevant answers to all questions.
Insider also lets you build your own bot personas that are tailored to your brand to ensure a consistent experience for customers. You can also set knowledge limits, so that your bots can avoid specific topics (e.g., race, religion, or political preferences) and determine when not to engage or reply.
If you don’t have a chatbot already, you can get one with our platform. However, if you’re using another solution like Zendesk, Intercom, or Drift, you can still build your bot personas with our AI and simply connect it to your current chatbot.
Create, optimize, and automate high-converting customer journeys in minutes
Insider offers a cross-channel customer journey builder and marketing automation solution (called Architect) that enables you tie all customer touchpoints into a cohesive customer experience.
Architect comes with a simple, user-friendly interface and a drag-and-drop editor that lets you set the rules for each customer journey — including how it starts, which channels it takes place on, and when each message gets triggered.
Architect is also very versatile, allowing you to build all kinds of automated flows and campaigns, including:
- Simple email campaigns, purchase confirmations, or order update flows.
- Complex omnichannel marketing automations that are personalized to each customer’s preferences.
- And much more.
And like many other Insider tools, Architect is also powered by AI. Our algorithms can drastically speed up the journey creation process, while also helping you improve click-through rates, conversions, and revenue with:
- Send-Time Optimization (STO). STO uses the power of AI to determine when each message in your campaigns should be sent. It does that by analyzing customer’s behavioral patterns to deduce when they’re most likely to engage with your brand.
- A/B Test Winner Auto-Selection. This feature automatically optimizes each journey based on the results of the A/B tests you’re running. For example, say you’re comparing two different journey paths in an A/B test. You can instruct Insider to wait for a set period of time and then automatically direct users to the winning path based on a metric such as open rates, conversion rates, revenue, and so on.
- Next-Best Channel Predictions. Similar to STO, this feature also analyzes each recipient’s behavioral patterns. However, its goal is to determine the best channel to contact them on. It’s especially powerful in situations where you don’t know how to continue a journey beyond a certain point.
Put simply, Insider’s AI-driven automation and optimization capabilities let you automatically deliver personalized messages on the right channels and at the right times during your customers’ journeys.
For example, Slazenger used these capabilities to create and personalize various campaigns across their website, email, push notifications, and SMS. This helped them achieve a 700% increase in customer acquisition and a 49x return on investment (ROI) within eight weeks of working with Insider.
Work more efficiently and launch campaigns faster with generative AI
As you can see, Insider’s AI capabilities can help you personalize all aspects of your customers’ experience — like your website content, product recommendations, send times, channel selection, site search results, and more.
Additionally, our newer Generative AI toolkit can simplify your workflows, improve your productivity, and enable you to launch campaigns much faster.
For example, here are three benefits of using our Generative AI in your day-to-day:Discover profitable segments 30x faster. Insider offers 120+ attributes for building customer segments. However, you can drastically speed up the segment creation process by simply giving Insider a text prompt and letting our platform generate segments for you. The whole process takes seconds and you can easily tweak each segment until it fits your needs.
- Build or autocomplete complex journeys. Insider can generate entire customer journeys based on your text prompts. All you have to do is tell it what your end goal is, e.g., increasing open rates, driving more conversions, preventing churn, and so on. Alternatively, you can use our AI to autocomplete journey paths in a way that maximizes engagement and conversions.
- Generate campaign copy and images. Sirius AI can create engaging subject lines, body copy, and images in seconds. Again, you just need to provide a simple text prompt with your end goal.
For more details on how Insider’s AI capabilities can help you achieve your business goals, schedule a free demo with our team.
#2 Braze
Main AI personalization use cases: Personalization across web, mobile, email, SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications, predictive segmentation, A/B testing, and customer journey personalization.
Braze is a customer engagement platform that brings together various channels under one roof. It offers an AI-powered tool stack called Sage AI that combines AI-powered personalization, content generation, and optimization. Braze is mostly specialized in tailoring communications on external channels like email, SMS, and push notifications, while its website personalization capabilities are very limited compared to other solutions on this list (like Insider, Dynamic Yield, and Monetate).
Learn more: 11 Braze competitors and alternatives for cross-channel marketing
#3 CleverTap
Main AI personalization use cases: Personalized messages across web, mobile, email, SMS, push notifications, and voice calls, predictive segmentation, A/B testing, and customer journey personalization.
CleverTap is an all-in-one customer engagement platform. While it was a simpler mobile marketing solution, CleverTap has expanded its offering to cover additional channels and features like CleverAI, which includes AI-powered segmentation, personalized product recommendations, and journey orchestration. Similar to Braze, CleverTap is also specialized in external channels, instead of on-site and in-app personalization.
#4 Adobe Target and #5 Adobe Campaign
Main AI personalization use cases: AI-powered A/B testing, experiment-led personalization across websites, mobile apps, IoT devices, email, SMS, and more, and context-specific product recommendations.
Adobe Target and Adobe Campaign are two products for running, testing, and personalizing campaigns across different channels. Adobe Target is an AI-powered A/B testing and personalization solution, while Adobe Campaign specializes in pulling together customer data into a single view and using it to create tailored cross-channel campaigns. We’re listing them together as they’re both part of the larger Adobe Experience Cloud and are often used in conjunction.
#6 Dynamic Yield
Main AI personalization use cases: Website, mobile app, and email personalization, A/B testing, and predictive segmentation.
Dynamic Yield is a personalization platform with a big focus on website personalization. It comes with a self-training deep learning system called AdaptML that can tailor the digital experience to each user based on their behaviors and preferences. Dynamic Yield also supports email personalization with features like personalized product recommendations, open-time-decisioning, precise targeting, and more.
#7 Klevu
Main AI personalization use cases: Personalized site search, product recommendations, automatic category merchandising, and website A/B testing.
Klevu is a personalization and conversion rate optimization solution for eCommerce businesses. Like DynamicYield, Klevu is mostly focused on website personalization and optimization with a few key AI-powered tools like
- Site search, which can deliver the right search results to all website visitors.
- Product recommendations, which can personalize each shopper’s experience.
- MOI, which is an AI chatbot (powered by ChatGPT) designed to improve the on-site search experience.
#8 Monetate
Main AI personalization use cases: Website and mobile app personalization, AI product recommendations, site search, predictive segmentation, and A/B testing.
Monetate is a personalization platform that offers three distinct products:
- Personalization, which includes features like automated personalization, segmentation and targeting, and audience analytics.
- Discovery, which includes features like personalized product recommendations, site search, and social proof.
- Experimentation, which includes features like A/B testing, dynamic testing, and feature experimentation.
#9 Intellimize
Main AI personalization use cases: Website personalization, website A/B testing, and product recommendations.
Intellimize is a website optimization and personalization solution. Its AI Optimize product enables teams to increase the likelihood of conversion by showing different page variants to visitors. The company also offers an AI-powered personalization product that can show tailored content and product recommendations to different users.
#10 Lyne
Main AI personalization use case: Cold email personalization.
Lyne is the simplest tool on this list. It mostly helps sales and marketing teams improve their cold outreach results and saves them lots of time in manually researching prospects. Lyne also offers a scraper that extracts useful lead data from LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator and search results.
Personalize all customer touchpoints and work more efficiently with Insider
Insider is the perfect personalization platform for midsize and enterprise companies looking to unlock the full potential of AI.
Our AI-powered toolkit can increase your conversion rates and revenue by delivering tailored content and product recommendations to all visitors across your website, mobile app, email, SMS, WhatsApp, and other touchpoints.
Plus, our generative AI can help you be more productive and work more efficiently by generating campaign copy, images, segments, and journeys in seconds using simple text prompts.
Our enterprise marketing platform is also a great choice if you want to:
- Unify your customer data from CRMs, CMSs, APIs, analytics solutions, social media tools, and other online and offline sources. This helps you lay the foundation for successful personalization by aggregating all customer data, getting a clear picture of your customers’ journeys, and building highly-targeted segments. Learn more: An in-depth look at the 7 best customer data platforms (CDPs).
- Automatically track customers’ behaviors across all touchpoints, uncover their interests and preferred channels, and even predict future behaviors like likelihood to purchase or churn.
- Maximize your marketing efforts and save resources by consolidating multiple marketing channels under one platform.
- Put product discovery on autopilot with hyper-personalized product recommendations and tools like InStory.
- And much more!
Finally, our experienced support team, native channel integrations, and proven templates enable you to get started with AI personalization and see a meaningful return on your investment as quickly as possible.
Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Insider can help you reach your business goals.