As any marketer worth his salt knows, AI and Machine Learning are no longer the future of marketing. They are the right here and the right now. But are they actually helping marketers?
IT’S TIME TO BECOME RELEVANT
No one likes the feeling of being sold to. Think about it, have you ever heard your customers say “send me marketing messages”?
The attention of your customers, you have to earn it. They are short on time too, just like you. Before hitting that send button, ask yourself, is what I’m sending relevant to this customer and does it provide value? Value always lies in the eye of the person who’s receiving what we’re sending them not the other way around.
The importance of tailoring your marketing to an individual level cannot be overstated. Amazon attributes 35% of its revenue to relevant recommendations while 70% of the videos viewed on YouTube are the result of recommendations.
HOW TO SCALE
The difficulty of delivering relevant communications at scale, however, is that this goes beyond human capacity. With the increasing amount of data available it’s becoming more difficult to determine what is relevant for each individual customer. Let alone having to do this accurately for the millions of customers in our databases. This is where tech comes to the rescue.
Data scientists have developed a proprietary algorithm that crunches all offers and content, customer data, transactions and channel interactions. It then processes this information to create the most relevant communications and recommendations for each individual customer. For example, with the solution called uDecide, marketers were able to incremental sales by 20% and achieved positive ROI within 9 months after implementation.
NOT JUST ANOTHER GENIUS
While the results are impressive, the process is not unique. Where uDecide does stand out from the crowd, however, is in its self-learning capabilities. As it collects more data and processes more offerings, it also learns to prioritise the communications that customers respond to over those that are ignored – all in real time.
Marketers still have the opportunity to determine the weighting of each response to control how customer-brand interactions play out.
NO SILVER BULLET
While marketing tools like uDecide are game changers, they are not magicians. Marketers still need to ensure they have a wide enough selection of quality content and offerings to make all that computing worthwhile.
Generating up-to-date content that is relevant and engaging for each and every customer is the goal of every marketer. In reality, however, reaching that goal can be prohibitively time-consuming and expensive.
INTRODUCING OUR CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT FRAMEWORK
Once again, it’s no surprise that when humans have a problem, technology has an answer. Digital Alchemy’s Customer Engagement Framework makes the process of selecting and framing marketing communications more systematic and therefore less of a challenge for marketers. Working in tandem with uDecide, the Customer Engagement Framework applies the principles of behavioural science.
Communicating with customers on an individual level requires understanding what motivates them and what they respond to. Once we know this, we can apply psychological techniques to present the same offering in different ways to different customers:
Social Proof: works for customers who are guided by the actions of their peers – “345k customers have benefited from this offer”
Loss Aversion: works by instilling a sense of loss – “Offer ends today!”
Scarcity: works by making an offering appear limited – “While stocks last!”
The same principles can also be applied to content creation, enabling marketers to reword the same piece of content for different customers based on psychological techniques. In effect, this simple solution not only multiplies the number of offerings and recommendations that marketers can make, but also ensures they are more relevant.
