For a successful marketing campaign, you need to figure out what your target audience expects and then deliver on-brand marketing content that resonates with them. It is not as simple as it sounds. That is why there are tools out there to help you - using AI to create content, personalize it, test it, optimize it, measure its impact, and drive customer engagement.
One such tool is Phrasee. It is not a household name like HubSpot but it is being used by businesses and marketers across industries like retail, finance, travel, and health and wellness - probably because of its powerful automation capabilities. This comprehensive review is for all of us who are interested in marketing - for those who have never heard of this platform and also those who have been thinking of using Phrasee for their business.
Let's not waste any more time. Are you ready?
What is Phrasee?
Phrasee is a marketing content generation and optimization tool that uses generative AI to create original on-brand marketing content in real time. Although content generation and optimization are at the core of this platform, it also has some pretty good analytics and reporting capabilities.
Introduced in 2015, this platform offers some powerful third-party integrations and allows you to deploy your AI content with major CDPs and DXPs. But let's not rush it and instead take a close look at some of its fundamental functionalities.
Content Generation
In the age of tools like ChatGPT, content generation is not something to be particularly impressed about. But the main challenge for marketers today is that AI-generated content is seldom original and worth using, ironically hurting their marketing efforts instead. This is where paid content-oriented platforms like Phrasee do things differently. The content generated by the Phrasee content engine is unique, diverse, and tailored to your brand voice. Even if the content is original, generally AI struggles with a human touch, which does not seem to be the case with Phrasee.
To get you started there are plenty of guided templates. So, you don't need to be a prompt engineer to generate the content you want, all you have to do is answer a few questions for the Phrasee content engine. It then uses its proprietary Content Graph and Large Language Models to deliver the result.
The area where this platform really excels in content generation is on-brand content. Its content engine boasts the capability to create content consistent in style and tone - this is the kind of content that helps you build credibility and trust. When configuring your brand voice, Phrasee gives you some controls such as what punctuation marks can be used, how often, what title case to use and when, which words to capitalize, what vocabulary and emojis to use, etc.
Phrasee can create content across multiple channels including email, social, messaging, web, and ads. All your content is organized in a content library that you can visit anytime and search for any piece of content.
A/B Testing
The beauty of A/B in marketing is that you can test things out to see what works the best and minimize your risk. Well, Phrasee does it well. When you instruct Phrasee's content engine to generate content for you, it generates multiple variants of it. It then sends them out to different segments of your audience and measures the performance of each against KPIs like click rate, open rate, etc.
The process is fully automated but that does not mean you can not control aspects of it and give feedback. At the end of the day, the goal is to find out the best-performing content that the Phrasee algorithm can optimize before sending it out to the biggest audience segment.
Content Optimization
There is little point in testing out content if you can not implement the test results to optimize it for maximum impact. This is another key feature of Phrasee that is quite commendable - making it one of the few AI platforms that can automatically perform dynamic optimization on experiments in real time.
As Phrasee's algorithm sends content variants to different audience segments, it continuously measures their performance against set KPIs and optimizes them on the fly. In this way, it can send the optimized content (based on the most effective variant) to your biggest possible audience and drive customer engagement.
Performance Prediction
Phrasee has been out for almost a decade, which means years and years of training its AI-based content algorithm on millions of experiments. Because of a huge data set and extensive experience gained over time, Phrasee is fully capable of quite accurately and reliably predicting the content elements most likely to engage your audience. It knows, for example, what the optimal length of any piece of content should be or where to place an emoji. So, when you get your Phrasee-generated content copy, you know that it is not only quantitatively good but is also predicted to receive high engagement.
Collaboration
A big part of Phrasee is automation but it also leaves necessary room for human intervention. The platform has integrated approval workflows to ensure that the machine and humans are on the same page.
For seamless collaboration, you can share the AI-generated content with your marketing team for their approval and feedback. They can either let you know their decision with the simple "Reject" and "Approve" buttons or share their thoughts as comments.
Integrations
Phrasee effortlessly integrates with all major Email Service Providers (ESPs), Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), and digital engagement platforms. This integration allows for hassle-free incorporation of Phrasee-content generated into your campaigns, using Phrasee's expertise in statistical optimization. Also, it automates the retrieval of experiment results, which can be readily fed back into the Phrasee platform to keep its algorithm learning and getting more accurate over time.
Some of Phrasee's integration partners are Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle, Facebook, Cordial, Airship, Braze, Optimizely, Sailthru, Liveclicker, and Instagram.
Pricing
Phrasee does not have any fixed pricing plans as the company boasts flexible pricing. They have categorized the platform's features into two sets - Content Generation and Content Optimization. Both sets are sold separately. Content Generation is solely for AI-driven content development needs. Content Optimization, on the other hand, has the rest of the features, with all the Content Generation features included too.
There is no free trial. But if you are curious to learn more about the platform, you can contact Phrasee's sales team to book a free demo.
Final Verdict
Phrasee gives the impression of a light, typical generative AI platform but has some impressive capabilities - thanks to its machine learning algorithm that has been trained on millions of experiments over the years. Another impressive thing is the balance between automation and human control.
There is so much to like about this platform. The only factor that may discourage many small businesses from using it is the lack of a free trial and a proper starter pricing plan.