Last year, AI burst onto the scene as one of the biggest innovations of our time. By embracing it, marketers can scale themselves—and their programs’ impact.
AI is poised to completely redefine and revolutionize the way brands do marketing. 72% of US digital retailers pin generative AI and AI-driven personalization as a trend that will impact their business the most in 2024.
Embracing AI can open up new possibilities in the face of obstacles like tighter resources, data privacy changes, and changing search behavior. And it can help you extract maximum value out of a sea of customer data—which isn’t possible with manual segmentation and rule-based workflows alone.
Integrating AI into your marketing efforts can give you more bandwidth, reduce your reliance on paid ads, support a diversified marketing mix, and improve performance with fully-activated customer data. Here’s how.
Increase your bandwidth despite tighter budgets and smaller teams
With prices for consumer goods still higher than pre-pandemic levels, consumers remain price-conscious while marketers are working with reduced budgets to reach them. So it’s more important than ever to optimize marketing campaigns to get the most out of every channel.
AI can help you increase your bandwidth by speeding up campaign creation and optimization—while increasing conversions, AOV, and loyalty.
For example, with Attentive AI™ you can:
- Generate on-brand copy to launch campaigns quickly.
- Identify the most relevant customers to send outbound messages like one-time promos to (instead of relying on predefined segments that may miss potential high-intent subscribers).
- Tailor triggered messages across the entire customer lifecycle, ensuring that every customer gets a truly unique experience that aligns their customer journey with your brand.
- Scale replies to inbound messages with automated two-way conversations that unblock the path to purchase.
Not only can you do more with less, but you can also personalize more effectively than before.
Prioritize owned channels to combat diminishing paid ad performance
It’s becoming harder to target the right audience and track conversions accurately with paid ads. The cost of ads skyrocketed with the pandemic and never went down. And now, ads are becoming a gamble as Google turns off third-party cookies this year. So you’re targeting a broader audience and getting a lower hit rate, causing CAC to go through the roof.
What’s worse? Brands are paying that CAC repeatedly to reacquire customers. “Many brands admit to me that they’re recapturing the same customer over and over again,” our CEO Amit Jhawar shared at this year’s Shoptalk, “We need to fix that problem and writing better messages that are personalized prevents that.”
Overall, you can expect to spend more on ads and see a lower return on investment.
If you're making moves to rely less on paid ads, you're probably looking to double down on your owned channels and make them more efficient to convert as many potential customers as possible. Which means a focus on personalization.
When you can achieve hyper-personalization, you can deliver experiences that align with the specific needs and habits of each customer. AI enables you to achieve this degree of customization by helping you craft personalized messages for every individual customer. This will result in more clicks to your website, better conversions, and higher LTV.
Diversify and optimize traffic sources in response to changing search behavior
A confluence of factors in recent years has also changed search behavior. So brands can't rely on search to drive traffic as much as they used to.
First, people are relying on their phones more than ever. According to Hubspot, 54% of consumers use search engines on their mobile phones more than any other device. That number increases with younger generations, as 80% of Gen Z use their phones most often when searching.
Search is also expanding beyond search engines. The same Hubspot study found that 31% of consumers use social media to find answers to their questions. In fact, Gen Z favors TkTok over Google for search.
And now, AI is changing search behavior, too. 12% of consumers use AI chatbots like ChatGPT to find answers to questions. Google's AI summaries surface answers to queries for searchers, negating the need to visit the website it came from. So brands are getting less traffic for informational queries.
While search engines are still dominant, the popularity of alternatives like social media and AI chatbots will likely continue to grow—particularly with younger consumers.
What does this mean for your brand? For one, diversifying your marketing mix will help you drive traffic to your website from a variety of channels and keep you agile to adapt to shifting customer behaviors.
And when it comes to off-website-owned channels like email and SMS, you can use AI to magnify performance—which is especially important as consumers interact with you on multiple devices. You have the most control over these channels, so you can create a cohesive, personalized experience that:
- Bridges the gap between mobile, desktop, and in-person experiences
- Drives more traffic back to your website
Ultimately, AI can make these channels feel like an extension of your website. By analyzing customer data in real time, AI can help shoppers continue the journey where they left off based on what they were browsing, what they have in their cart, and what they’ve purchased from you in the past.
Create 1:1 personalized experiences by activating your trove of customer data
Consumers have really high expectations when it comes to how brands interact with them. They know how much data a brand has on them, so they have little patience for irrelevant messages. But on the flip side, they'll stick with you when their interactions are personalized. 68% of consumers will switch to a competitor that offers a better personalized experience.
Even though you have plenty of customer data, the rule-based workflows you’ve had to rely on are limited to personalizing with attributes—like inserting a product name into a cart abandonment message template.
And it’s been too cumbersome to send messages when each customer is most likely to engage with that message. So you’ve been reverting to a standardized trigger time—like two hours after abandonment—that’s given the best results on average.
Personalization in marketing has never been able to follow every individual customer’s journey 1:1. Somewhere along the line, that customer’s path diverged from their segment, but messaging couldn’t entirely keep up. In an ideal world, you’d be able to send each customer a unique message based on everything you know about them:
- Their browse and purchase history
- How frequently they buy from you
- Their interests and preferences
- Messages that have gotten them to click in the past
- When they’re most likely to take action
Then, you’d have a lot more customers engaging and converting from your campaigns.
Thanks to AI, that world is finally a reality. We know exactly what customers have browsed, what they've bought, what they've added to their cart—in addition to all of their demographic information. We’re able to build a full profile of that consumer instantly. So you’re no longer limited to personalizing based on their last interaction, but based on their entire history with your brand.
Using AI, you can start reaching them more effectively by building dynamic messaging that moves them along the funnel—from consideration to purchase and, ultimately, to repeat purchase.
Each customer gets a unique message based on their real-time behavior and evolving relationship with your brand. So you can realize the potential of hyper-personalization and send customers messages they want to engage with.
Accelerate performance and tackle marketing challenges faster
AI is quickly becoming standard to streamline processes and drive better business performance. Leveraging it is going to become increasingly critical for staying ahead. “It's a little bit like AWS. No one builds their own data center, right? Remember when everyone was buying servers? It’s a whole different world,” Jawar shared with the audience at Shoptalk. “The most significant piece of advice I have is when you look at all these technological shifts. They happen very quickly and you need to be on the forefront of experimenting with the technology.”
AI can automate time-consuming tasks, predict customer behavior, and enable hyper-personalized experiences that drive engagement and loyalty. And it’s already having a meaningful impact on key marketing metrics.
Brands that use Attentive AI are seeing:
- 120% more clicks
- 117% more purchases
- 115% more revenue
Want to explore how you can achieve hyper-personalization with AI? Learn what you can do with Attentive AI and join the waitlist.
