Tag: chatbots

The potential of AI in personalising festive shopping experiences

Change is the only constant in life and nowhere is the more evident example than the marketing industry undergoing a significant transformation. The introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI like ChatGPT, has provided marketing teams with several options to reach out to their customers. With festival season approaching the Indian subcontinent, brands are all set to make the most of AI technologies and maximise their sales; they allow customers to immerse themselves in personalised shopping experiences by anticipating what they want to buy before making their own decisions. Moreover, AI along with machine learning and deep learning goes beyond conventional personalisation and produces relevant and customised ads for specific customers.

Considering the diverse implementations of AI in marketing, Statista conducted a marketers’ survey in India in 2023. Approximately 42 per cent of respondents revealed that their organisation is now in the trial phase of implementing AI into their marketing strategies. In contrast, over 9% of them stated that their companies have fully integrated these modern technologies into their marketing strategies. This increase in numbers reflects the numerous benefits of AI, including data-driven customisation, precision targeting, return on ad spend (ROAS), and so on.

Data-driven personalisation

The increasing popularity of artificial intelligence over the last two-three years has brought about a revolutionary shift in conventional marketing processes. The concept of personalisation has gone old with hyper-personalisation gaining momentum. By employing real-time data to deliver contextually relevant information, hyper-personalisation delivers more real-time and individualised experiences.

Personalisation is the activity of gathering customer data, analysing their preferences and behaviour and providing personalised experiences. On the other hand, Hyper-personalisation provides tailored information based on the customer’s present context, geographic location and even time. As a result, consumers are enjoying their shopping experiences both in-store and online. Based on the InMobi research, 83 per cent of Indian customers raised their shopping budget in 2023, indicating their satisfaction with improved marketing strategies.

Gen AI conversational chatbots

While traditional chatbots provide one-way communication leading to a monotonous shopping experience, generative AI chatbots assist brands in performing two-way communication with customers. For instance, a customer wants to purchase a t-shirt online. A standard chatbot might not understand the customer’s requirement for t-shirts with a “V-neck” or “round neck.” However, a Gen-AI bot can recognise it and will precisely present the buyer with relatable t-shirts. This means that the customers can ask direct queries and receive appropriate options, making conversational commerce a go-to option for customers.

Precision targeting

Companies may now get unparalleled insight into the complexities of consumer behaviour and preferences by leveraging the power of artificial intelligence. This comprehensive data enables the construction of highly targeted marketing strategies that appeal to certain audience segments. For instance, Google provides tools and insights to help marketers identify customers, measure success and modify their approaches in real-time. Companies may use Google Ads to acquire new consumers during peak hours by setting a new customer acquisition objective for performance max and search campaigns.

Enhanced return on ad spend (ROAS)

A smart marketing ROAS employs powerful machine learning algorithms to evaluate a company’s marketing actions and outcomes. By comparing current and previous efforts, AI delivers a full picture of their performance. In addition, with the implementation of AI, creative marketing techniques are identified based on enormous volumes of data, like marketing reports, industry trends and customer behaviour patterns. This becomes extremely useful for the brands during the peak festival season.

Conclusion

AI in marketing is not just the latest buzzword but rather a disruptive force. By adopting AI in marketing, companies can gain benefits with more personalised, efficient and successful campaigns. This, in turn, helps in substantially improving consumer experiences and achieving better outcomes. The impending festive season in India will provide several possibilities for marketers to boost brand value and sales. Companies may use generative AI and hyper-personalisation to transform client interactions and achieve success in a variety of industries, including e-commerce, grocery, and fashion. However, it is critical to note that, while AI may assist businesses with data-driven insights, it cannot replace the amount of human creativity and intuition required for effective marketing efforts.

The article has been authored by ETML co-founder & COO Amitek Sinha.

September 14, 2024
GUEST COLUMN: Is AI a threat to digital marketing industry in terms of employment?

Mumbai: Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been one of the celebrated buzzwords of all time across various industries. It has been answering a lot of questions and taking humankind to new places, quite literally, with customer service like chatbots and autopilot driving machines.

With people adopting the digital way of living, brands aggressively engage with digital technologies and innovation to propel their marketing efforts. AI is disrupting nearly every digital experience and has altered the way consumers interact with services.

The deployability of AI-led technologies and the difference it has brought in achieving customer satisfaction is now posing a serious threat to digital marketers. With AI’s agility, it is normal for marketers to be a little insecure. However, the day when AI takes over digital marketing jobs is still years away. On the contrary, automation creates more opportunities than it is killing, with vacancies for AI coders and AI software handlers.

Seven in 10 marketers claim to have a comprehensive AI strategy. Undoubtedly, organisations have found various machine learning applications that can benefit marketing endeavours.

Customer service chatbots are one of the everyday uses of AI. It allows brands and businesses to offer 24/7 service to their customers and address basic queries. AI gives advertisers an edge by offering a tailormade digital advertising experience. and allows advertisers to acquire factual information for customer profiling such as age, gender, geographies and behaviours. This data further will enable marketers to create effective ads.

AI technologies such as Augmented and Virtual Reality are also stealing the limelight by the way they are revamping the online shopping experience.

Marketing professionals are also aligning Artificial Intelligence towards marketing content creation. With stacks of data accumulated by AI, marketers can easily decide on the content that will drive engagement. AI has been efficient in predictive analysis, allowing marketers to identify potential customers and strategies that will yield better results.

Despite the significant advancement witnessed by AI, there are still some aspects that consistently need human intervention and expertise.

Creative quotient: No matter how advanced, machines are still lagging in keeping pace with the human brain. Creative problem solving, music creation, painting landscapes, photo and video editing remain a few aspects where AI fails to perform. On the other hand, AI has been bringing a revolution in cutting down repetitive tasks such as creating customer profiles, sending personalised messages and scheduling.

Decision-making: AI is adept at assisting humans but can’t have the final say. It requires a considerate amount of critical thinking and analysis to govern any marketing action. AI is crucial for acquiring data but cannot strategise or develop a plan on its own.

The human touch: AI has proven effective at answering all the questions hurled at it by customers, but AI cannot build customer relationships due to the lack of emotional connection. The responses provided by AI-powered chatbots are restricted to their programming, whereas humans share similar experiences with other people, which forms a sense of relatability and understanding.

AI is dependent on humans: AI is a technology developed by humans and cannot function independently. Therefore, it is dependent on humans to be programmed and be successful at performing a task. In addition, AI machines need to be upgraded as per the market’s changing landscape, which again requires human expertise.

AI may still not be powerful enough to take up creative jobs, but it definitely eliminates a lot of human intervention from monotonous and routine jobs. As a result, businesses have been quick to deploy automation to boost productivity and mitigate the costs of resources.

(About Author – Sahil Chopra is iCubesWire founder and CEO)

March 10, 2022
Guest column: How chat-based ads are winning the marketing race

‘You talking to me?’

The famous line of Travis Bickle, a lonely taxi driver in Martin Scorsese’s iconic film Taxi Driver, is known to cinephiles all over the world. In the world of advertising these days, this line is often being repeated by customers, thanks to the prominent rise of chat-based ads as the most effective medium of communication in the millennial world.

Creating compelling brand engagements has become the need of the hour for brands today. While the digital world has opened up numerous possibilities for advertisers all over the world, this very same abundance of options is also driving them crazy. Brands are trying to create the optimum communication mix by employing multiple channels such as print, radio, TVCs, video ads, social media engagement etc. to connect better with their consumer bases and gain insights to help their marketing efforts. However, understanding the millennial customer’s mind with non-personalised advertising tools is like walking into a labyrinth with general directions, rather than a customised map. While the former will only result in you losing your way as you move further, a map, as is the case with chat-based ads, will ensure that you are able to navigate, control, and conquer it.

Chat-based vs. Video ads: Identifying the perfect ad mechanism for the millennial mind

Imagine this: globally, the average consumer is exposed to 4,000-10,000 brands per day, with 56 per cent of digital ads and 86 per cent of TV ads not being seen – even once! In this era of over-saturation, the only way to keep your brand thriving is to shun the volume-driven approach and create personalised, engaging advertising efforts that make users an essential part of your brand’s conversation. This is where chat-based ads are most suited, for they do not inform, but engage users through a two-way communication. As chat-based ads are driven by the inputs of the users, there is no predefined message or conclusion and the chat ad takes a route as driven by the conversation. At one to two minutes, the user engagement on chats is also much higher when compared to the sub-10 seconds worth of engagement that video ads deliver. Even with the rapidly growing proliferation of social media, and its share of video-based content, in our lives, theengagement rate of 75 per centon personalised chatbot-based ads is much higher than the measly 10 per cent of audience interactions that video-based ads manage.

While video ads today offer an edgier style that also has a call-to-action embedded in the form of a link to the brand’s homepage, it can never be a help in the fundamental process of decision-making due to its inherent opacity. Chat-based ads, on the other hand, engage customers by distilling the rigid process of advertising into a simple and personal conversation. Perhaps, this is the reason why 90 per cent of users are reported to give a positive feedback to chat-based conversations, as compared to 45 per cent affirmative responses received by video ads.

Furthermore, the recent technological developments in the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence have made it possible for chat-based ads to offer remarkably authentic conversational experience, while simultaneously collating data and solving a user’s problem. For business purposes, chatbot creators like us have developed numerous solutions that help organisations to conduct initial communication with customers. These chatbots then store the data, thus obtained, and analyse it. The information collated by chatbots presents a rich data source that enriches future conversations by human agents, invariably culminating in positive end-results for the business. In fact, 40 per cent of chat-initiated communication efforts result in task completion, a number that in videos still hovers at 10 per cent.

Apart from the fact that it creates highly personalised experiences for the user, the alternative possibilities with chatbots, as opposed to video ads, is endless. Chat-based solutions are being used the world over to tackle a diverse range of problems, from helping out cyber harassment victims report incidents and file complaints to helping insomniacs get through the night without having to go through multiple re-readings of old WhatsApp conversations! For instance, Endurance, a chatbot specifically designed for dementia patients, apart from being a conversational companion to the users suffering from the ailment, also identifies deviations in conversational branches indicative of a problem with immediate recollection – quite a technical achievement for a natural language processing-based system.

Every era has a generation-defining advertising medium that is preferred by consumers. The post-World War eras saw the epic rise of print-based ads, which was followed by the complete dominance of radio and TVCs. At the onset of the digital era, video ads and content ruled the roost. As the era of smartphones reaches its peak, it still hangs on to the throne. But chat-based ads, with their personalised, flexible, deeply engaging, and highly-efficient approach, are quietly making their way to the top, one conversation at a time.

The author is the co-founder and CEO ofHaptik. The opinions expressed here are his own and Indiantelevision.com may not subscribe to them.

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