According to a new study launched by Forrester and commissioned by Sizmek, 80% of marketers say that increasing customer loyalty and reducing customer churn will be a priority for 2018.
As customers tend to jump from channel to channel, it can be difficult to engage and interact with them in a way that doesn’t make them feel uncomfortable or negative about your brand. Personalising the customer experience is the key – and marketers are keen to improve their abilities in this area, with 86% of marketers putting it as a priority for the next year. In a separate survey by Sizmek, consumers showed that they were happy to receive advertising messages related to brands or products that interest them – which is another reason to invest in personalisation.
The best type of personalisation delivers the customer with an engaging message that delights rather than annoys them. In order to increase the likelihood of a conversion, this message must be sent at the right time of day, and on the device that they are most likely to be using. This is a tough task, but there are several steps that can be taken to bring you closer to achieving this…
The vast amounts of data available to marketers is unprecedented – with 2.5 quintillion (a billion, billion, billion) bytes of data created every day. This data is useless without the right technology to sift through and organise it into understandable insights and patterns on consumer behaviour, which is where artificial intelligence (AI) comes in.
AI improves with both masses of information and with time, as it has continual learning capacities, meaning that the AI can start to predict behaviours and enable marketers to act accordingly. AI is empowering marketers to optimise operational and ad buying efficiency, grow revenue through cross-selling and drive unprecedented marketing insights. AI actually enables brands to deliver perfect personalised marketing – sending the right creative at the perfect moment across any device – something that would be impossible to do manually.
With the AI system taking control of the data, turning it into valuable insights for the marketing team – what should the marketers do with it? Consumers wish to have consistency in the content from brands across all of their channels, which is another area that AI can assist in. An AI will continuously decide the right content, time and device to send a message to the consumer, however, with creative optimisation, this can go one step further. Creative optimisation for AI means that an ad is sent at the perfect moment – with the right customer receiving at the right time and on the right device – as well as deciding which product, offer or information to send from a set of predetermined options.
The modern consumer can be loyal, but it takes a lot more work from the marketers to foster a sense of loyalty. One way to do this is to only send relevant information at the right time – anticipating their needs and offering them excellent solutions. AI will help brands to get ahead, and if it does not seem essential now, it soon will do…
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