Why Data is the Secret Sauce for Marketing Leaders

For today’s organizations, scaling marketing activities to fill the pipeline remains a top priority. However, marketers have also had to come to terms with keeping up with the growing demands of prospects and customers. As consumers, people’s expectations have risen sharply - one-to-one personalized experiences are becoming the new bar. The engagement strategy and technology you used yesteryear will not successfully guide you through the modern digital age.

THE NEW RULES OF (MULTI-CHANNEL) CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT: HANDBOOK FOR GROWTH MARKETERS

Winning CX will come from Brands who can balance relevance, consistency and convenience to drive engagement. The kind of engagement that drives optimal customer lifetime value and real business impact.

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When it comes to meeting customer expectations and delivering one-to-one personalization at scale, as counterintuitive as it may seem at first, you must leverage what you know about all your customers; the strength is in the numbers. As your customer base grows, so does your volume of data, including each customer’s preferences, browsing and shopping behaviors, purchase history and more. This treasure trove of data about all your customers can be put to work at a velocity that enables real-time individualization of promotions, suggestions and recommendations. Fortunately, machine learning and AI capabilities do the heavy lifting, handling millions of uniquely personal, tailored interactions and rules - a marketers dream! Understanding what data your company is aggregating will help empower your marketers to drive more tailored offers that resonate with your target audience.

In this post, we’ll explore how machine learning and AI can enhance the performance of your marketing activities, your website and overall customer experience (CX).

Also Read: 3 Ways to Enhance the Customer Experience Using AI and Machine Learning

Make Every Customer the Most Important Customer

Think about a recent experience with a brand that totally wowed you. My guess is that it was frictionless, personalized based on previous interactions and relevant to your context and intent in that moment; a glorious CX trifecta. Intellectually, though, you know that  every one of that brand’s customers is getting the same royal treatment as you. But that’s okay isn’t it? You don’t need to feel like the only customer, you just want to feel like the most important one when you’re turning to a brand you trust.

This kind of consumer-like personalization is now the baseline for B2B brands as well, and even extends within the workplace to employees, too. Simply put, just about all of us have come to expect the right information on our phones, tablets and laptops, the moment it’s needed. If your organization hasn’t recognized that, you’re likely losing leads by the day and are missing out on key opportunities to delight your customers and increase their lifetime value.

The key is to automate the process. With machine learning and AI capabilities, you can enhance your customer experience and personalize the journey of every single visitor, based on information gleaned as they navigate through your website, product or services.

Here’s what an AI-powered search and recommendations solution can do for your marketing strategy:

Step 1:

Programmatic advertising targets browsers with relevant ads, at the right time and place, based on a variety of touchpoints.

Step 2:

A visitor who clicks on an ad and lands on your homepage sees content that has been automatically customized to fit with their interests and needs.

Step 3:

When that visitor uses your website’s search function, the delivered results are ones that are relevant to them, and adapted to previous searches or purchases.

Step 4:

Once the visitor starts looking at a given product, related content is proactively delivered with their context and intent in mind and keeps them engaged.

Step 5:

Not only does this eliminate the need to look elsewhere for answers, but they’re also so impressed with experience that they decide to purchase more than what they initially came for.

Also Read: 3 Ways to Future-Proof Your Martech Stack

Your data is the secret sauce for your marketers’, and ultimately your organization’s, success. The problem for most organizations is that it lives in silos. It holds clues, that when put together, tell the full story of your customers and what you can do to keep them happy and coming back. Those clues include where your visitor came from, what they’re clicking on, how long they were on your site, which product or service got them to engage more and what ultimately led to them converting or abandoning their cart. Unifying those interactions, using machine learning and AI, is what’s fueling the Relevance Transformation and will enable your organization to predict what your visitors next, oftentimes before they even realize they want it.

Consider the alternative: if your visitor has difficulty finding what they’re looking for, has to scroll through several irrelevant search results before finding information that’s actually helpful, and isn’t offered a personalized experience that acknowledges prior interactions you’ve had with them, you risk losing them, if you haven’t already. When 70 to 96 percent of visitors who leave your website will never return, it’s important to make their experience as relevant and contextual as possible. Relevant digital experiences have a direct impact on customer satisfaction, conversion rates, as well as the number of return buyers, who will forever associate your brand with a positive experience and will gladly tell their friends.

It’s your marketers’ job to drive demand and generate leads for your organization’s products and services. Their goal is to make a measurable contribution to your business growth targets. Implementing machine learning and AI will empower your marketers to achieve their goals and move the needle on business-critical metrics - and delight your customers.