Marketing Personalization Is A Necessity
While many brands have already started to personalize their messages using marketing automation tools, online marketing allows for much more specific targeting, almost on an individual basis. Potential customers leave breadcrumbs of their interests across the internet, through social media, shopping sites and search engines. This data can help you craft a better marketing campaign, one with tangible benefits.
Personalization at scale can lift revenue by 5 to 15 percent for companies in the retail, travel, entertainment, telecom and financial services sectors, according to McKinsey & Company.
There is no surprise to see that personalization is becoming a major consideration as McKinsey highlighted that more than 90 percent of retailers believe this is a top priority. However, only 15 percent of these companies are actually doing a good job at it.
Challenges With Marketing Automation Tools Today
One of the most important aspects of marketing is making sure you get your message to the right people. The more specific you can be with your target audience, the more likely you are to see a positive return on investment in your campaigns. There is little point telling a vegetarian about your new steakhouse, or advertising a luxury resort to backpackers.
A major limitation of many marketing automation tools today is the lack of available data. Whether it is because you are looking at a small data pool or that you cannot track a user over multiple devices, having holes in your data can make your personalization less accurate and therefore less effective.
For example, a user may access your site on their computer, phone and tablet. Many personalization tools don’t have the capacity to see this as one user and will instead report three different people looking at your site. This gives a disjointed view of the user and means you miss out on valuable information about the buyer’s journey.
Marketing automation tools do not always understand human actions or emotions either. They could fail to recognize that after someone has made a purchase, he or she will no longer want to buy the same item. This can often come down to a lack of data about a user’s behavior.
Another challenge businesses have is that they find it difficult to scale their marketing efforts and manage engagement across all their channels. One cause for this is the number of different tools they need to cover all the bases, and upgrading each of these can be a costly or impractical exercise. With different tools in place, there is often a lack of communication between what marketers are seeing, making it hard for them to act quickly and efficiently.
How Can AI Improve Personalized Marketing?
There are many ways that AI techniques can help brands improve their marketing campaigns. This is particularly true in terms of zooming in on one particular type of customers and scaling up for large projects.
Without any sort of AI, the information companies know about a visitor when they visit a website can be limited. However, the visitor may already have shown information about the type of person they are and what sort of product they are looking for. For instance, a consumer often purchases fashion goods from an ecommerce site A, but she also buys baby products from site B. Having this insight available for site A means the visitor can be exposed to relevant products and information to keep them engaged further.
AI can also help you engage potential customers once they leave your site. For instance, someone who has abandoned a cart on your site can receive a reminder about the product that they have left waiting, perhaps with personalized suggestions for other items if that one wasn’t quite right.
Another scenario could be knowing whom to send certain newsletters to. You may have a sale or promotion on products that might be of interest to some of your contacts. Sending one email campaign out to all your subscribers isn’t necessarily the best approach. So, knowing who has shown an interest and who would be likely to buy that product can help make that email marketing campaign more effective.
AI-powered personalized marketing is proving to be one of the most effective ways to maximize a marketing budget and it’s something that brands are increasingly making use of today.