Guest post from James Warner of NexSoftSys

Isn’t it an all-time wish for every company to see through the minds of their customers and find out their preferences? Only if there were a realistic way to do that!
There is actually a way to cater to the needs of the customers by predicting what they want. Artificial Intelligence, for all the right reasons, is being employed by many companies to find out exactly what their potential customers are looking for and give it to them at the right time. On the other hand, AI is also used by companies to create a whole new set of target customers that sometimes they never knew existed!

Take the instance of Asafi Jacobi who runs a Harley-Davidson dealership in New York. He was selling one or two motorcycles per week. He hired an AI firm, Adgorithms, and made use of Albert, an AI-driven marketing platform used by Adgorithms. In one weekend, Albert helped him sell 15 motorcycles!

Jacobi had estimated that 2% of the city’s population was his potential buyers. But Albert revealed that his market was much bigger than he estimated and found him buyers that Jacobi never knew they existed in the first place!

Personalization – Just what a customer wants to see!

Before the introduction of AI, companies used to broadly categorize their customers and made bulk decisions about a huge section of target customers. Finding customers out of this scope was not on cards and companies stuck with this set of potential customers all through the way.

Now AI is changing the way companies sees the customers. Each and every potential customer is analyzed by AI. AI records and analyzed every action made by a user – those who visited the website, the products they browsed, the items they added to the cart and removed, the items left in the cart, a call-to-action followed and left in midway, customers who signed up but never visited and so on. AI analyzes these behaviors of each and every customer and finds out the reasons behind the customers for stopping in their pursuit.

Personalization is, as everyone knows, the key to great marketing strategy. Personalizing a segment of customers is what marketers normally do. But AI goes a step beyond that and comes with the content that could focus on converting a particular lead to sales. It personalizes the content in line with what the customer wants to see.

Data and metrics – What AI need

25% of Millennials spend more than 5 hours a day on their smartphones and more than 50% spend at least 3 hours a day on their smartphones. According to a survey by comScore, an average American above the age of 18 years spends 2 hours, 51 minutes on their smartphones every day.

As people are spending a lot of time online, they leave a track of data that gives hint to their characteristics and behavior. These data will be essential in predicting the next move a customer will make on their journey to sales. Also, it will be quite useful in creating look-alike audience who will then be targeted and retargeted for conversions.

Collecting and analyzing data is the backbone of the AI that propels it to function properly. AI employs techniques like mining data from social media to collecting existing historical data from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to identify high-value targets and new leads.

AI analyzes the engagement patterns and combs through millions of user interactions and actions to create human-like interactions without any involvement of humans! That’s the beauty of AI.

Targeting the right customer with the right content at the right moment through the right channel

Do you know that an average customer is exposed to 10,000 brand messages a day?
So how can you make your message stand out from among the crowd?
Users exhibit so many behaviors online that it takes a great deal of effort to evaluate the user, find if they come up under the category of potential customers and worth spending the time. AI takes all these factors into consideration and much more to assess the user and their preferences to target them.

By presenting your message or advertisement to the customer at their exact time of need, the prospects of conversions are increased. The next step needed in convincing the customer to take an action is possible by crafting a personalized content that hits the right chord with the customer.

Marketers generally have pre-defined channels allocated for targeting based on specific criteria. AI tests the options and makes use of the data to come up with its own model of choosing the right channel to target with.

But a marketer cannot be at the right place at the right time all the time. Hence AI helps to target potential customers at the right moment and present them with the content with a human touch that appeals to their preferences. A study by Adlucent also concedes the fact that 71% of users prefer seeing ads that are tailored to their interests and shopping habits.

Hence more companies have started using AI to come up with innovative ideas to target new users and employ advanced retargeting techniques to drive more sales from new customers.

The difference between a success and a failure may be as simple as a single word or a font size. AI correlates the information with the customers and bridges the gap between the data and the related actions to get what the marketers want.

SOURCE: https://irishtechnews.ie/targeting-the-right-customers-using-artificial-intelligence/