Marketers who regularly email promotions to subsets of their customers based on their shared attributes — such as customer age, gender and the previous number of purchases — are now getting significant help from AI in automating the process.

Essentially: Instead of tediously assembling subsets of customers manually, these early adopters are using AI tools to automatically sort their customers into subsets — and then easily target them with highly personalized emails.

Even before the use of AI, marketers have realized significant gains in sales by grouping their customers into subsets — or persona groups — and then preparing customized promotions for each of those persona groups.

And more recently, marketers have been able to mine a great deal of the personalized data needed to create various personas by using Google Analytics.

The tool has been a godsend for marketers looking to get a detailed look at the identity attributes and Web site behavior of each and every person who visits their Web site and clicks through to their product pages.

But those early advantages have come with some pain points.

Newer privacy laws, for example, force marketers to anonymize the data they collect on Web site visitors — and group those visitors into anonymous subsets if they want to send them personalized marketing messages.

Plus, while Google Analytics serves up an incredible wealth of data on Web site visitors, the chore of sorting and converting all that profile data into ten, twenty — or even more — customer subsets or personas too often becomes a horrendously manual, tedious exercise.

Fortunately, with AI, sorting through all that data and creating numerous customer personas to market to has been automated.

New AI tools, for example, can automatically scoop up Google Analytics-provided identity data on each Web site visitor — such as their buying habits, favorite colors, cities where they live, how often they visit your Web site and similar — and then automatically anonymize that data by grouping each visitor into a separate persona group.

In addition, the AI can also study and amalgamate the kinds of pages and products those visitors linger over, the specific links they click on while visiting a Web site, the number of sales the Web site has made to each visitor and still other attributes.

Essentially: Everything that Google Analytics observes and reports on about your Web site visitors can be automatically ingested by the AI, thoroughly analyzed and then auto-segmented for use into specific customer persona groups.

Moreover, these AI tools can also be programmed to analyze visitor behavior more deeply.

And they can be used to offer their analysis on which Web site visitors in any given persona group appear to be at the initial interest stage of a purchase, at the research and evaluation phase of a purchase — or at the moment when a purchase appears imminent.

Even better: The same ingestion, analysis and auto-sorting into persona groups these AI tools bring to Google Analytics can also be used to mine all the data your company is gathering from visits customers and potential customers make to its social media properties.

Here, AI can be unleashed to deeply ingest, study and provide recommendations regarding the interests, behavior and affinities exhibited by each of your customers on every one of those social media properties.

By studying social media, AI will also accumulate a great deal of insight into your customers’ reading, listening and browsing habits.

And it will also be able to take note of influencers they follow, where they hang out most on social media and who they’re engaging with.

You’ll also be able to determine, for marketing and advertising purposes, what podcasts are most popular with each persona group you’re tracking, what YouTube channels they like best and what hashtags and conversation topics are resonating most forcefully with them.

Again, all this data can be automatically ingested, analyzed and used to create customer subsets or personas that you can target with your marketing.

Plus, the persona group data you glean on social media can also be combined with the data you already have on Web site visitors to create an omni-view of each persona group you track.

Of course, when you venture into the marketplace for an AI tool that can automatically segment your Web site visitors or social media members into various personas, you’ll find there’s a great deal of noise out there, a great deal of questionable claims — and a great deal of sizzle trying to pass as substance.

That’s why it pays to rely on a seasoned, trusted AI advisor who will enable you to pick the perfect AI-powered customer auto-segmentation tool for your business — either off-the-shelf or as a custom solution.