In today’s hyper connected, always-online world, companies are looking at AI to help them understand and overcome the challenges of marketing and customer engagement. Customers are finicky, and a slew of competitors are waiting if your product falls even a little short. Today’s brands need to engage customers in a contextual and timely manner in order to succeed. In a recent webinar, How AI is Changing the Customer Retention Game, Aditi Mohanty, Digital Marketing Manager at Vodafone, and Stewart Rogers, Analyst-at-Large at VentureBeat, discussed the role of technology in revolutionizing customer engagement and retention. Here are some key highlights from the webinar.
The Major Applications of AI for Improving Customer Retention Segmentation is a major challenge for marketers. Every customer is unique, and each one interacts with your products and services differently. Understanding what drives consumer behavior, and building the next best action based on last and historic behavior is an aspect where having an AI or machine learning solution helps tremendously.
AI and Machine Learning-Powered Strategies that Brands Can Use to Engage and Retain Customers AI-powered solutions can help companies encourage customers at each stage of the user life cycle to take a desired action. For example, when a customer is first onboarded you can send them in-app notifications with special offers or key feature suggestions. The webinar details several specific implementations of AI that major organizations with millions of active users have been using, and the remarkable ways in which it has improved user engagement with their products.
Using AI to Strengthen Marketing Campaigns Personalization is a critical component of modern marketing strategies. Airbnb’s search is powered by an AI model that analyzes hundreds of distinct user signals in real time to return personalized listings. Guests are matched not only with specific hosts and listings that might be compatible, but also with overall neighborhoods and experiences that would make their stay more pleasurable. Source: Airbnb.com
The Real-World Results of Using AI to Increase Customer Retention and Engagement The North Face uses IBM’s Watson technology to create an AI-powered user interface that changes based on what the customer is looking for. It asks the user for the activity, weather conditions, and even terrain to offer the ideal products.
Leading beauty brand Sephora has also been using AI to better understand their audience. The Sephora Virtual Artist system gives users a virtual environment where they can try products that match their style and skin type.
AI is the Future of Customer Engagement
Improved AI and machine learning capabilities will continue to provide marketers with unprecedented insights into user behavior. The better AI gets, the more personalized marketing will become. Deep learning and pattern recognition will allow marketers to design more effective campaigns and pinpoint user requirements. Virtual assistants will become the norm and change how customer support systems operate with the ability to provide exact solutions based on a vast array of data. AI-powered marketing is the future. It is already changing the way brands and customers interact with each other, and it will continue to shape this dynamic. It’s an exciting time to be a marketer!
How AI is Changing User Retention Game
Learn how tapping into your oil well of data and harnessing it via marketing automation platforms powered by AI and machine learning can strengthen your bottom line.
Source: Airbnb.com 
