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In today’s digitally driven world Artifical Intelligence, better known as AI is the key to giving your customers amazing customer journeys and experiences. You are more than likely to gain more business and increase consumer loyalty by using AI to deliver personalized consumer journeys through flawless cross-departmental handoffs and multi-channel communication as well as relevant engagement based on previous meaningful interactions.
Therefore, it is not surprising that up to 70% of customers attest that such experiences are crucial to purchasing products or services from businesses. In fact, a global survey by Salesforce revealed that 62% of customers are open to companies that incorporate AI into improving their customer experiences.
It is quite remarkable the opportunities present to both businesses and consumers and the increasing level of interest from both parties is quite notable. For companies operating in Africa, competition is rife in the world’s fastest developing economic zone and AI might be the “secret sauce” you need to ensure your business stays ahead of the pack. Blue Consulting is going to take you through how your Marketing Department can harness the power of AI today.
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Three Ways Marketers Can Use AI
Most marketers today already have sufficient data to create value to their customers. To succeed, marketers need to start with some targeted use cases, especially in digital marketing.
You can do this by:
- Using smart segmentation to identify your target audience
- Connect with your customers on their terms
- Deliver tailored content to each target audience segment
1. Use AI and smart segmentation to identify your target audience
The power of audience segmentation cannot be under-estimated. To be effective, marketers must always know exactly who they are reaching out to. Previously, marketers used to ask questions such as “What the business needs to gain? Is it awareness, engagement or retention and proceed to manually estimate the best general target audience for each particular campaign. With the power of AI and predictive analytics, marketers are today able to identify the best audiences faster and smarter. The accuracy is unprecedented. They are further able to find new audience segments with similar attributes! The scale of AI enables modern marketers to deliver more personalized offers to wider audiences and create more meaningful customer relationships, effectively growing your business smarter and faster.
You might be wondering how this works in real scenarios. Let’s take a local travel agency for instance whose key customers are weekend getaway lovers and thanks to AI discovers that a significant portion of their audience is interested in local day trips such as hiking expeditions to Mt. Longonot. The agency can then specifically create campaigns targetted to this new audience and increase its consumer engagement by creating more meaningful and relevant content, products and services.
AI can also help determine which actions your target audience segments are most likely to take upon receiving your message. First, it is important to find solid yes-or-no questions you need to answer. For instance, in the case of email communications, you might want to ask the following:
- Will the audience open it, or not?
- Will they click through, or not?
- Will they convert, or not?
- Will they unsubscribe, or not?
By truthfully answering these questions you will be better positioned to constructing your customized messages e.g. For a customer who doesn’t regularly engage with your emails, you can encourage them to update their communications preferences to only receive content they find valuable. And for a customer who often engages with your emails, a loyalty membership offer may be the perfect way to grow the relationship.
Just to remind you, here are a few steps to leverage AI for smarter audience segmentation:
- Take stock of your main audience(s) — who they are and what they like
- Use AI to do deeper audience analysis to uncover new personas
- Treat new personas as sub-segments, and market to them personalized messages
2. Use AI to connect with your customers on their terms
Today’s marketers are under more pressure to deliver not just the right message, but the right message at the perfect time on the most appropriate channel. With the availability of multiple avenues of communication, it is easily confusing and quite challenging at times to determine which platform to use and how to use it. With AI, marketers can easily identify the appropriate channels to use, whether its mobile, email, desktop, laptop or social, find the appropriate messages, and tone and keep audiences interactive and engaged.
AI basically helps analyze the number of messages against engagement rates and is able to predict what works and what doesn’t using this data. Marketers are then able to create messages and ads that they are assured will be seen by the target audience at the time they are most likely to pay attention and engage.
In summary, here’s how AI can help you meet your customers where they are:
- Audit for what messages you send, when you send them, and on what channels
- Collect customer preferences on frequency, channel, and send time through your preference centers and using AI
- A/B and multivariate test to measure the impact of your AI-optimized campaigns versus your existing baseline
3. Use AI to deliver specific content to your audience segments
Now that you’ve identified the right audience, when, and where to reach them, the next step is to create engaging content. You may have used content with special offers or creative elements that change based on specific customer attributes before. This is called dynamic content and it’s great but often manual and time-consuming to scale. But that’s changing with AI.
For companies that have thousands of products and hundreds of thousands of customers, AI can help scale curated product recommendations that would be relevant for each target customer segment. AI-powered product recommendations account for browsing behavior and product affinity in order to match customers with products they’re most likely to buy.
Beyond products, AI-powered campaigns can offer personalized banner ads that are more likely to prompt customers to action. As AI continues to learn more about an audience’s preferences, it can personalize the content or offers in a campaign dynamically. It’s as easy as creating dynamic fields on your website, mobile app, or email newsletter and watch AI fill in the right offer for each target audience segment.
In a nutshell, here’s how to scale personalized content with AI:
- Create a variety of offers for your target audience segments
- Use rich tags or metadata to identify what audiences should be targeted with each offer
- Incorporate dynamic fields into your content linked to tags and metadata
- Automate with AI-powered recommendation engines and machine learning
AI in marketing is here to stay
As customer choice and connectivity continue to increase, customers’ demand for personalized experiences and marketers’ need for scale will only become more prevalent. That’s how we know AI is here to stay.
To stay ahead, marketers should think about how AI can help them with smarter audience segmentation, better engagement practices, and dynamic content strategy. These, and so much more, will soon become essential parts of any marketer’s toolkit.
To learn more about how
Salesforce Einstein artificial intelligence solution helps marketers deliver value to customers, read about
Marketing Cloud or download the free e-book
HERE.
And if you still have questions, on how to apply AI to marketing, reach out to us by filling out this
contact form or fill in a request for a
FREE CONSULTATION on Salesforce Products.[/vc_column_text][tm_spacer size=”lg:60″][vc_column_text]
A Match Made In Tech Heaven
How Resolution Insurance and Blue Consulting Use Their Shared Love of Technology to Break Barriers and Effect Change
The cohesive relationship between the teams of both Blue Consulting and Resolution Insurance over the years can not be matched. CRM Implementation is expensive and time-consuming and this fact has never been lost on both sides.
The fact that Resolution’s team has been clear in its goals and direction is all thanks to their
Head of Digital, Francis Ngari. He made it easier for Blue Consulting’s lead Salesforce specialists to make everything work. His five-year road map made it possible for our team to identify and streamline what aspects of Salesforce would be best suited for them.
Salesforce CRM is a vast multifaceted tool that can be utilized in multiple ways to achieve multiple results and one of Blue Consulting’s main objectives is to ensure all its clients get the most out of their CRM platforms.
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