By Sameer Danave
AI tools can play a crucial role in creating, communicating, and delivering consistent, coherent, and personalized customer experiences across the brand and marketing channels. With digital technologies fast taking center stage, the need to offer consistent brand experience in omnichannel marketing couldn’t be overemphasized. The significance of seamless communication is also rising as consumers constantly switch between different brand marketing channels in their purchase journey. From browsing online to shopping at stores and interacting on social media, customers expect brands to deliver consistent, coherent, and seamless experiences. However, fulfilling these constantly changing expectations takes work, especially for those still stuck with legacy marketing channels and approaches. Breaking the mold here calls for the use of new-age innovations and the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in omnichannel marketing is one such breakthrough that can marketers deliver consistent brand messaging across the platforms. Harnessing the combined prowess of data analytics, predictive modeling, and large language models (LLMs), AI can significantly boost omnichannel marketing and help them deliver personalized, consistent, and seamless experiences to the target market across channels and platforms.
Omnichannel Marketing: What is it?
Omnichannel marketing has been steadily rising the popularity ladder owing to its ability to offer unified experiences to consumers. The approach uses multiple platforms including web, mobile, social, and physical channels to offer customers a consistent and coherent brand experience. In stark contrast to multi-channel Marketing employing different marketing mediums independently, omnichannel marketing emphasizes bringing coherence, fluidity, and seamlessness to customer experiences across touch points. In other words, omnichannel marketing helps brands retain their equity, relevance, and resonance even amidst the constant shift of consumers between offline and online modes of brand interactions.
Personalized Experiences: Why do customers prefer them?
With competition cluttering almost every business category, aligning offerings with the tastes and preferences of customers could help firms stay ahead of rivals. Sample the result of the study conducted by Salesforce which found overwhelming 73% of consumers expect organizations to recognise their unique needs and yet, 56% believe that most firms treat them just like numbers. Further, it has been proven time and again that personalized experiences are more likely to evoke an engaging experience from target audiences. In the wake of all such observations, offering personalized experiences is increasingly becoming a task of strategic importance for firms across product categories and service domains.
AI-powered Personalisation
AI can analyze massive amounts of data and generate valuable insights into consumer behavior, purchase preferences, and shopping experiences, among others. These insights, in turn, can be used to tailor content, suggest products/services, and offer recommendations aligned with the specific preferences of target consumers. The enhanced understanding can also be used for creating content, developing strategies, and optimizing communication for similar groups of demographic cohorts. With such high levels of personalisation, companies can establish a greater sense of connection and belongingness while strengthening their equity among the target audiences.
Content Optimization
By deep diving into the search history, browsing preferences, and past interactions, AI can enable organizations to dynamically adjust their content across social media and brand channels. The information can be used to adjust the website content, social media campaigns, email messages, and advertisement strategy among others. These personalized messages are also high in their resonance as each customer receives brand communication aligned to their specific activities, interests, and opinions.
Predictive Analytics
Perhaps the most significant aspect of AI is its ability to forecast prospective shifts in consumer behavior and preferences. Smart algorithms process interactions of consumer preferences with historical data records to offer a preview of trends that are likely to dominate future business scenarios. This analysis empowers brands to proactively engage with target audiences, develop products/services that are aligned with their evolving choices, and be ready with remedial solutions for prospective issues that customers might come across in the future. The power of predictive analytics also helps organizations stay ahead of the innovation curve and bring novel offerings into the market to gain the first-mover advantage.
Virtual Assistants
An increasing number of businesses today are relying on chatbots to offer fast, convenient, and seamless experiences to consumers. These chatbots are capable of offering round-the-clock services and can easily handle routine transactions, answer basic queries, and solve common issues and problems faced by consumers. The use of virtual assistants can also free up valuable human resources that can be used for accomplishing more complex tasks while offering smooth, seamless, and convenient service experiences to customers. Another significant aspect of AI-based virtual assistants is their ability to constantly evolve over a period of time, leading to more accurate, specific, and precise service experiences for customers.
AI in Action: Real-world Use Cases
The multi-dimensional benefits of using AI are well-recognised today and also partly explain its popularity among many leading organizations across the business spectrum. From Amazon and Apple to Samsung and Mercedes, real-world use cases of AI are changing the way businesses deliver value to their end consumers. Be it the recommendation engine of Netflix or the virtual artist app of Sephora, AI is revolutionizing the customer experience by enabling personalized and interactive experiences to target markets. These enhanced interactions, in turn, are proving crucial to creating brand loyalty and resonance, thereby driving the growth and profitability of organizations.
AI-Powered Customer Experiences: What Does the Future Hold?
The constantly evolving AI will take consumer interactions to a whole new level in the future. AI-powered chatbots are likely to engage in natural conversations with customers soon and with advancing technology, we might come across bots having an understanding of human emotions and capable of resolving queries with a human touch. The features of personalisation will also become hyper-specific in the coming years with more attention being devoted to personal preferences and future needs of customers. In sum, the overall transformative potential of AI is huge and going forward, the technology will change basic tenets of customer experiences across industry verticals.
Conclusion
By deep diving into the search history, browsing preferences, and past interactions, AI can enable organizations to adjust their content dynamically across social media and brand channels. Using the power of data, smart algorithms, and predictive modeling, AI can ensure brands deliver seamless brand communication across marketing platforms. AI tools can also help marketers understand consumer behavior, personalize offerings, and optimise strategies to strike long-term relations with prospective audiences. In sum, the AI-led omnichannel revolution has just started and will prove enormously beneficial for companies and customers alike going forward.
The author is senior director, Marketingat MSys Technologies
