4 min read
For marketing to be effective in any industry, you need to find a way to speak to your audience on a personal level, and using personalized techniques backed by artificial intelligence (AI) is the way to go.
Marketers’ Missing Opportunities for Personalization
It is now a common practice to use marketing automation tools to reach a wider audience, but the most obvious mistake that marketers tend to make is simply ignoring the option of personalization. By monitoring how users interact with your site, you can get very clear signals of what they are looking for, which device they use and at what time of the day. Failing to engage them with personalized messages means you are missing out on a hot lead.
Other marketers begin personalization first interacting with the audience, but stop short of tailoring messages to the individual throughout the customer journey across devices. For instance, a visitor looked at a t-shirt on your e-commerce site using a smartphone, but he soon left before making any purchase. Later he used a tablet to search for a sweater due to the change of weather. Without knowing this change of behavior, you would continue to send him push notifications about the t-shirt on the phone, rather than the information that meets his real need.
Personalize Campaigns for a Wider Audience Based on Interest
Now, with AI-powered marketing automation tools, marketers can tailor messages on the individual level based on their interests and behavior patterns.
For example, Emma came to your travel site and saw two package deals: one to Tokyo and the other to Bangkok. She clicked on the Tokyo offer and found out the dates were unsuitable. So, she stopped reading and then went on to the Bangkok page where she spent much longer time reading about this destination. Often, this behavior is seen as Emma having equal interests in both locales based purely on the clicks. However, by taking a holistic view, AI is able to identify that she is more likely to go for the Bangkok package. Hence, you can send personalized messages relevant to her real interest.
While learning about your existing customers to delight them is a great step for many companies, you need to make it count – and that means being able to scale campaigns effectively.
Being able to scale campaigns by segmenting the audience based on user interest and behavior is imperative. Not only this way you can personalize content for more individuals who share the same preference, but also target only the people who have shown real interest in a product – perhaps they have checked items multiple times or left something in their cart – rather than just because they have downloaded your app.
An example of poor personalization would be a travel site that sends details of a sale on hotels in Tokyo to all its users, regardless of them all showing an interest in Japan or not. Instead, a more logical approach would be to send details of the various cheap deals to the users who have searched for specific destinations.
An extra step would be to offer deals on car rental or things to do in their destination city. Preferences like this can often get lost in the ether, with prospective customers searching on their phone, tablet and computer and on numerous sites. The average consumer in Asia owns three devices, after all. If this valuable data cannot be tracked, marketers would miss out on a way to improve their strategy.
With the right AI on your side, you can quickly find the signals that people are showing and triggers that will convert them into customers. Many businesses struggle as they grow because they can no longer spend as much time on each customer, but with AI software doing the hard work you can be much more efficient in this pursuit.
Marketing automation can help a business boost its marketing campaign to a certain degree, but without the data and nuances brought about by AI-powered tools, you are often shooting in the dark. Marketing is about getting the right message to the right people, and artificial intelligence is the most efficient way to find out what people want.
* AIQUA – Our marketing automation platform runs most-advanced AI models to help you understand and predict your customers’ future behavior. Request your free demo now.
