What’s in this article:
- Artificial intelligence technology can also help you make improvements to your team’s overall processes—in turn allowing you to establish stronger relationships with your customers
- Since your AI-backed tools know your customers almost as well as they know themselves, catering to their specific needs becomes much easier
- AI based data-analysis tools are better equipped to collect and assess data objectively—and from multiple angles
Relationship marketing is all about going beyond simple transactions to forge authentic, valuable connections with your individual customers.
To get relationship marketing right, you need to have a clear idea of who your individual customers are, and what they want from your brand. This means thinking about their unique needs, personalities, and lifestyles in order to provide a valuable experience to each one of them.
Of course, as your audience grows, it gets pretty difficult to forge such tight-knit relationships with every one of your customers.
For one thing, it’s nearly impossible to engage in one-to-one conversations with each individual customer. Digging through customer feedback and other data also becomes more time- and resource-consuming as your audience grows. And, as your base becomes more diverse, it becomes harder and harder to make improvements that benefit everyone.
Fortunately, AI is here to help—in a number of ways.
In this article, we’ll dig into five key ways you can use artificial intelligence technology to supercharge your relationship marketing initiatives—and optimize the value you bring to your customers.
Before we dive in, though, we do need to clarify one thing…
A Quick Note on Relationship Marketing, AI, and Authenticity
In an ideal world, retailers really would be able to form truly authentic, one-to-one relationships with each of their customers.
But again:
That’s just not realistic—which is where AI comes into play.
Still, the argument can always be made that using AI to forge “authentic” relationships with your customers is a bit of a paradox.
The thing is:
The goal of relationship marketing is to deliver optimal, individualized value to your customers whenever they engage with your brand.
It’s all about building customer intimacy.
To that end, it doesn’t matter whether this valuable experience is provided by a member of your team or by artificial intelligence owned by your team. As long as your customers get what they need from your brand, whenever they engage with you…well, that’s really all they’ll care about.
5 Key Ways AI Can Supercharge Your Relationship Marketing Efforts
With the above in mind, let’s take a look at five aspects of relationship marketing that can be enhanced through the use of artificial intelligence technology.
Improved Lead Identification, Scoring, and Segmenting
All retailers know how involved the lead-generation process is.
In short, your marketing and sales teams have to:
- Identify prospects and learn about their personality, needs, and behaviors
- Gauge the chances of their becoming a paying customer
- Put them on the right track to get them to convert—and to start providing value to them
…and this is on top of all their other duties.
Needless to say, your teams need all the help they can get, here.
Luckily, there are a number of AI-based tools that can accomplish these tasks automatically.
A few examples:
- Leadberry crawls various social media platforms for supplemental info on website visitors and mailing list subscribers. The tool then scores incoming leads using your fleshed-out customer personas for reference.
- Conversica offers an AI-powered chatbot tool that engages with leads via website or social media to collect customer information and gauge their interest in your brand.
- Optimove provides predictive micro-segmentation technology, allowing your team to quickly place incoming leads into the right sales funnels from the get-go.
With AI at the helm, your teams won’t have to spend countless hours engaging with (and digging up information on) new leads just to see if they’re a good fit for your brand.
Instead, your AI-based tools will hand over your qualified leads on a silver platter. In turn, your team can quickly dive in and start delivering value to your nearly converted prospects immediately.
(And, as we’ll discuss, your team will be more free to serve those they engage with, as well.)
How does this benefit your business?
According to MarketingProfs, businesses that implement AI into their lead-gen processes see 59% better close rates, 58% higher revenues, and 52% higher conversion rates.
Those stats alone should tell you what you already know:
AI has become essential technology for supercharging your relationship marketing initiatives.
Enhanced Data Collection and Social Listening
We’ve said it before:
By today’s standards, data is everywhere—and should be at the center of everything your marketing and sales teams do.
But, with the amount of data flowing through your organization (and your industry) at all times, it’s nearly impossible to keep up with it all.
Of course, it’s this data that allows you to improve your relationship marketing efforts in the first place. Without this data in-hand, you just won’t be able to provide the experiences your customers expect from your brand.
This is another key reason that AI technology is so vital.
For one thing, AI-based data collection tools are second to none when it comes to cleansing, organizing, and delivering data to your teams. Instead of spending countless hours ensuring your data is comprehensive and comprehensible, your teams can simply dig in and start making sense of it.
Backing up a bit, many data collection tools also use AI to seek out mentions of your brand throughout the web. In addition to text-based social mentions, these AI-powered tools can identify when terms and phrases are used in multimedia content, as well.
More than just collecting this data, artificial intelligence can also analyze it. As we’ve discussed in detail before, companies like Stitch Fix have used AI to assess customer feedback on an individual level—allowing the team to give each of their customers exactly what they’re looking for each time they engage with them.
Speaking of that…
Agile Hyper-Personalization
The main reason we collect and analyze all the data we just mentioned is so we can better serve our customers in some way.
When it comes to the individual customer, this means focusing on hyper-personalization.
To be sure, the modern consumer expects a “typical” personalized experience from the brands they engage with. They expect the basics: product recommendations based on purchase history, sales and promotions that matter to them…all those things that were pretty revolutionary a decade or so ago.
Hyper-personalization goes well beyond showcasing different items “people also bought” to different customers on the same product page. Hyper-personalization is about contextualizing your customers’ individual engagements with your brand and delivering exactly what they’re looking for at any given moment.
Are product recommendations a part of it? Absolutely.
But hyper-personalization also considers the customer’s behavior, as well as the timing of the engagement, in order to deliver the optimal offer, content, or message.
For example, Limespot’s AI-based software helps ecommerce companies deliver:
- Relevant and valuable content via multiple channels
- Laser-focused product recommendations
- Unique digital merchandising experiences
…all tailored to the individual customer’s needs and expectations.
This all but ensures every engagement goes exactly as the customer had hoped—or better. Since your AI-backed tools know your customers almost as well as they know themselves, catering to their specific needs becomes just that much easier.
See? As it turns out, you can strengthen your relationship with your customers without actually engaging with them.
Navigable Self-Service
Ironically, giving your customers the ability to serve themselves can strengthen their relationship with your brand.
In fact, 50% of millennials view self-service as a key premise of the brands they do business with. These individuals actively seek out companies that offer self-service options in a variety of areas—and typically avoid those that do not.
At any rate, the goal of offering self-service options is to give your customer more control over their experience—especially when they’re facing a problem.
As expected, artificial intelligence technology can help optimize your audience’s self-service experience in a number of ways.
One simple example: Tools such as SearchBlox’s SmartSuggest use AI tech to enable autofill within the search function of your website.
This leads to more focused and relevant product searches—which will lead to more conversions for your business.
You can also apply this technology to your knowledge base, as well. The less time your customers have to spend looking for the solution to their problems, the more time they can spend solving it.
Another key area of self-service in which AI is huge: Chatbots.
With the help of AI-powered on-site chatbots, your customers will be able to:
- Resolve minor issues with ease
- Discover content to guide them through a new process
- Connect with a human member of tech support member, should the need arise – without having to wait for opening hours
On the backend, your chatbot will have been collecting data on your customer’s issues the entire time. This allows your support staff to jump right in whenever needed to help the customer find their way.
When it comes down to it, your customers just want their problems to get solved. Whether your AI-powered technology helped along the way or took care of the entire issue altogether is a moot point.
In either case, it will leave your customers with a positive outlook on your brand.
Continuous Improvement of Processes
Artificial intelligence technology can also help you make improvements to your team’s overall processes—in turn allowing you to establish stronger relationships with your customers.
It all goes back to being data-driven:
- Collecting as much information from as many sources as possible
- Cleansing, organizing, and prioritizing this data
- Using the data to make meaningful improvements to all areas of operations—specifically involving customer engagements
As we said earlier, AI takes the menial and time-consuming work off your team’s shoulders—and provides immediate results, too.
More than that, the AI-based data-analysis tools we’ve discussed are better equipped to collect and assess data objectively—and from multiple angles, as well. This allows for previously unnoticed data patterns and relationships to emerge, potentially leading to major breakthroughs for your team.
So, it’s not just that AI helps you better serve your customers during individual engagements—though that certainly is true. On top of that, artificial intelligence technology helps your team become better equipped to serve your customers at all times.
When your customers know they can always get top value from your brand, your relationship will become stronger than ever. With AI strengthening these relationships at every touchpoint—at minimal cost to your business—you’ll easily become a driving force in your industry.