The nature of marketing has made it absolutely necessary to embark on the survival of the fittest and this can only be done by constantly honing and upping your area of competitive advantage. Fortunately for you, however, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has recently opened the door to scale-personalize without compromise.
No two customers are exactly the same, there are differences, concerns, feelings, pain points, and needs that must be addressed individually. But in a world of 7.7 billion people as of February 2019, according to the most recent United Nations estimates, it seems almost impossible to scale-personalize marketing.
How do you go about attending to the different needs of these people, when everybody wants to be reckoned with? This is surely a herculean task especially now that customers want to know where, when, and how without being given excuses.
Humans have constraints as well as the propensity to be inconsistent, therefore, it becomes difficult to effectively create responses that can appeal to a larger group at the level of the individual. Also, just one interaction that is out of context is enough to make you proffer the wrong response because you didn’t understand what brought about that particular interaction and in that manner.
Sending a one-to-all message will not do the magic, personalized messages are what your customers want from you and the only way out of this logjam is to scale-personalize with AI. According to The Harvard Business Review, there is the need to get it right, bearing in mind that personalization can deliver five to eight times the ROI on marketing spend, and can lift sales by 10% or more, if the three Ds—data discovery, automated decision making, and content distribution are integrated.
You must acquire the necessary data and insights to position your business where you are able to anticipate customer behavior and then come up with optimized offers or programs for every individual customer in real time or close to that. However, it will amount to recklessness on your part if you don’t know that you may have all the data in the world and you are still at the zero levels.
You must be able to give your data context so that it becomes information and comprehensible to your customer. That’s only when you can use it effectively to drive the desired results making use of systems (AI and machine learning) that can run the advanced analytics to initiate useful and actionable insights, and then activate the sending of appropriate personalized messaging to your customer.
What aspects of marketing as seen today do we really need AI for? Scale – the size of your customer base and speed – the expectation that the action suggested by the insight will be attended to live rather than later, tend to make an already complex situation more complex.
The complexity introduced by the customers is how do you discover what they are doing, interpret what you know about their activities, reach a conclusion on how you are going to respond to them, come up with the response and relay that response – all while the customers are still on their various journeys? And you must all the time take into consideration a large number of customers you must attend to promptly.
Understanding and personalizing customer experience requires digital brands to create hundreds, and sometimes even thousands, of micro-segments in order to identify journeys that are likely to have similar patterns. This is absolutely impossible without AI input, the human resources needed to effect such will overwhelm even the very big corporations.
The incorporation of machine learning into conversational bots has seriously revolutionized the ability to scale-personalize, we have today the AI chatbots which can process the natural language and resolve simple problems of the users all by themselves. You absolutely need automation to effectively scale-personalize marketing and AI Chatbots can help bring about the automation of your customer service and improve customer engagement process.
AI chatbots are able to provide assistance for basic queries, such as resetting passwords and updating personal information. In these cases, the answers are very similar and therefore customers can enjoy fast and real-time processing of their requests. Employees who ordinarily should have been bogged down are freed to focus on higher value-added tasks.
With AI and machine learning, brands can hone in on signals and information produced by customers about their needs and intentions through activities and then, respond with relevant and timely content and experiences based on these triggers. The essence of scale-personalizing is to enhance the overall customer experience and increase engagement and loyalty by delivering messages that map to and even anticipate what customers will want.
The latest marketing technology platforms or AI also allow marketers to try out different campaign creative, content, and experiences and do so at scale in order to improve the relevancy for individual customers where, how, and when they want it along the customers’ journey.
For you to accelerate your growth as a brand, you overwhelmingly need to scale-personalize your marketing campaigns in this digitalized world. The task may seem undaunting but with AI and automation, and the data you need easily accessible all you need do is integration.
