Taking AI Beyond Chat: How to Improve Marketing Outcomes for E-commerce

While AI is not a new concept, many marketers are still unsure of how to utilize this technology to its full potential. Some brands are adopting smart technologies for everything from customer service to content development to marketing optimization, but the jury is still out on which ones are here for the long haul and what impact they will have on business overall. Are they moving the needle when it comes to building profitability? Optimizing efficiency? Providing actionable insights? Or just a buzzy new trend?

With the abundance of tools available, it can be hard to decipher when and how to use them. A good starting point is to consider tools that are most likely to generate revenue and drive profitable growth for the brand. Consider a customer data and analytics platform that utilizes AI to help generate dynamic personas, so brands can better understand and market to their customers within minutes, resulting in personalized marketing initiatives that will positively affect their bottom line. Here’s how.

Persona Identification, Assignment/Tracking and Comparative Analytics

Identification: Uncovering the distinct groups or personas in your customer base is the first step in marketing personalization. By allowing machine learning to identify pockets of individuals who share common characteristics, you can quickly and easily identify your unique personas. What used to be a long, arduous, and expensive process is now simplified with AI. You receive the improved results and benefits as compared to the traditional methods of persona identification, but you can generate customer personas within minutes, and with much lower investment.

Assignment and Tracking: These AI-driven personas can be used as a dynamic lens to evaluate the health of your customer base. As new customers are acquired, advanced marketers will programmatically assign customers to their nearest persona. This allows brands to easily track the growth of personas over time, and gauge the efficacy of your marketing efforts.

Comparative Analytics: When personas exist at the person level, you can explore what customers in each persona tend to buy, which product categories they buy from, their discount usage behavior and what channels they come from. Tailor your acquisition and remarketing strategies to reach and resonate with each subpopulation in your customer base. 

Predictive LTV: AI capabilities can predict future incremental revenue for each customer, helping you determine how much to invest in cultivating customers through remarketing or discount strategies. You can determine whether added time and investment will translate to a higher value customer. By understanding in real time whether a campaign is driving high value customers, you can quickly pivot and adjust campaigns as needed. 

Lifecycle Segmentation: Understand which customers are likely to make a purchase soon, and which are likely to churn. With this information at hand, you can make informed decisions about what marketing communications to push out. Is it time to offer a discount? Should you send an email to give an extra nudge to make a purchase? Taking it one step further, you can combine this with sequential purchases to identify what the customer is likely to buy next based on previous orders.

Through the use of advanced AI tools, brands can achieve enhanced segmentation, improved personalization and predictive models, better targeting, acquisition, and retention of higher LTV customers, and so much more to not only increase revenues, but more importantly, drive profitable growth. 

By Cary Lawrence, CEO of Decile.