High-touch, multichannel engagement is within every brand’s reach, but it requires putting AI in the driver’s seat. For a solid understanding of what it takes to fully integrate customer data and AI into your cross-channel marketing, don’t miss this VB Live event!
“Companies like Netflix and Amazon have demonstrated how to deliver superior customer experiences with AI, and it’s time for every brand to embrace this philosophy,” says Vijay Chittoor, CEO at Blueshift. “AI is coming to a point of maturity where you can build AI systems that non-technical marketers can actually use.”
At the speed at which customer data is being generated these days, the old processes — data warehouses, teams of analysts, tools tied to single-channel execution — are thoroughly out of date. As a result, a majority of customer data lies “dormant,” Chittoor says, and doesn’t impact the end customer experience.
AI-powered segmentation is a big leap forward, Chittoor explains, offering the ability to dynamically segment on the fly with real-time information. But it goes beyond just segmenting better, faster, and more nimbly — AI can unlock an array of strategies that have a powerful impact on customer engagement.
Continuous predictive scoring
In other words, “Who” to target. Unlike human analysis, AI is able to extract many more features from the raw data, both on an individual level as well across the entire population of customers. AI also has a tremendous advantage in being able to score customers continuously based on new data as it becomes available.
Recommendations
Recommendation engines aren’t just for Netflix or Amazon anymore. For instance, the personal finance company, LendingTree, is using recommendations to help drive customer journeys. If a customer has shopped for a mortgage, perhaps they’d also like a line of credit for renovations, for instance.
“The same idea applies to a variety of businesses,” Chittoor says. “Non-technical marketers are able to say, ‘if my customers have engaged with certain categories, I want the AI to actually recommend the next thing that people do after this action.’”
And then AI does the rest of the heavy lifting, and scales 1:1 recommendations of product, content, and offers across millions of customers.
Customer journey optimization
Customers interact with the same brand in a variety of different ways. They might start their experience in your mobile app, then shift to a website, and then 10 days later, switch to a different category of shopping. AI allows marketers to follow that journey, and determine which channels each individual customer should be engaged on, and when, and what action will be most effective, anywhere along that path.
“Looking at changes in predictive scoring — for example, the customer crossed a 50 percent threshold on likelihood of churn — AI can enter customers into the right journeys at the right time, and optimize the channel mix,” he explains.
Real-time optimization
Basic A/B testing has always been the gold standard of optimization, but AI enables techniques like the multi-arm bandit approach, optimizing across many creative variants at a much faster pace than manual optimization.
“Now you can actually have a campaign that is always running and you can keep adding new variants to it,” Chittoor says. “The AI system will automatically keep optimizing them over time across many, many variations.”
As you get into the process of choosing an AI solution, Chittoor recommends looking for a couple of key capabilities in the systems they deploy:
Interpretable models: Since marketing involves combining AI with elements of storytelling, marketers must be able to understand the AI before using it in their campaigns. That’s why it’s important that AI solutions are interpretable — in other words, the models can be explained easily to humans (even if they are built using thousands of inputs).
Continuous decisioning: The biggest shift in AI compared to a few years ago is that today’s AI can “self-drive” and make decisions continuously. In an era when customers expect you to know them based on real-time information, it is important to invest in continuous decisioning systems.
To learn more about using AI to activate customer data at scale, drive real-time intelligence, and orchestrate cross-channel marketing, plus choosing the right AI solution for you, don’t miss this VB Live event.
Don’t miss out!
In this VB Live event, you’ll:
- Understand the power of the customer data you have at your fingertips
- Learn how to leverage data to drive personalized, cross-channel marketing
- Discover how AI can transform your marketing strategy
Speakers:
- Rusty Warner, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
- Vijay Chittoor, CEO, Blueshift
- Shannon Johlic, Director of Marketing, Blueshift
- Stewart Rogers, Analyst at Large, VentureBeat
- Rachael Brownell, Moderator, VentureBeat
Sponsored by Blueshift
