Marketers now have access to more consumer data than ever and, therefore, have the opportunity to derive in-depth insights that can enable true data-driven decisions making to inform their marketing strategies. However, with the many tools, datasets, and platforms available, it’s often challenging to integrate the vast amount of information and generate actionable insights in a timely manner to inform key business decisions. But what does that have to do with using AI and machine learning to improve conversion rates?
Thankfully, AI-driven technologies are becoming increasingly affordable and accessible to help marketers make use of extensive (and often noisy) datasets.
For example, by identifying patterns to understand customer behaviors and market trends, marketers can design data-driven strategies to meet fast-evolving consumer expectations and increase conversion rates.
In fact, large online retailers have been investing heavily in AI technologies to help increase sales by generating insights into consumer preferences, providing improved customer service, and offering highly-relevant product recommendations.
Here’s how you can use AI-driven marketing technologies to improve customer experience and increase conversion:
How To Increase Conversion Rates With AI
AI-driven technologies, such as machine learning and natural language processing, can be used to increase the effectiveness of many marketing strategies and increase their ROI.
Here are some key areas you can apply AI-powered marketing technologies to increase sales:
Customer Service
AI-powered chatbots with natural language processing, natural language generation, and machine learning capabilities are allowing brands to deliver relevant and responsive customer support in real-time.
The technologies can analyze a massive amount of data related to customers’ browsing behaviors, preferences, demographic information, and past orders. Doing so can provide suggestions or reduce the friction involved in the buying process to facilitate a purchase.
Chatbots are helping businesses improve response rates, provide better customer service, and facilitate online purchases. In fact, at least 80% of businesses have already implemented or are planning to use AI as a customer service solution by 2020.
For example, Alibaba leverages a large amount of customer support data to identify key customer service issues so it can improve its inquiry management channels and deliver a better customer experience.
Product Recommendations
Today, most consumers expect a personalized shopping experience. That’s the key to increasing conversion, average order value, and customer retention rates. For example, 56% of consumers are more likely to return to a website that offers product recommendations.
AI-powered recommendation engines can vastly improve the relevance of the product recommendations on your eCommerce site by showing customers items they’d most likely be interested in to deliver a better customer experience and increase sales.
These recommendation engines use machine learning technology to analyze a large amount of customer data. They can then determine a shopper’s needs, tastes, preferences, and requirements to deliver the most relevant suggestions in the right place and at the right time.
To understand the effectiveness of relevant product recommendations, look no further than retail giant Amazon, which is deriving 35% of its revenue from the use of recommendation engines.
Email Marketing
Compared to non-personalized emails, personalized promotional mailings have 29% higher unique open rates and 41% higher unique click rates. In addition, emails with a personalized subject line are found to deliver 600% higher transaction rates.
From subject lines and images to targeted content and offers, AI can help you send the most relevant email communications to each individual customer. For example, Amazon uses its AI-powered recommendation engine to find products that a customer is most likely to buy. Then, it sends promotional emails to drive conversion.
Hyper-personalization is made possible by AI’s ability to analyze a large amount of customer data to understand each customer’s behaviors and preferences. Based on the insights, you can send the most relevant information at the optimal time.
In addition, AI can facilitate A/B testing at a speed that allows you to increase the variations of testing elements. It can pick the winning combination for each subscriber segment and immediately start sending the right content to the right recipients to drive incremental revenue.
Content Marketing
While content marketing can be a highly effective strategy to drive high-quality traffic and build customer relationships, it’s becoming increasingly challenging to generate enough content to create tangible results.
Not only do you have to research your audience, write up creative briefs, produce content, and publish frequently, but you also need to make sure that all the content has a consistent tone and style to accurately represent your brand across all channels.
If you have many different writers working on a variety of topics, hiring editors to ensure consistency and quality of the content can be very costly.
Now, you can use AI tools that use natural language processing and machine learning technologies to ideate, proofread, and correct content. They allow you to streamline the process. In doing so, produce a large amount of content that’s clear, of high quality, and consistent in tone and voice.
These technologies correct grammar and spelling. They also consider elements like your business’s unique terminology, preferred word choice, brand personality, and linguistic style. These considerations help you deliver a uniform brand experience across all touchpoints and effectively nurture customer relationships.
Final Thoughts on Improving Conversion Rates
The use of AI-powered technologies enables data-driven marketing to be implemented at scale by businesses of all sizes.
Automating repetitive tasks and analyzing data with minimal manual input allows companies to allocate human intelligence. They’re doing so in areas that can benefit most from strategic decisions, creative thinking, and human interactions. As a result, they build meaningful customer relationships.
In addition, the use of predictive intelligence will allow you to further improve targeting by analyzing where users are in the customer journey. Then, deliver the most appropriate content, services, and product recommendations to progress them down the sales funnel and drive conversion.
The many benefits delivered by AI-driven marketing technologies can be very exciting. However, it’s important that you don’t fall into the “bright shiny object syndrome” trap. Focus your investment on areas that will benefit most from automation and data analytics. That way, you can generate the highest ROI while creating the most value for your organization.
Editors Note: This post was written by nDash community member Ling Wong. Ling writes content for SaaS, IT, and marketing companies. To learn more about her – or have Ling write for your company – check out her nDash writer profile.