There’s a lot of conversation around using artificial intelligence (AI) to improve your business. Whether it’s helping HR with workforce management or improving the testing of your software development team, its benefits are well known. But did you know it can also help with your sales and marketing?
What is hyper-personalisation?
We’ve all encountered hyper-personalisation in physical stores. A great example is how sales assistants for makeup brands interact with their customers. After seeing a potential customer browsing for a while, they’ll often approach and employ some of the following tactics:
- Ask what outcomes customers want, rather than what products – sometimes people don’t know what products exist, so this allows the sales assistant to introduce them to new solutions.
- Up-sell or cross-sell based only on those outcomes – as well as a foundation, suggest a colour-correcting concealer but not something unrelated, like lipstick.
- Let them test it – Benefit Cosmetics has strong brand faith in eyebrow products, and part of that reputation is due to their sales assistants/makeup artists applying it professionally for free during a sale.
- Offer samples – especially if there’s a product they liked but wasn’t directly related to the reason they came in.
All of these tactics mean the customer is treated as an individual, with a shopping session dedicated specifically to their needs. Rather than feeling like they’ve been left adrift in a sea of confusing products, they’ve had help specifically tailored to what they want – not what the sales assistant wanted to sell. They’ve then been able to go away with a personalised solution.
Hyper-personalisation is a great addition to customer engagement strategies. While it is easy to do in physical stores with dedicated sales staff, it isn’t as easy online. That’s where artificial intelligence comes in.
What can AI do?
AI can be applied in a few ways to create a hyper-personalised customer experience. Most of these can be implemented quite quickly, and with great effect.
A good example of the impact this can have comes from GAP. While it’s difficult to measure exact improvements, they’ve noted that their digital marketing uplift efficiency is around 50% higher since implementing AI solutions. AI shouldn’t be seen as a big business solution, but one of the most important resources for start-ups, too.
Gather data
Everyone knows the best way to learn about your customer’s needs is to gather data. But this can be challenging, especially with high volumes of customers and the lack of a face-to-face connection. There are lots of ways AI can be deployed to create new data sets.
- Using AI chatbots rather than generic forms allow for broader, more comprehensive answers.
- Analyse online behaviour – how do your customers interact with your site?
- Use NLP (natural language processing) to pick out key linguistic trends in reviews.
Understand data
Once this data has been gathered, it needs to be processed. E-commerce companies have so much data available to them – from social listening, loyalty schemes, reviews, and many more sources – but often no way to make use of it. AI can trawl through large data sets and extract valuable information. The kind of insights that allow you to hyper-personalise experiences in ways you might not have considered before.
- Analyse linguistic trends – for instance, are lots of the negative reviews all using phrases about ‘high delivery rates’? Are they all associated with particular products?
- Build accurate customer personas – quickly assess the age, gender, location, and similar characteristics of your customer base.
- Spot trends – do lots of people abandon carts in one particular browser? Maybe there’s a tech issue that can be fixed.
Engage appropriately
A key aspect of hyper-personalisation is engaging at the right time. AI can react based on the customer journey through the website, and jump in at the right moment. That could be popping up with an offer as a customer goes to abandon a cart, having a tutorial video open on a page they’ve lingered on, or connecting them to SMS customer support. This turns a generic experience into a personalised one, with their needs met in real-time.
Applying these insights
Of course, you still need your marketing team to apply these insights! Whilst AI can do a lot of the work, those aspects require personal engagement. By linking this to your computer telephony integration products, you can ensure the personalisation continues beyond the website. Engaging with your business over the phone should seamlessly follow on from previous experiences, rather than feeling distinct.
AI can support your marketing campaigns, helping to tweak micro-elements of content like email subject lines and greetings. This adds a great new tool to your marketer’s toolbox, with the ability to target more accurately. While it can’t write an entire campaign for you, it can provide insights on what keywords do well, what sort of content gets click-throughs, and what issues might need addressing.
A key part of hyper-personalisation is continuing it throughout the customer experience. AI can be hands-on on the website, actively targeting and engaging customers based on their behaviour. But it’s also a great way to improve operations throughout the company, and should be used as such. These insights can be applied throughout the whole journey – from marketing emails through to customer support, and plenty more besides.
