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.

18 Tips to Generate More Traffic with Your Content

If you market online, it is inevitable for you to develop innovative content marketing strategies and tactics. Such strategies/tactics can help your business stand out of the crowd and grow traffic. This is why every online business owner who wants to have more traffic and by implication more customers must find a way to market content. Despite the fact that the Internet today is a severely crowded market space, many marketers are still creating content and getting it out on the Internet by way of thousands of new blog posts published every hour 24/7. These marketers know that a well-thought-out content marketing strategy is a very effective way to brand your business, increase engagement, and generate more website traffic. No matter the nature of your online business, content is one great marketing tool to engage with and effectively speak to your customers and potential customers. Growing your website traffic flows directly from such efforts.

If you’re running an online business, here are some of the most effective strategies/tactics online marketing experts recommend to start effective content marketing for your business.

1. Publish only easy-to-read content: If your content is easy to read, it is easy to understand and therefore more effective. If you want to write content that easily guides readers, it must have good headings and short paragraphs that are easy for the human eyes and mind to comprehend.

2. Promote your content on social media: The wider you promote your content, the more it is read. For this reason, you can use social media channels to promote your content widely. That helps to increase web traffic to your site.

3. Don’t ignore SEO: You must pay special attention to Search Engine Optimization, SEO to benefit from organic traffic search engines send to websites.

4. Use keywords wisely: Research, select and use keywords wisely. If you use Google keyword planner, it is possible for you to target and use the right keywords searchers mostly use when searching for your type of business.

5. Monitor your Competitors: You can do this by analyzing your competitors’ content/blogs. That will allow you to understand what they are doing and why they’re doing what they are doing. Such insights will enable you to compete favorably with them.

6. Create a blog for your business: Blogging in one great way to market content. A good blog will enable you create educational and informative content to engage your readers. Take your business niche and commence writing on relevant topics in the business to engage your readers.

7. Create evergreen content: Evergreen content is content that remains relevant and continue to engage readers over a prolonged period of time. If you create such content, it will continue to send traffic to your website, year in year out.

8. Leave your blog posts undated: You can remove publish-dates from your blog posts to prevent them from looking out of date. Not many readers like to click through blog posts if the publish-date is old and stale.

9. Invite Guest bloggers: Bloggers like to cooperate for mutual benefits. You can therefore invite other people as guest bloggers in your business niche to blog on your own website. Doing so helps to bring new readers to the site. Make sure you select only guest bloggers of repute who will help enrich your website with high quality content.

10. Embrace storytelling: People generally love to hear stories. These stories help readers make connections between what they may already be aware of and new things your own stories will reveal to them. Write human angle content that many people can relate with particularly real life stories, challenges, triumphs and trials and with real-life examples. Such stories help to draw readers in for more engagement.

11. Use bullet points, images, and videos: Doing this helps your content to be shared more easily and frequently and search engines love them as well.

12. Make your posts easily shareable: If you use eye-catching social sharing buttons on your content, it makes it more shareable across multiple social media channels.
 
13. Respond to comments from your blog readers: This helps to build more engagement and nurturing of customers. Responding to comments promptly and intelligently helps to show your readers that you value their feedback. It can help sustain customers’ interest to come again and again to your website. 

14. Work with Influencers: You can follow influencers on social media and invite others who are respected individuals in your business niche. They can help share your content to their followers, a consequence of which you may get hundreds of extra views on your content.
 
15. Find good content marketing examples: You can look for successful marketing campaigns to work with so that you can introduce them in your own content marketing strategy.

16. Create irresistible headings: Every content marketer knows that without a great headline, even the best blog post can go unread.

17. Link internally: Internal linking of your content helps with SEO. A good SEO on your content can result in a better experience for your readers. A direct consequence of that is increased traffic to your site.

18. Publish industry interviews: Yeah, everyone always wants to know what is new and trending in any industry. Timely interviews help to fill that yearning. For this reason, you can publish industry leaders’ interviews on your site. Aside from making interesting reading/listening for readers, the famous names recognition that comes with such interviews help boost credibility for your business.