How to Use AI to Acquire and Retain Customers

Online marketers are increasingly relying on Artificial Intelligence, AI for problem-solving in their marketing activities. They do this by using AI powered aps some of which are voice-activated virtual assistants, auto responders, CTAs, customer service and retail and e-commerce automation. Online business owners now depend more and more on the power of AI and machine learning to significantly increase brand awareness, enhance customer engagement, improve user experience, meet customer expectations and to find solutions to even more complex business problems. 

 
Direct Marketing Benefits of AI

You can achieve many milestones in your online business which allow you to acquire new customers and retain existing ones if you do the following.

Use AI-powered social media tools to help you monitor and gain valuable insights about your brand.
Use AI to identify gaps in your content marketing strategy. That way, you can manage to create content that’s relevant to your target audience.
Integrate AI into your e-commerce site to reduce shopping cart abandonment.
Use AI to significantly improve your website user experience by making it intuitive, accessible, and easy to navigate.
Use AI to help you generate high-quality leads that are likely to buy your products and become customers.
Use AI to personalize and tailor-fit your product recommendations based on your customers’ preferences thereby increasing repeat purchases.

No matter the nature of your online business, it is possible for you to acquire and retain customers more efficiently than what it normally takes to get same things done manually. Here is what you need do.

Improve Your Website User Experience

As an online business owner, your business window into the internet world is your website. That is where visitors can interact with your brand, respond to your call-to-action, and to purchase products. To make these interactions smooth, it is important that visitors to the site have a great experience while navigating through the site. With AI, you can improve your website user experience several fold by way of personalized recommendations, search relevance and seamless customer service through AI chatbots. In particular, the presence of AI chatbots on your e-commerce website contributes to a great user experience on the site because they provide 24/7 assistance and support in the absence of human customer service.  They help users to get accurate answers to their inquiries more quickly and efficiently when compared to manually scrolling through text-based FAQs.

Evaluate the Performance of your Content

This you can do by using AI to identify gaps in your content marketing strategy. If you’ve been creating content for a while, by deploying AI, you can easily identify the gaps, find fixes, and evaluate the performance of your content marketing campaign. Even if you’re into retail or e-commerce business, you can use AI to identify the gaps in your content marketing. Your content may be directly focused on your products and their features, but through AI, you can better determine the relevant content that addresses your audience’s needs and pain points faster and more accurately.

Pre-Qualify Prospects and Leads

When your new leads are not converting into sales well enough, you can rectify the situation with the help of AI. If you have a bit of experience in online marketing, you’ll know when you’re not getting good sales despite the high traffic your website is receiving. If you are experiencing this, it could mean you are not taking some marketing actions correctly. It could mean your CTAs are ineffective, your content marketing strategy is poor, you are targeting the wrong audience, you are promoting your products through the wrong social media channels or you are using the wrong type of Sign-up form. With the help of AI tools, you can extract relevant data to help you learn more about your target audience. These tools also provide predictive analytics on your customers’ behavior. By using them efficiently, you can improve your lead generation strategy because they’ll help you to identify which leads to pursue, where to find them, and how to effectively engage them.

Cut Down on Cart Abandonment Rate

If you run an e-commerce business and you experience a high cart abandonment rate, it could mean certain things are just not right with some operations in your website. Many online shoppers may abandon their shopping carts because they’re not ready to buy yet, high extra costs, privacy concerns, complicated/cumbersome checkout process, privacy concerns and most commonly, not enough customer-friendly payment methods. AI-powered chatbots can come in handy to address these issues by diligently guiding customers through their shopping journey. AI chatbots can with smooth conversational approach give customers a nudge to prompt them to complete their purchase. They also act as a virtual shopping assistant or concierge that can let a customer know about an on-the-spot discount, a time-sensitive deal, a free shipping coupon, or any other incentives that will encourage them to complete the checkout. Even lost orders due to cart abandonment can be recovered with the help of AI. If AI does these for an e-commerce website, it can lead to an increase in conversion rate for the business.

Social Listening

Marketers can deploy AI for social listening for potential customers. This is simply a process in which AI can be used to analyze the conversations, trends, and buzz surrounding your brand across different social media platforms. Social listening effectively analyzes what’s usually behind the metrics and the numbers. It determines the social media sentiment about your brand and everything else relating to how people feel and relate to your brand. Such AI generated data/information you get through social listening can be used as a guide in your strategy to gain new customers. Without a doubt, getting this type of intricate data can constitute an enormous and very daunting task for human beings. AI helps out very nicely.

Increase Repurchases

Marketers can increase repurchases with predictive analytics made possible with the use of AI. Predictive analytics is the process of making predictions based on historical data using data mining, statistical modelling, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other techniques. Through it, marketers can generate insights, forecast trends, and predict behaviors based on past and current data. Its practical use is when marketers rely on it to predict customers’ propensity to repurchase products as well as its frequency. When used to optimize marketing campaigns, AI-powered predictive analytics can generate customer response, increase repurchase, and promote cross-selling of relevant products. Predictive analytics helps marketers to focus their marketing resources on customer retention while targeting a highly motivated segment of their markets that may be happy to return and repurchase more products. This helps to save on ads costs for marketers. AI makes it possible.

Provide Personal Recommendations

Most online shoppers really value personalized marketing experiences. The reason brands are able to boost their sales when they tailor their recommendations based on consumer data. Recommendation systems’ algorithms typically rely on data on browsing history, pages visited, and previous purchases. Thus, smart AI can accurately analyze customers’ interactions with website content and find relevant products that will interest the individual customer. This is how AI makes it easier to target potential customers and effectively put the best products in front of the site visitors. With AI, recommendation engines are able to filter and customize product recommendations based on each customer’s preferences and correctly match the customers’ preferences with the right products. Because of this element of personalization, marketers can effectively acquire and retain customers with the help of AI.

6 Social Media Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Social media marketing is hugely popular with business owners. Nearly everyone actually wants their business on social media because of its popularity and ease of social media marketing activities. As a result of inexperience, many marketers tend to make avoidable mistakes when marketing on social media. Such mistakes stem from creating good content, sharing it online and engaging with social media communities. If you manage to avoid these social media marketing mistakes, your online business will do better even amidst the huge competition in digital space. 

If you are desirous to make some appreciable success in your social media marketing activities, here are six of the commonest mistakes you can do well to avoid.

1. Creating Content for Yourself

Many businesses are on social media posting only content they like not what their audience likes. That is a mistake. Content that helps to grow your business is the type of content your audience likes and appreciates. It is such content that gets them hooked up to you and your business because you are regularly giving them what they like to see and read. If you focus more on topics you are knowledgeable about and tailor your content to meet what your audience yearns for, the content serves a great marketing purpose. From your audience feedback and FAQs, it is easy to gauge what your audience wants to know. Creating content that answers questions/concerns from your audience is the best way to provide definite value for them. Such content is what helps to get good results for your business.
 
2. Random Postings

Posting content randomly is a great marketing mistake. What your business needs is consistent and regular content postings since social media algorithms tend to favor consistency in terms of both the number of posts and the type of content you regularly share. Aside from this, if your audience knows what content they expect from you, it helps them to connect better with your business.

3. Not Engaging Enough

When your social media content is not engaging enough, your audience/community cannot grow fast enough. Sporadic posting just for the sake of it never gives good results on social media. What works is what manages to get your audience engaged. You must never lose sight of the fact that social media platforms are primarily meant to cultivate useful social interactions among all shades of people. It helps brands to cultivate strong online presence. For most brands, such connections are the key to long-term relationships which generate leads and sales. Social media helps you to build a valuable audience free of cost provided you do your part to post high value engaging content regularly.
 
4. Absence of Calls-To-Action, CTAs

If you plan your content well enough and the quality manages to provide real value to your audience, it is great for your business. A follow up of such content with an appropriate CTA is great for selling your products/services. If a CTA is absent, many consumers may just read your content and move away. That is a great business opportunity lost. By placing a good CTA at the beginning or end of your content post, it tells your audience the immediate action you want them to take after reading your post. If this CTA is short, inviting and to the point, the audience acts appropriately. A good CTA helps consumers to make their buy decisions and to purchase from your business.

5. Not Editing Photos and Videos

The average human being easily gets attracted to visuals. Good products photos and how-to videos accompanying your content are good for business. With a lot of bad images out there on the internet, it is bad for business to add just about any photos/videos in your content. If you are not taking photos or shooting videos by yourself, be sure that any photos/videos you admit in your content are well edited to match your marketing message. Even if you are not a professional photographer or videographer, you can use online tools to tweak a few things up to make your marketing images/videos look much better.
 
6. Ignoring Direct Messages

If you want to connect easily with your audience on social media, never ignore Direct Messages, DMs from them. Ignoring DMs or comments from your audience is an indirect way of telling them they don’t count. And, that you don’t really care about them or whatever they have to say to you about your business. If you want to benefit well from social media marketing, you must spend quality time daily to engage with your audience, answering questions, and checking your direct messages. Sometimes, there are great questions and business opportunities you are likely to miss if you ignore DMs from your audience.