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.

5 Website Glitches Which Can Hurt Your Sales

Every online marketer always wants a website which is functional, simple and coverts customers easily. It is smart to maintain those qualities as much as practicable. It is a known fact to many marketers that the things which drive conversions are unique to every website and every product. For that reason, when conversions are down, many marketers turn to solutions/strategies that promise high conversion rates and guarantee a certain outcome. This web strategy and approach to conversions should be comprehensive enough to facilitate the uniqueness of both your brand and audience. These here are 5 things you can properly manage to create a page/website that is hospitable to high conversion rates.



01. Cumbersome Check-out Process. Having a cumbersome check-out process is one avoidable way to end up with abandoned shopping carts and failed conversions. This can be fixed by ensuring a seamless check-out process that involves as minimal information as possible in as timely a manner as possible. Many online shoppers habitually have no time to waste. The faster and easier the check-out process is, the better the sales.

02. Poor Web Design. Because it directly impacts the way users interact with your site, a poor/weak web design negatively impacts your conversion rate. Usually, a poor web design is attributable to a lack of aesthetics in color and style, outdated organization or look, over-complicated display features, and any other combination of first-impression factors. When a web surfer lands on your web page, an impression is made within a matter of milliseconds. That is the time it takes for them to make a decision whether to stay or to move on. “Something” compelling must hold them on your site long enough for them to deal.

03. Lack of Transactions Security. Building trust online is not an easy thing to do because of overwhelming presence of scammers. That is why consumer trust has become the single most important element factored into high conversion rates. For shoppers to willingly submit their personal information necessary for conversions, they have to be able to recognize your website as being secure. For many shoppers, the slightest sign of fraudulence or error, whether it is sloppy content or a glitch in the checkout process, it calls your legitimacy to question. To counteract consumer fear of scams and theft, you must add security/business seals to your site. That helps to show your site is verified.



04. Under-developed Product or Service. Sometimes when your product is not selling as expected, the problem may really be within the product/service.  Most often, an under-developed product or lack of understanding regarding the audience of that product can hamper high conversion rates. Your product/service must at all times be clear and easily communicated fit for the audience it is designed for. Any piece of the product/service which is a deterrent for consumers must be quickly straightened out.

05. Web Conversion Problems. All told, many of the glitch problems do directly impact conversions and can all be classified into web conversion problems. Some of these problems are, slow load time during check out, confusing information, absent or unclear display of shipping or pricing information, glitchy form submit buttons etc.etc. These can dramatically impact conversions. You must therefore routinely go through your check out process the way a user would then fix any conversion deterrents.