Marketing is an art form that is becoming increasingly personalized as consumers’ needs change. How can you attract and retain a consumer in a manner that sounds natural and stands out from the competition?
This has been the age-old question in the business world, and there are now new tools that help you sell a product that fits the characteristics and preferences of a consumer. There is no doubt that marketing campaigns have become increasingly sophisticated in appealing to audiences, but they still have a long way to go in attracting and retaining customers. Artificial intelligence (AI) is now paving the way for a new wave of personalized marketing, which is designed to fit the needs of an individual rather than the collective.
In other words, how do you streamline the process of sending marketing emails that fit the exact needs of an audience of one rather than a group?
This initiative began with customer segmentation, which split up consumers into groups based on their purchasing habits, such as what type of products appeal to them, the average cart size of their orders and seasonal factors. Similarly, recommendation engines are better at sharing products with customers based on buying habits of customers who have bought similar items. Nevertheless, consumers are now more likely to subscribe to a program or buy a product or service if marketers target them directly. McKinsey & Company report has estimated that 35% of consumer purchases come from recommendations.
According to Salesforce, 91% of consumers unsubscribe from emails, partially because of the impersonal nature of marketing campaigns nowadays. Additionally, Kahuna amassed data from Forrester, Gartner, and Infosys to conclude that 48% of consumers say they are willing to buy more when marketers personalize their experience to fit consumer interests and buying behavior. Also, 85% of marketers say that their audience segments are too broad, resulting in missed opportunities for revenue growth.
What your customers want in today’s day and age is more personal engagement, meaning that you need to engage them at the right time on the right device with the right message. One way companies are starting to do this is with A/B testing tools, which offer always-on personalization for websites and mobile apps.
Such tools can help increase your profitability with more advanced analytics platforms that compile narrower and more timely behavior-based segments. Plus, it allows your marketing team to update your company’s sites, apps or other products with your own messages, requiring no IT support. Finally, if you create multiple variations of creative content for each segment, A/B testing tools use machine learning algorithms to determine the optimal variation for each segment throughout a marketing campaign.
Another way you can reach customers directly is with chatbots, which store large quantities of information and are equipped with text analytics technology to simulate a conversation with customers. Your company can add a chatbot that not only answers questions but can also link up with popular messaging platforms (or you can create your own text messaging). This makes it easier for customers to interact with you without them having to download a new app.
Voice-activated assistants are an extension of this idea where AI tools have realistic conversations with customers in order to create a greater connection between a customer and your brand. There are also more advanced MarTech tools in the market that can adapt to changing trends in the marketing world and create sales copy and ads that fit these changing trends.
You can always create your own marketing personalization tool using machine learning APIs as well. Companies such as ours have developed products with machine learning APIs that have cognitive functions, such as natural language processing, product recommendations, marketing trend analysis and chatbots. You can even use reinforcement learning to better understand and adapt to your consumer preferences in order to offer more personalized content.
Businesses still have a long way to go in creating cutting-edge marketing platforms that fit customers’ growing need for personalization. Nevertheless, AI is making great waves as it can help your company make its marketing dreams come true either through existing software or by developing their own with off-the-shelf machine learning APIs.
Once you adapt to consumers’ changing needs with more personalized AI tools, your customer retention rates will grow and your ROI will increase. Thus improving your customer engagement, narrowing down your customer segmentation and boosting your connection to consumers.