How AI Helps You Keep Up With Your Consumers
Article • August 11, 2021 • Written by: Diane Keng
Consumer expectations have been steadily rising, and the pandemic only accelerated that trend. With online shopping paving the way for consumers to find new brands and lose the ones with inadequate digital consumer experiences, marketers need to adapt to a rapidly changing landscape.
To do so, things like AI and predictive personalization are no longer just nice to have – they’re all but required to provide consumers with the experiences they’re looking for. That means eliminating the guesswork and using data to inform consumer experiences at every touchpoint in real-time.
Consumers aren’t looking for tons of content from your company, either. They only care about what’s relevant to them and their current situation – if a consumer just bought a puppy, for example, you should recommend content and products around caring for a new pet. If they can’t find what they’re looking for quickly, they’re likely to lose interest and give another brand a try.
What Can an AI Marketing Solution Do For You?
Technology plays an increasingly important role in marketing. In order for brands to produce truly relevant and timely experiences, they need to have the right tools at their disposal.
In the past, marketers could break their audience down into a few different segments, providing different experiences for consumers based on age, gender, or geographic location, for example. Now that consumers expect personalized experiences at almost every touchpoint, marketers need to be able to create tens of thousands of audience segments to meet that need – something that isn’t possible with manual segmentation practices.
AI also creates an opportunity for dynamic consumer experiences that change in real-time based on a consumer’s changing preferences. For example, if a consumer just looked at a vegetarian recipe and it’s almost dinnertime, the AI can recommend quick recipes that don’t contain any meat. Adapting instantly to a consumer’s preferences isn’t possible when marketers are responsible for curating those experiences manually, and it’s inevitable that small opportunities will be missed – but these add up.
How AI Improves Digital Consumer Experiences
- Enable personalized recommendations for individualized experiences
Marketers can’t create personalized experiences for each consumer on their own – with an AI solution, they can turn their attention to more strategic elements of marketing campaigns. AI makes it easier to bring a data science approach into your marketing efforts by taking the burden off of marketers when it comes to consolidating and analyzing consumer data.
AI marketing solutions can take that data and use it to inform product recommendations for different audience segments. With the right solution, that can happen in real-time based on a consumer’s purchase history and current context.
- Optimize customer loyalty programs
Predicting consumer behavior isn’t an easy task. Preferences can change in minutes based on contextual factors like weather, time, or location. That’s why AI tools are so powerful – they can account for these factors to optimize digital consumer experiences.
Even if consumers aren’t registered in your CRM, AI can help you personalize their experiences based on data like geographical location, device type, and referral source. For those consumers that have made purchases in the past or signed up for your CRM, the right AI marketing solution should be able to optimize product recommendations, deals, and special offers using historical data and contextual information.
- Create an omnichannel experience
Once you’re comfortable with how AI is helping you optimize digital consumer experiences on your website, you can extend that to things like email and SMS campaigns. AI can create millions of different emails based on the parameters you set, without any manual involvement from marketers. For retailers, something as simple as using AI to update product recommendations based on in-store and online product inventory can improve consumer experiences almost immediately.
What was simply a great website experience has now turned into an omnichannel personalization strategy for your brand – and your consumers will appreciate it.
AI helps marketers stay one step ahead of changing consumer preferences – so long as marketers have found the right AI tool for their business. No matter where you are on the journey to curating fully predictive and dynamic consumer experiences, applying AI in the right ways can help you improve ROI while creating meaningful and relevant digital consumer experiences.
Want to make the most of your personalization efforts? Get in touch with us today!