The Exponential Shift: AI and the Unprecedented Speed of Digital Customer Transformation
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It seems like yesterday that the wave of digital revolution swept the marketing world globally. The transformation that began decades ago seems to be passing us by like a breeze, given the unprecedented pace at which things are changing. The scenario in Australia and New Zealand is no different. The region’s digital transformation market is expected to reach a massive $122.76 billion by 2030. This meteoric growth is being driven by rapid enterprise cloud migration, rising data-centre CAPEX, and increasing public sector mandates.
What’s more?! Digital transformation has now touched every aspect of marketing. Customers are interacting with brands like never before. Add to this the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI), which has taken customer engagement to a completely new level. For instance, AI-driven data analytics and generative AI now enable brands to meet customers in real time with hyper-personalised messaging.
In this rapidly changing landscape that waits for none, brands need to stay up to speed with their engagement strategies.
How Marketers Can Master the New Engagement Ecosystem
Granular Data Analysis
Customer behaviour is constantly evolving. At one point, desktops dominated browsing -> next, it was all about portable devices like tablets -> now is the era of smartphones. To adapt to ever-changing customer preferences and enhance engagement, brands need to analyse demographic, psychographic, behavioural, and transactional data across customer touchpoints. The idea is to meet the customer where they are and offer a continued, cohesive experience.
To achieve this, marketers would require efficient and accurate data collection and analysis at the microscopic level. For example, a customer who has left products in their cart on a brand’s website should be able to smoothly continue their purchase journey on the brand’s smartphone app as well. This can lead to higher engagement, retention, and lower drop-offs. This is where the importance of channel-agnostic data analysis comes in.
Optimal Cross-channel Engagement
A recent survey revealed that although 88% of retail sales in Australia occurred in stores, only 12% of those customers had zero digital influence. Additionally, the fact that customers have access to multiple screens like smartphones, TVs, tablets, and more, is leading to cross-channel journeys.
For brands, this means more channels (or opportunities) to engage with customers. However, marketers need to be mindful of customers’ privacy. This translates to decoding behavioural data like when the customer likes to engage, what the customer is interested in, and which channels would be non-invasive for the customer. Automation and AI can make this level of understanding possible at scale.
Embracing AI While Keeping It Human
AI’s rising prowess in the APAC region is evident from the growing investments in GenAI. The overlap of AI and marketing is so huge that AI is now considered an integral part of a brand’s core strategy. And why shouldn’t it be? AI is enabling automated personalisation, predictive analytics, and dynamic content creation. Despite these advancements, the human touch remains important to customers. Ensuring that the brand’s tone and positioning are maintained while leveraging automation can help customers relate better with the brand.
Where Can Brands Start?
Clearly, the starting point for brands to navigate customer relationships in today’s rapidly changing digital world is by using intelligent data analysis and smart engagement strategies. In this regard, Customer Data and Engagement Platforms (CDEPs) have emerged as the real game-changers. CDEPs enable brands to gain a 360-degree view of the customer, regardless of channels and touchpoints, allowing marketing efforts to be directed more effectively.
A CDEP essentially collects data from all available customer touchpoints and channels, helping create a unified customer profile. This is primary to any segmentation prior to targeting. While CDPs focus on data collection and profiling, CDEPs not only help with data and customer segmentation but also enable engaging customers with relevant messaging via email, SMS, chat, push notifications, and other channels.
How a CDEP Can Elevate Your Customer Engagement Strategies
While traditional CDPs helped with collating data in one place, today’s CDEPs are taking things up a notch. Here are some benefits of using CDEPs to improve your customer engagement outcomes.
Data Accuracy: A CDEP collects data directly from the source, eliminating data silos and becoming the single source of truth. Not only that, it also builds complete customer profiles and allows for agile campaign management by considering your campaigns’ engagement outcomes–much like a feedback loop that keeps giving.
Understanding Customer Preferences: CDEPs help assess the customer database to identify what the customer likes / dislikes, as well as the channels and interaction time they prefer by capturing data from every small interaction. This information helps create more personalized campaigns that customers are more likely to engage with.
Optimizing resources: Your brand can deploy better-targeted campaigns using intelligent CDEPs. As most processes can be automated, it saves time and effort. Moreover, it results in tangible outcomes, such as lower marketing costs as these spends are better targeted to high-performing assets.
A CDEP like MoEngage can help brands achieve all this and more. For example, with MoEngage’s AI engine Merlin AI, brands can easily generate assets using AI-driven copywriting and design within existing workflows. Moreover, you can enhance your results by utilizing decisioning agents to deliver personalized offers and goal-based campaigns. Predictive AI makes product recommendations smarter and dynamically optimise journeys for better engagement.
With its cross-channel marketing capabilities, MoEngage can help build complex omnichannel journeys with ease, allowing you to engage with your customers in real-time and never miss opportunities for better engagement and retention.
Data unification, profiling, targeting, and insights with scale and security! Access the entire omnichannel marketing stack to create a stronger impact with MoEngage. Contact us to schedule a quick demo today.
