Artificial Intelligence in Marketing; How AI is Transforming Customer Acquisition and Retention
Do you know that 25% of global ad expenditure goes to two internet behemoths, Google or Facebook?
The last two decades have witnessed a huge shift of advertiser’s budget from the traditional forms of advertising such as TV and magazine to digital online ads. So, why Facebook or Google? These two big companies are at the center of digital advertising and are painting the picture of how the future use of artificial intelligence looks like. It is predictable that Facebook and Google are going to dominate the marketing sector in the days to come.
The ability to understand the needs of your target customers has been made better through the aid of artificial intelligence. It is because of its high level of efficiency that its use is set to increase gradually in future.
What is Artificial Intelligence?
This is the ability of machines to obtain and utilize knowledge and skills.
Here are the traits that AI machines possess:
- Knowledge: facts, skills and information about something;
- Reasoning: to think about certain things logically and sensibly:
- Problem-solving: coming up with solutions;
- Perception: being able to become aware:
- Learning: acquire useful knowledge;
- Planning: do things systematically;
- The capability to manipulate and make objects move.
Artificial intelligence currently is taken to mean “narrow AI” or, alternatively, “weak AI”. This is due to the fact that it is tailored to undertake narrow tasks such as facial recognition.
However, the long-term objective of many researchers is creating a general AI which is stronger.
Despite the fact that narrow AI might only perform better than humans in the particular cognitive tasks that they are designed to perform, AI could perform better than humans at performing almost all cognitive tasks.
AI Meets Marketing in Customer Journey Mapping
What is customer journey mapping? This is an analysis that seeks to help marketers understand how customers are interacting with their brands and their level of engagement with the company.
The breakthrough of mobile usage has actively contributed a lot to journey mapping. With the rise of new technologies such as AI assistants and augmented reality, smart cars also included, customer journey mapping is set to become even better.
How Does Customer Journey Mapping Help in Serving Customers Better?
Through the aid of this technology, marketers will be able to understand their customers better, which gives way to improving their relationship.
The simplicity, intelligence or how new a technology is, is of little importance to the marketer. It is the level of effectiveness that tells how important that technology is to marketers; how does it help them improve the relationship with their customers?
With customers changing how they conduct their research and make their purchases, marketers need to use advanced customer mapping technologies in order to cope with the new trend.
How Do Marketers Build a Successful Online Relationship With Customers using AI?
However, this can’t be possible without the use of advanced analytical tools that allow marketers to track their customer’s pattern and expectations. The need to understand your customers remains inseparable from understanding their journey. For instance, what makes them your customers, and what are their needs on that path?
This involves understanding how the digital marketing approach is compressing the old marketing methods to real-time information down from weeks to days or even hours, just as Sheryl Sandberg from Facebook is suggesting.
In a research about marketers spending habit on technology, 647 marketers attested that they are willing to spend up to 60.2% of the money set aside for technology, on an analytical tool that will provide them with good insight into their customers’ path.
How Can AI Help Marketers Predict The Future?
Being informed about your customer’s origin and the process they use to decide on purchasing your products, service or subscriptions, is very important. As a matter of fact, marketers say that improved customers path visibility would increase their marketing return on investment by 70 percent.
If marketers are in a position to observe and measure how new customers are turned into loyal clients, then they can optimize their path. With time they are going to be able to successfully predict the purchasing pattern of customers and maximize it to improve sales.
For this reason, marketers require the best technology for conducting campaigns, sending emails and building engaging smartphone experiences. It will also help them to understand their customers more.
Generally speaking, proper visibility of the customer’s journey is useful to enhancing, impacting and affecting it.
Understand What Drives Customers To Buy Your Product
However, understanding what making good judgment involves and what makes it more valuable, we need precision about what we imply.
We are looking at a future time when most business decisions are going to be made by intelligent algorithms. What does this mean? Business is going to be able to make informed decisions and improve their sales.
This is because the technology utilizes customer’s data to produce meaningful information about the customers.
For instance, it enables marketers to know when to offer discount and to tell which products are purchased concurrently.
Improve Customer Acquisition Using AI
Currently, AI is increasingly becoming popular to marketers, this is due to its various benefits from establishing leads, nurturing them and analysis of customer data. Businesses are investing greatly in this technology to keep up with the competition in a variety of ways. Here are some of the ways that you can utilize in using AI to boost customer acquisition and improving your business:
- Lead generation, engaging and filtering them
- Predictive analytics,
- Bettering customer service,
- Automated email marketing,
Artificial Intelligence ; Tips for Improving Customer Retention
With the rapid transformation of how business operations are conducted, AI is also manipulating approaches to customer retention. Modern automated marketing software presents an opening for managed services givers to improve their marketing strategies, which could boost their revenue.
With an increase of customer retention by 5%, profits could increase to the range of 25 – 29 percent for any business, according to a research conducted by Thomas – Bain Company.
4 Tips for improving your customer retention:
1. Using big data – through the large data gathered.
2. Utilizing the preemptive fix – the process that uses customer data to understand customer’s behavior.
3. Creating outstanding customer experience – helps to build brand loyalty.
4. Offering 24/7 support – creates a personal touch with customers.
Closing Remarks
It is evident that AI has enhanced the creation of a smart and improved sales process. With most sales team projecting a growth of 139% in the use of AI in the coming three years, a majority of them are willing to incorporate this technology into their businesses.
It is astonishing how the internet changed marketing strategies decision-making process. The success of AI would not have been made possible without the internet.
With better lead prioritization, improved forecasting, identifying opportunities and staying on top of account, Artificial intelligence is surely the real deal and it is going to be a primary need for any business to succeed in the near future.