By Petra Spanko, managing director of Clever Monitor Middle East
Artificial intelligence is the new buzzword that is swiftly transforming the technological landscape and changing the dynamics of businesses all over the globe. Given the challenging market scenario in the region, businesses today have to up their game to deliver a unique customer experience.
A company’s growth is pretty much pegged to its marketing efforts. Faced with a myriad of ever-evolving customer needs, marketers have no choice but to remain steadfast in ensuring they deploy cutting-edge marketing strategies or risk losing traction with their customers.
Almost everywhere you turn people are talking about automation or machine learning and how this new and mind-boggling concept is poised to change the world. Not to be left behind, marketers are jumping on this bandwagon in a bid to exploit it and boost their marketing efforts. The areas where AI will be able to help range from repetitive tasks up to complex decision making.
Personalisation and customer engagement are the dominant areas for AI in marketing. Not only has AI helped marketers come up with more effective communication, but it has also enabled them to focus on other important things that affect the bottom-line.
Clever Monitor’s marketing technology, for example, leverages machine-learning processes to empower digital marketers making them more efficient and effective. AI’s ability to gather valuable data across numerous customer touchpoints leads to better segmenting and targeting.
AI’s entry into the email marketing scene has affected how customers receive and react to content. According to e-Consultancy, 80 per cent of companies in the Middle East are using email for marketing. Out of those, based on recent estimations, more than 30 per cent in the UAE are using or looking for AI solutions.
By incorporating AI in email marketing, companies are now able to create truly personalised emails. This helps brands build credibility and strengthen customer relations by keeping information up to date. Top beneficiaries of this emerging trend include all e-commerce and call-centre based businesses, real estate, the financial sector, automotive, media, and retail.
Email marketing has an incredible return-on-investment potential. Based on some studies, potential results can rise up to 4,400 per cent, where each dollar invested can bring an average return of $44, when using best practices. This can rise even higher with the help of AI.
Deeper segmentation and targeting, together with automation, can bring great results. But then we still have to include best practices in our approach. The importance of one-to-one communication with customers will only rise, together with the usage of private channels.
People these days are more comfortable communicating via mobile phones, and we can see that one of the strongest emerging trends today is m-commerce. Whether making an online purchase or searching the web, everything these days can be done via the mobile at the click of a finger. This is courtesy of bigger mobile screen sizes, handiness and the ability of retailers to produce mobile versions of their websites that are extremely user friendly. This in turn has given rise to the demand for mobile messaging apps, which by 2021 is predicted to increase by 23 per cent from today.
Building an omni-channel platform that will provide customers with a much better and more complex experience is the way ahead. Automation will not only help businesses identify their specific target audience but also create truly personalised content that will be sent out to them using the most effective medium. This will make communication both more relevant and less frequent. It will also help eradicate the challenges marketers usually face such as consumers feeling “over mailed” and spammed, irrelevant content and ineffective modes of communication.
Enterprises will reach out for AI technologies more frequently. AI will help them approach their clients in a more professional way, automate repetitive tasks and complex decision making, select better engaging versions of content and deliver the right message at the right time to the right audience.
