Customers always love options, be it online or offline. But with the changing times and fast-paced lifestyles, the urge to find the best from a vast pool of options is now considered a waste of time and energy.
Let me explain with a simple example: Say, you are searching for a flower bouquet for your friend’s anniversary. As per the traditional way, your search will be fed by a long list of flower bouquets, irrespective of the occasion you intend to gift.
And, here comes the role of AI, which understands your intent and goal, and curates a personalised bouquet list that suits your purpose.
This is the new way of retail online marketing, where AI drives the power to engage, understand, and deliver a personalised experience to each one of its customers.This helps to build a stronger customer-brand relationship, making them more likely to come back for this seamless shopping experience.
AI-Driven Personalisation can be implemented in Emails, ads, and websites.
AI-Powered Email Marketing
This tool helps to analyse the customer base thoroughly, collecting and understanding their statistics like preferences, intent, behavior, browsing history, and demographics. This information helps to tailor personalised emails and dedicated offers to be sent at preferred times.
How does it work?
- Data Analysis: It does a detailed study on customers’ social profiles, search history, purchase history, and different website interactions.
- Content Adaptation: It uses the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field to understand and interpret human tone and actions.
- Predictive optimization: It determines the frequency and best time to trigger emails and offers to its customers.
- Dynamic Content: Upon understanding customer data, emails are tailored, suggesting relevant products, offers, and information.
Example
Amazon uses AI-driven Email Personalisation to send well-crafted emails to its customers, prioritising their preferences.
AI-Powered Ads Personalization
This technology uses NLP and big data to analyse and understand customer behaviour and create highly relevant ads that increase the chances of engagement.
How does it work?
- Data Analysis: Firstly, dynamic customer profiles are built based on customer data sets like demographics, purchase history, browsing history, real-time interactions on the website, and social media activities.
- Predictive Analytics: Algorithms are used to predict user requirements, needs, or upcoming probable actions.
- Real-time Customization: Even during navigation or interaction on the site, ads are being dynamically crafted with product recommendations and giving exclusive offers.
- Cross-Platform Delivery: Depending upon customers' actions and usage on other platforms, be it social media or other shopping sites, ads are personalised, creating a cohesive experience.
Example
Netflix and YouTube direct personalized ad/movie suggestions.
AI-Powered Personalized Website
This technology upgrades the customer experience by going beyond the same static page view to crafting unique journeys with exclusive page design to boost customer engagement and a satisfactory user experience.
How does it work?
- Data Collection: Just like email and ads, for the website as well, customer data is analysed to gather data depending on their browsing history, previous purchases, location, actions, and interactions.
- Machine Learning Algorithms: Customer profiles are built by analysing their data, patterns, behavior, and online interaction.
- Real-Time Adaptation: While the user is navigating through the site, this technology captures and understands users’ actions on the site and instantly delivers personalized content, offers, or layouts.
Example
Amazon and Sephora use this technology that encourages shoppers to add more items to their cart.
Benefits of AI-Powered Campaigns
- Increased Engagement & Conversions: It delivers relevant content to the customers that keeps them hooked and thus increases the chances of sales.
- Data Driven Insights: It helps to get a deep knowledge of customer data, which in turn helps marketers to take data-driven decisions that can highly influence customers and boost campaigns.
- Improved Customer Satisfaction: It creates a seamless, relevant, and highly satisfactory user experience that encourages customers to make purchases.
- Personalization at Scale: AI makes it so easy to deliver personalised content even if the customer base is thousands or millions.
- Cost Efficiency: By using automation and optimisation, AI helps to reduce operational costs and free up resources by taking over repetitive tasks.
- Predicting & Forecasting: AI has the ability to foresee changes based on its regular study of current and future trends, and changing customer behaviour. This helps marketers to strategize their plans proactively.
Risk Involving AI-Powered Marketing
- Firstly, data privacy is a major concern as it primarily deals with user data. All this user information needs to be handled with utmost precautions.
- Loss of Human Touch: This will lead to the loss of empathy and emotion. No doubt AI creates great content, but sometimes it struggles to build a real connection with customers that can be a high bait.
- Algorithms for automations might not always be correct, which can lead to wrong communication with potential customers, which can damage the customer experience built so far.
- Incorrect CTAs and product suggestions can be confusing and frustrating for customers. If the customer product is not delivered yet, but it is prompting for review, this can confuse the customer, creating a wrong impression.
- Possible IP and copyright violations are a major risk of using AI-generated text, images, or audio.Marketers need to be extremely cautious and not just use directly generated content from AI, but rather do some research work and fine-tune it.
Is AI-Powered Marketing the Next Big Thing in the Advertising World?
AI, undoubtedly, is the future of marketing, and with the fast-changing world, AI will become more crucial. Companies can go ahead in the game by using AI in their marketing. It helps them understand their users better, connect with customers more efficiently, save money, time, and a whole lot more. If you want to keep up in the fast-paced world of online marketing, you have to jump on board with these new ideas.