Fact and Fiction Behind AI’s Next Best Action

With digitization taking leaps and bounds and everything available at the swipe of the screen, it has become critical for marketers to offer personalized messaging for long-term customer retention. From onboarding and engagement to retention, brands must analyze the pulse of their customers throughout the customer lifecycle.

“Consumers in North America and Europe want brands to personalize their experiences based on their previous purchase history and interests.”
-Personalization Pulse Check Report

Personalized experiences ensure that your customers receive communications regarding your products/services based on their buying patterns. This acts as a stepping stone in your customer engagement efforts. Customers are rather keen on receiving messages related to promotional offers, coupons and upcoming sales. Offering personalized messaging is possible by adopting an insights-led customer engagement platform that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI). It assists the marketers in collecting customer data getting meaningful insights from customer data to provide one-to-one personalization to enhance the customer experience.

Customer Frustration Leads to Brand Abandonment

A confusing experience can be frustrating for the customers. Personalization is not merely about targeted messaging, and it also involves meeting the customers at their channel of choice. Personalization Pulse Check Report shows that most consumers across North America and Europe prefer email over direct mail, chat or phone call. The report points out how irrelevant products and inconsistent messaging across channels remain the top frustrations for consumers. Also, this frustration has led them to question the brand.

Marketers today are working hard towards improving the customer lifetime value (LTV) and driving meaningful relationships. Some things that enhance your customer LTV are re-aligning the organizational goals, humanizing connections, and offering products that fit the customers’ needs. Only when the communication channels are transparent, the service prompt, and the product worthwhile, will customer frustrations be most successfully combated.

Succeeding in 2022

The success of marketing efforts depends on the level of customer engagement. Marketers must have a unified view of the customers, lasting connections, and a dynamic customer-brand experience. They need to be hands-on with the right data set to achieve these goals.

How to improve customer engagement in 2022

• Improving the customer journey from acquisition to conversion
• Planning a digital growth strategy
• Campaign execution and management
• Adoption of an insights-led customer engagement platform

AI: A Marketer’s Superpower

Focused efforts in scaling customer acquisition require marketers to understand the customer journey. This is where AI comes to the rescue.

Using AI-driven insights-led customer engagement tools makes the marketer’s life easier in the following manner:

• Analyzes customer’s buying pattern
• Boosts efficiency
• Enhances engagement
• Zeroes in on the best engagement channel
• Insights on how an action triggers desired action

Marketers limit themselves in using the available customer information. However, it is essential to draw insights by analyzing more data sets. AI-driven marketing automation tools can help extract geographical data and customer preferences to provide a holistic view of the customer. This 360-degree view serves as actionable insights for brands to hone their messaging/communication.

“With a 360-degree view, you get the properties, data, actions and customer interactions with the campaign. By using an AI-driven insights led-customer engagement tool, you can achieve the right time, right place and the right messaging goals.”
-Ehren Maedge
GM North America, MoEngage

Improving Customer Journeys Using AI

Marketers need to improve customer acquisition today, and to do so, they must understand and optimize the customer journey. With AI-driven optimization, you can work more efficiently, engage more customers, and spend less money on the process. AI also helps understand how a particular message triggers the desired action, such as customer retention. A customer’s path towards retention is decoded using necessary AI-driven tools.

AI personalization is key to optimizing customer journeys. Personalization can benefit almost any industry for both the marketer and the customer. For instance, customers might look for an auto loan in the finance industry. Here, personalization can come into play as the customer behavior can be analyzed before giving them a solution, i.e. the loan. AI can help you find out the customer’s spending patterns, which might help you understand their risk appetite, ability to pay back the loan, etc.

RFM Analysis for Customer Segmentation

The multivariate ways AI can help marketers extend to conducting recency, frequency, monetary (RFM) analysis to make more sense of data and understand where to spend more time. For instance, the analysis will help you identify your loyal/hibernating customers, etc. There are several tools out there that can help you with journey orchestration. Once the customer enters the funnel, you can plan what you want them to do next, create logical flows using RFM and subsequent journey orchestration, and automatically decide the best channel.

The Leaps in Digital Engagement

Digital engagement involves engaging with customers individually through hyper-personalized, relevant, and timely communication. This depends significantly on the content you use to market your products and services. Personalization and AI allow you to engage customers effectively. Cutting the noise and getting to the point is extremely important for sustained and rewarding digital engagement due to the shorter attention spans of the customers.

“Intelligent marketing has to move beyond the trinity of awareness, reach, and conversions. New touchpoints need to be created to make the consumer experience flawless and frictionless.”
-Sumeet Grover
Chief Digital & Marketing Officer, Alliant Credit Union

As the world moves towards newer ways of communicating in the digital sphere, the adoption of chatbots is on the rise as consumers continually shift to different modes of engagement. Services like online streaming have also become quite popular among different audience segments. Streaming has brought about a significant marketing change with the omnipresent influence of over the top (OTT) platforms.

“The earlier we can provide useful tools to the artist, the more successful the artist can be in getting customers to enjoy their music, thereby helping Audiomack increase customer acquisition.”
-Charlie Kaplan,
VP of Product, Audiomack

Conclusion

Marketing messages can contribute to organizational goals if you use the right data to understand customers. However, these messages tend to fail if you replicate the same strategies for each customer segment. AI can streamline your marketing efforts, identify the best strategy for customer acquisition and retention, and ensure your brand markets to the right consumers. This can make a massive difference in creating brand resonance and perception.

Recommended Reading

• Dynamic A/B Testing: Why You Should Do It? (With Proof)
• Pros and Cons of AI Chatbots: All You Must Know
• 5 Ways AI is Redefining Customer Engagement in E-commerce