Can AI-Based Personalization solve the rising Consumer Expectations?

When it comes to providing an exemplary customer experience to your users, the spray and pray marketing model doesn’t work at all. Factors that convert a certain user group can cause no conversion or even unsubscription for another group.

Data-driven marketing has been quite effective in arresting this loss of users. Yet, some issues still remain that marketers need to iron out to improve the performance of their marketing campaigns. AI-based personalization in marketing campaigns can be particularly helpful here. It helps you to treat the users as individuals. Therefore, you can provide a seamless experience for users to connect with your brand. Let’s find out how effective AI-based personalization is, and how you can design your marketing strategy around it for improving your campaign performances.

How AI is catering to rising customer expectations

Customer expectations are the key reformers in terms of personalization. Researches show that as many as 80% of users are more inclined to make a purchase when brands they are engaging with offer personalized experiences.

Thus, personalization no longer means that you can mention the name of the users you are targeting. Personalization encompasses a more wholesome approach in data-driven marketing strategies. You need to  include the users’ choices of products and engage them on their preferred marketing channel at a preferred time. You must also recommend products and services that they like, and treat them in a 1:1 manner.

Further, users now have more choices for buying a product or service online. Hence, grabbing their attention with marketing communications needs to be more meaningful to engage them. Not only that, but these messages must also be relevant and according to their preferences. Unless your users notice all the information they need in a glance, your marketing messages won’t get much traction.

Here, it should be prudent to mention that the choice of platform is critical in delivering messages and generate users’ interest. Certain AI-based marketing platforms like Vizury Engage360 emphasize on personalization. Hence, it packs in some unique features to improve your campaign performances.

So let’s find out some of the advantages of AI-based personalization. Some of these benefits are unique to Engage360.

The AI-based personalization marketing advantage

1. Personalized customer service

While offering a product or service to your users, you have to address their concerns or feedback too. Solving complex issues of users usually translates into a higher benefit. AI-based marketing help you address these concerns much more efficiently. You can deploy several AI tools at different layers of your customer service operations to improve user concerns.

Since customer services are mostly human-dominated, there are possibilities of users facing some poor experiences while connecting with you. Several reasons, such as slow profile mapping of users by service representatives, or miscommunication between executives and the users, or other issues susceptible to human error, contributes to this.

However, AI-based tools act as virtual representatives having every data at their disposal and use them efficiently while interacting with users. These tools can have an engaging conversation with your users and understand what they are looking for better. Offering AI-based customer service can often lead to reduced churn, increase engagement and retention, and adds more value to your business.

For example, let’s say one of your users has an issue with a product he bought and approaches your service desk to resolve it. Your AI-based communication can interact with him and understand the solution he is looking for. Since the tool has a better understanding of the user intentions and buying propensity, it can either offer to exchange his current product or replace it with products from the same brand, or product type much faster. A human customer care executive, whereas, might have issues with recommending solutions faster, as he has to look up the user data and think of a solution manually.

2. Identifying user behavior to improve communication

As mentioned earlier, AI-based tools and platforms can access user data faster and more accurately, identifying user behavior becomes easier. Therefore, it can be an essential medium for reducing the friction between the users and your brand. Besides, the AI-based approach helps you understand the pain-points of your users better, and communicate with them in a relevant manner so that they feel a personal connection with your brand.

AI tools and machine learning algorithms can also help you to predict the most active touchpoints or time of their online activities. You can use these and leverage their interest in your products to create a compelling marketing funnel. Subsequently, you can engage your users with relevant communication and guide them towards conversion more smoothly by removing the expected roadblocks in their journey.

We can take up an example here. Let’s assume that a section of your users is more active on social media and is keen on trying out new apparel. Let’s say, this section is comprised of compulsive shoppers, and don’t shy away from buying from different brands. Once your tool identifies the trend and behavior of these users, it can promote products that resonate with their choices using social media as the touchpoint. Using the right kind of content over the most active channel can help you generate more sales volume using these tools.

3. Understanding the user intent to improve retention using AI-based Personalization

AI-based tools are based on machine learning algorithms that help you to visualize the complete user journey with much ease. Moreover, they help you to collect and leverage user information collected across data points from across channels.

When you have a detailed collection of user data, you can make your marketing campaigns more personalized. The data dashboard shows you multiple information. This include aggregated app usage of users, social media activities, online behavior, and their interaction with your website. You can use these data to create different cohorts of users and target them accordingly with products they find relevant. Additionally, you can constantly send them communications to reinforce your brand value and improve the user intent to increase the chance of retention.

Having personalized marketing strategies can help you in another way too. Validating your current campaigns’ performance can help you identify the bottlenecks that are adding to the churn rate. You can have a complete understanding of the user interaction on your marketing campaigns. Subsequently, you can streamline the ones that are not performing well and improve the value generation from them.

4. Activate more users with product recommendations

AI-based personalization depends on the multi-faceted capabilities of machine learning and one of them is pattern recognition. Implementing the AI-tools in your marketing stack helps you leverage the machine learning engines to understand the buying propensity of certain products for a certain category of users. Your AI-tool or platform then uses these patterns to create several models based on the data. Further, it let you know the products that your users could be interested in buying if you recommend them.

These models can help you to design your marketing campaigns using an omnichannel approach. Hence, you can engage your users with accurate product recommendations. You can also use certain additional features such as product labels and carousel notifications to improve the buying intent among your users. Product labels add the social validation of certain products, while carousel notifications help you to club multiple product information under a single notification.

These types of product recommendations help you attract new users to your website. Not only that, they improve the customer lifetime value of your existing users. Using the right product recommendations, you can improve the cross-selling and upselling opportunities for your products. It could help you to generate more revenue by increasing the bucket size for your users and the volume of sales.

5. Building loyalty and engagement with Omnichannel AI-based personalization

The AI-based marketing strategy is carried out through an omnichannel approach. Therefore, it allows you to save effort and time on designing the campaigns using personalization parameters for each marketing channel. In addition, designing, deployment, and performance optimization can be monitored effectively depending on the accuracy of your marketing automation platform.

Besides, studies show that if you send out personalized communications, brand loyalty is increased by 28% among millennials. This lowers the cost of acquisition and improve the conversion rate, resulting in efficient marketing spend.  Moreover, it helps you to improve your retention rate too, due to targeted and relevant communications.

Wrapping Up

Personalization has become one of the key parameters when it comes to user engagement. Thus, you must cater to the rising expectations of your users. Furthermore, almost 89% of digital businesses are looking to invest more funds in personalization. Besides, keeping yourself out of the bandwagon might become a bother later.

Are you looking to adopt an AI-based marketing strategy for your business? Please reach out to [email protected] to know more about personalizing your campaigns.