Companies worldwide already use AI-powered predictive analytics to anticipate behaviors and onboard and retain customers. By all accounts, investment in AI is paying off.
Research by NewVantage Partners shows that 91% of surveyed companies in 2022 were increasing investments in artificial intelligence, and 92% report measurable ROI. So the use of AI is quickly taking over as the future of digital marketing and for good reason.
McKinsey research finds that 76% of customers today get frustrated when they don’t receive a personalized experience with a brand, and that’s a key factor in their decision-making.
The problem? Personalization at scale is a true challenge. It’s nearly impossible without the right technology. With privacy-focused regulations raising the cost of advertising in recent years, organizations have less access to the third-party data they rely on to make demographic or intent-based recommendations to their customers.
The solution? Artificial intelligence — specifically, using AI to identify, optimize and personalize based on first-party behavior data.
AI can fuel personalization in digital marketing in a way that technology never could before. By applying it to your marketing strategies and integrating it into your tech stack, you can harness its potential to maximize ROI across all channels.
How AI Improves Customer Experience
For marketers, personalization is not just about targeted messaging — it’s about a hyper-personal understanding of your audience. Today’s customers expect to be delighted before and after their purchases with a consistent experience across all channels (digital and in-store).
With AI, you can quickly transfer personalization from one channel to another.
If you’re using AI to personalize your newsletters, for example, you can use that same learning to enhance your chatbot.
An AI-powered optimization platform is the only way to personalize every interaction across the entire customer journey down to the individual level.
Today’s consumers expect a personal connection with the companies they patronize and buy from.
Whether it’s through the web, email, or advertising — personalized engagement matters to customers.
Most customers are willing to share their data for a product or service they truly value. AI can scale the number of experiences you can test into the millions, automatically serving each user with the best, most personalized experience across their entire journey.
AI Is the Future of Digital Marketing
In marketing especially, AI is the best way to automate and scale experiences that meet the high standards of today’s consumers. The right tech can help exponentially scale content and allow for more intelligent decision-making across the customer journey, which is why adopting AI is so critical.
Here are four significant ways that AI is blazing the trail for the future of digital marketing:
1. Big Data Analytics
Only AI algorithms can quickly analyze exponentially large amounts of data and accurately act upon it in real-time. What this means for leaders is that AI can do a lot more work than you expect, enabling you to focus more time on higher-level tasks. As a result, AI could relieve those repetitive, tedious (but still necessary) chores.
2. Decreased Learning Costs
AI-based optimization solutions analyze data across all channels, automatically minimize traffic to underperforming experiences, and increase traffic with ideas that are currently excelling. This means that AI drives the cost of testing and learning to its lowest potential. This decrease in understanding cost further allows organizations to spend time on what’s working instead of what isn’t and customize reactive, impactful, and effective personalization.
3. Reduce Customer Churn
In the service of customer retention, today’s leading brands are adding proactive service recovery (PSR) to their CX programs. PSR is an umbrella term for actions that aim to turn less-than-stellar customer experiences into excellent ones in as close to real-time as possible.
For example, when a telecom company detects that a customer visiting the accessory page isn’t progressing further down the funnel (or toward their cart), they can add visual callouts to popular compatible items or even offer help by chat or phone.
Both chat and phone interactions can be powered by conversational AI and provide a deeper level of personalized experience to your customer’s journey where it’s needed most.
4. Hyper-Personalized Experiences
Brands who leverage AI optimization solutions have a significant advantage: They can deliver incredible experiences from any external channel, all the way to checkout and thank you pages.
This feat is accomplished by personalizing digital experiences across the entire customer journey, which would be a Herculean effort without AI assistance. With intelligent tech in your back pocket, personalized content is easy.
The Future of AI is Now
With intelligent tech like AI, employees can be more productive and create better results in shorter time frames with less of a strain on their workload. They can also create more complex, satisfying customer experiences.
While AI excels at crunching huge amounts of data, finding patterns, and making predictions, it would be far less effective without the humans who use it. Humans bring their own unique talents to the table, after all, such as creativity and flexibility — not to mention common sense.
As we find more uses for this incredible tech, AI will likely augment current staff and open new opportunities for them and your business.
Artificial intelligence is already starting to help form stronger bonds than ever between customers and brands. Stronger bonds mean happier customers — which means better business. AI is the future; don’t miss out on your chance to capitalize on its unique capabilities before your competitors do. Your customers are counting on you.
Featured Image Credit: Provided by the Author; Photo by Carl Heyerdahl; Unsplash; Thank you!
Michael Scharff
CEO and Co-Founder of Evolv.AI
Michael Scharff is CEO and co-founder at Evolv AI, which enables brands to continuously find better ways to connect with their customers using artificial intelligence and machine learning.
