The sun is setting on the general marketing email blasts and segmentation based on demographics. Marketing content and strategies have now woken up to customer personalization as the driving force for better revenue.
With digital commerce growing exponentially, businesses that are keeping step with the change are increasingly looking to personalize their marketing approach. Consumers don’t wish to be confronted by an overload of generic messages and irrelevant content. They go with brands that are able to capture their needs and preferences and establish a connection with them.
And the most effective marketing personalization currently is influenced by AI. According to Gartner research, 30% of digital commerce revenue growth would be attributable to AI technologies by 2020. The research also forecasts that by 2020, 60% of organizations will be using AI for digital commerce.
When it comes to getting marketing personalization, it boils down to leveraging AI for three broad areas– improving marketing campaigns, planning customer journeys and offering product recommendations.
These sound straight forward enough, but how does AI influence these factors?
Improving marketing campaigns:
AI vastly improves marketing campaigns because it helps businesses understand their customers deeply enough to offer them an enhanced customized experience. AI transforms all the existing data on customers into meaningful interactions that marketing leaders can use to carve productive campaigns.
AI takes customer segmentation to a more advanced level and empowers businesses to use behavioural insights using which they can deliver timely and personalized marketing messages.
AI can be used to identify customer preferences based on their purchase history, browsing behaviour, reactions to previous purchases and real-time responses.
The difference is that AI can process vast repositories of data online and offline to deliver tailored content and the right messaging.
Features like Natural Language Processing (NLP) to enhance conversational experiences with customers that are based on the customer’s context can be delivered at a much larger scale.
Planning customer journeys:
Most of us have a lot of social ads filling up our mailboxes and we don’t pay attention to most, even if they might be relevant. AI can place the right suggestion to the customer at the right time, enabling businesses to target customers more specifically. The journey stage that the customer is in is important and AI can help a business manage omni channel marketing campaigns and deliver the right content through the customer’s preferred device or channel.
AI also helps businesses leverage demographic data by collecting information such as delivery location and provide content that is relevant to such context. AI is able to analyze great amounts of data like income, age, online behaviour, personal interests and so on to time the content that is delivered.
Without AI, effective delivery of tailored multi-channel marketing, and personalization scaling is a huge challenge.
Offering product recommendations:
Having an offer is not good enough, knowing when to alert the customer about an offer makes all the difference. For instance, if a customer keeps receiving recommendations for products similar to the ones they recently bought might annoy them. AI is
able to track what the user is actually interested in and suggest offers and discounts accordingly. For instance, AI can detect a new customer and offer relevant coupons to instigate them to buy. Chatbots interact with customers in real-time and offer personalized coupons that a customer can redeem online or at the store. Using data analysis AI can also provide suggestions on the offers and product discounts that the marketing team can come up with to generate better revenue.
The power of AI lies in its ability to process data. Having an AI based platform can help a business identify patterns that humans cannot possibly detect and benefit from deep insights that are based on relevant and current data. AI brings the advantage of predictive insights as well using which marketing strategies can be forged to bring about the best results.
Conclusion:
To gain the competitive edge and to achieve marketing personalization, businesses are going for AI and ML powered technologies.
References:
How AI Will Drive Transformative Change in Marketing
How AI Is Shaping the Future of Content Marketing and Personalization
