With ever-increasing social connectivity and digital channels, there is an explosion of data from different channels. DATA, big or small, plays a huge role in the decision making, and planning process.
But, how to unlock this data?
It has been a dilemma for the marketers as the right unlocking of this information can only bring abundance to the organization.
Customers and the Data
As customers hop around from one website to the other, they leave behind a massive trail of information. The data left behind is not futile; it can unravel the mystery behind every customer’s behavior. You just have to be aware of the right tools, practices, and tactics to decipher the hidden meaning of customer’s behavior. As you dig deeper inside the pool of data, you will find invaluable information popping up on the surface, surprising you with incredible insights.
Unlocking the Potential of Marketing Data
Marketing data is a goldmine of information waiting to be unlocked.
When customers traverse different stages of the sales funnel, they display different behavioral preferences, intent before making the final purchase. These data are further saved to analyze and improve the engagement and conversion process.
Artificial intelligence (AI), acts in a big way by unlocking the meaning of the data and providing useful insights. It can track and interpret the information by finding the hidden pattern. The HIDDEN PATTERN is what many of the marketers miss out on. They can find the correlation of the hidden pattern with the buying behavior of the customer.
AI marketing helps in making sense of the marketing data so that as a marketer, you can receive useful insights for making the right marketing strategy.
Image source: pointillist.com
As you see from the above image, the majority of the useful customer data is hidden below the surface, which AI marketing helps in digging out to make the right usage of it. Sometimes, you will be shocked with results as the insights would make you aware of the information which you never thought ever existed.
Understanding Your Customers
The understanding process does not end after the successful conversion; customers experience data is also a significant source of information. The customer experience (CX) data guides in a better understanding of your customers as it is the real-time data of your customer’s likings. With their feedback, marketers can understand which features in a product can satisfy the customer. Most of the time, customers are even vague about their needs, and when they start using the product or service, they become aware of it. Data insights are one of the primary tools to enhance customer experience. AI simplifies the complexity of customer experience data with insights helping organizations to perform better.
There are three building blocks for successful application of AI in customer experience:
1. Real-Time Delivery of Insights:
The customer’s touchpoint, along with AI, helps in better delivery of insights. The touchpoints have the engagement information between the customer and the businesses; along with artificial intelligence, it can drive better customer engagement.
2. Data Unification:
Data unification, which creates a single view of the data, is used to understand behavioral analytics. The daunting task of unifying the data is now relatively easy with the data unification tools and can be integrated within a few days.
3. Business Context:
A proper context can help the AI in finding the touchpoints helping to shape customer behavior. This building block can even enhance customer experience resulting in repeat purchases.
Seamless AI engagement with customers:
Continuous engagement is necessary to maintain customer relationships. AI guides you with the right engagement process as it gives useful insights to motivate the customer. It helps in making a strategy to keep customers coming back, which means not only it helps in engaging the customers but also improving the customer experience leading to repeat purchase.
As per Gartner report by the year 2020, 85% of the customer interactions will be executed without a human being.
This AI engagement will help in better communication with the customers as marketers will be aware of their requirements on a complete level; it will also improve the relationship with them. By helping marketers in collecting data, identifying new customer segments, creating a unified analytics and marketing system, AI can help in customer personalization in ways that you never thought existed before.
IBM Watson CX Analytics:
IBM Watson’s customer experience analytics can make actionable intelligence a smooth process for the brands. It can give the marketers clarity into the complete journey and their effectiveness. You can visualize every customer experience in your digital channels. The end result?
The insight needed to optimize the journey, maximize profit, and boost conversion!!!!
According to TechNavio market research firm, the AI market in the US region will grow at a rate of about 50% until the year 2021.
This proves that AI marketing will be integrated into many industries, such as manufacturing, finance, healthcare, and automation. The main vendors for this technology are Siemens, IBM, Amazon Web Services, and Omron Adept Technologies.
Some of the tips to help businesses in implementing AI-powered marketing systems are:
- It is necessary to humanize customer interaction; in critical circumstances, most of the customers do not prefer chatbots. They feel an assurance of resolving the issues early when handled by a human being. In such a scenario, the identification of the right use cases is necessary. It’s just providing the solution which matches the use case.
- Customer engagement should always be at the top of your mind. Keep this process right and repeat purchase, customer loyalty, and sales will follow gradually.
Conclusion: Right audience, right time and right channel are needed in the current marketing scenario; and AI helps marketers in different processes like creating personalized messages based on consumer behavior, passing the message across different channels at the right time, and identifying the right audience for accurate targeting. AI marketing, along with customer experience, can drive the engagement to high-levels of success.
