AI Marketing

How Treating Customers with AI Marketing Can Make Holiday Hiccups Less Spooky

Blueshift

| October 29, 2020

While Halloween is always fun, it has its spooky side — some of us are scared of monsters, candy corn, too many PSLs, and, for many marketers scaling up and prepping for the holiday season is the stuff of nightmares. For marketers who want to give their customers more, diving into the world of personalization and mass messaging can seem scary.

Have no fear! AI is here to help overworked marketers do more with their campaigns, scale-up personalization, and even get a chance to rest easy for the holidays. Our new Ultimate Guide to AI Marketing shows marketers just how easy AI is to implement in your campaigns, where it can be used, and just how impactful AI is for the marketers already using it.

Spooky Scenario #1: Scaling Recommendations Leading to Inaccuracy

As brands amass more and more customers and the traditional customer profile morphs and expands to include a more diverse set of shoppers, it can be difficult to guess their wants and needs — making personalization much more challenging.

AI is the perfect way to scale up personalization — Blueshift’s Predictive Recommendations generate 1:1 content through the analysis of past behavior, past purchases, and many other factors. AI finds useful patterns and connections to best determine what affinities customers have for certain products, groups, and more. Additionally, our transparent approach to AI allows marketers to easily build custom models that can predict different behaviors and account for various data points. Examples include based on past purchases, latest browse, and trends for lookalike customers.

Spooky Scenario #2: Targeting the Wrong Customers and Wasting Ad Budgets

The days of spray and pray are long gone — and frankly, we celebrate the end of overspending on ads. With thoughtful, engaging advertisements marketers not only protect their budgets, but customers will also be much more responsive and will be more likely to convert with personalized ads.

Targeting the right audience (with the right message on the right channel and at the right time) makes your approach to customers feel more deliberate and compassionate — especially when all of those factors are related to where the customer is within their journey. Using AI to craft audiences for email, mobile, and ads is a great way to see fantastic ROAS. Blueshift’s own AI-enabled marketers have seen a ton of success through our “lookalike audience” feature, where AI compiles the different data points and patterns of your brand’s ideal customer and uses this information to find folks just like that to target on Facebook, Google, and more.

Spooky Scenario #3: Focusing on Certain Channels and Losing Opportunities

Another spooky reason marketers may be missing out on their best customers: they’re reaching out on the wrong channels. At Blueshift, we’re big believers in traditional channels like email (in fact, we just released a course on email deliverability, for free), but today’s customers aren’t just confined to a few key channels, they’re everywhere. To successfully market to the customer that’s constantly bouncing around, you need to use your first-party data and AI to find meaningful patterns and clues as to where customers should be reached.

Blueshift uses Predictive Channel Engagement Scores to do just that — AI combs a customer’s history of browsing, engagement, and conversions to determine which channel has the highest rate of success for whatever your goal might be. These scores (which take the form of a percentage linked to each channel, for each customer) can be easily leveraged throughout any campaign to optimize channel selection for success.

Scary Scenario #4: Getting Lost in the Shuffle without Send Time Optimization

Just as choosing the right channel is essential for success, the time of sending is also a crucial factor, especially in today’s message-overloaded world. Optimal customer engagement won’t happen if you’re simply guessing at the best time or going with popular times like 5 PM. Blueshift’s AI-powered Engage Time Optimization is the best way to ensure you’re messaging each individual at their best time, every time.

Predictive Engage Time Optimization helps you optimize send times for downstream behaviors that lead to revenue, rather than initial open rates. It takes into account that people today are much more likely to have many frequent bursts of activity around the clock. From analyzing past messaging activity, customer attributes, and site activity, AI identifies and optimizes send times for each customer to when they are most likely to deeply engage with your brand.