Today 63% of consumers expect personalization from the brands they engage with. They believe that they are cared for and being recognized as individuals when the brands send special offers customized for them.
81% of consumers expect their brands to understand them better and know when to and when not to approach them. As per cmo.com, 42% of consumers would pay more for a welcoming and friendly experience and 52% of consumers would pay for speedy and efficient customer experience.
In a survey of 300 marketers, 74% said that personalization has strongly helped their brands enhance customer relationships. In addition, 54% said their brands had experienced a 10% increase in sales. Another survey showed that 97% said they would continue to allot and invest in personalized marketing efforts.
Clearly, the time for personalization in marketing is here. The onus is on marketers to consciously craft content and design products as per the preferences of the individual customer.
Marketing strategies today are all about delighting the customers, attracting them, and engaging them meaningfully. Of course, this also speaks volumes about the tech-savvy consumers of today’s world and their self-image!
Digitization and social media are playing a vital role in the personalization of marketing communication. However, it is the technology that has actually created a supportive ambiance and allowed the successful implementation of personalization in marketing. And AI seems to hold the greatest promise for the future of personalization in marketing. Let us find out how!
Tailored content –
Today’s customer expects an empathetic, friendly, and timely communication along with speedy delivery! AI plays a huge role in understanding the customer. It helps to understand the patterns from data to derive meaningful insights and create uber-specific personas around which the marketing team can create appropriate and customized messaging.
Personalization is all about knowing the likes and dislikes, preferences, and choices of the customers and tailoring services and products around those. Customized messaging can be the key driving factor for purchases and sales today! It is all about how you customize your marketing messaging to ultimately convert a prospect.
Here are a few aspects of content personalization:
· Customer journey personalization-
Understanding your customer’s buyer journey is extremely important to time the delivery of your personalized messaging for maximum impact. This helps your customers navigate their way forward in the journey towards a purchase decision.
· Persona-based personalization-
A clear persona of the customer can be created based on the customer’s web search, purchase history, etc. and the content is then segmented by the characteristics of these personas. This helps marketers craft specific messaging aligned with the needs and motivations of those sub-segments.
· Segmentation-
As one of the most widely used methods in personalization; segmentation uses content that is crafted based on data such as gender, geography, age, range, job title, etc.
Better understanding of data-
One of the essential elements for AI to work successfully is data and its interpretation! AI engine feeds on the history of the customer data to train itself to predict the future behavioral patterns of the customer. In addition to bringing accuracy in serving the right products to the right customers, AI can also help in predictive marketing.
Paid advertising made better-
To enhance paid-ad campaigns, AI can deliver phenomenal insights. AI can help you design better campaigns based on a clearer understanding of the target customer. AI helps to get more bang from your ad buck too. By better understanding the buyer’s journey, you can optimize your campaigns for content, placement, timing, and channel selection. It is impossible to create smart automation for PPC campaigns without the power of AI. AI enables auto-bidding on keywords, automated extensions, dynamic search ads, etc. to add more power to any PPC ad campaign.
Improved customer experience-
Today’s customers are seeking a more personal and pleasant purchase experience. An AI-based e-mailer that offers a specific “solution” to a customer, based on previous purchases, is a great example of ways to improve customer experience. This is not restricted to product suggestions, AI could help drive more attractive offers, appropriate bundles, including accessories, and value-added options like customization too.
As a use case, Switzerland-based telecommunications company, Swisscom, was looking to give customers a personalized digital experience to stand out against the tough competition in the market. So, it partnered with Adobe Experience Cloud to learn from website visitor behavior. Micro-elements such as Call to Action and banner colors were made more impactful by monitoring the number of visitors, downloads, sales, and uploads. This improved ad performance by 40% on average.
Real-time customer support
Today’s tech-savvy consumer is happy to embrace new technology. But intuitive, available, and real-time support is mandatory. Pleasing follow-up or after-sales-service-support can help win customer loyalty by creating an enhanced customer experience! AI helps in bridging the gap between machines and humans and offers real-time customer support that is accessible anywhere, anytime. Apart from automation, AI can also assist human customer service agents to improve their performance with better insights, streamlined processes, and clearer direction.
Predictive marketing
The key to personalization is the ability to predict what your customers might need or seek in the future. This is critical to creating long-term marketing plans. AI helps you to anticipate the needs of your customers. The long list of suggested movies or shows by Netflix is one of the best examples of predictive and personalized marketing.
Conclusion
Marketing today is all about personalization! Consumers are spoilt for choice and marketers are finding innovative ways to delight, attract, and engage these consumers. Social media, reviews, stories and shared experiences of products and services have made today’s consumers demanding and more aware of what to expect and where to get it from!
Therefore, marketing communication which is tailored around the specific expectations of the consumers is creating incredible results for marketers. And it is technological innovations like AI that are powering these personalization strategies.
