Revolutionize Customer Engagement With AI Personalization

TL;DR:

• AI personalization involves using AI tools to create highly personalized experiences for narrow audience segments or even individual customers.
• There are several ways you can engage customers using AI personalization, including by making tailored recommendations in real time, utilizing predictive recommendation engines, and creating highly targeted marketing messages.
• AI personalization tools rely on personal data from customers — discover how Jebbit helped sporting goods retailer ASICS gather this data while engaging its customers with a fun survey.
• When implementing AI personalization, it’s critical to follow best practices to maintain data privacy to ensure the ethical use of both data and AI tools.

Artificial intelligence is taking the world by storm — and smart marketers are paying attention. After all, AI personalization stands to drive revolutionary change in the way businesses interact with their customers.

Think about it this way: Marketers have long dreamt of the ability to market on a one-to-one basis. However, the reality is that when your business brings in hundreds of thousands or even millions of customers, it’s impossible to interact with each individual. 

AI has the potential to change that. Imagine a future in which customers can interact with chatbots for real-time product recommendations, or where marketers can create individually tailored emails for thousands of customers with just a few clicks.

Some of these AI-driven technologies are already a reality — and others are on the way. That’s why we’re going to explore not only the transformative potential of AI-powered personalization but also the ways you can start putting it to work today.

What Is AI Personalization?

AI personalization involves using generative AI or predictive AI to create real-time personalized experiences that build customer engagement. While there are different ways to leverage AI-driven personalization, all of the tools and techniques that you can use share one thing in common: Each requires customer data in order to create a tailored experience. 

At a minimum, you’ll need the browsing and purchase history of your customers. Additionally, you can bolster your AI personalization efforts with data from social media interactions, as well as from interactive experiences like surveys and quizzes.

How Can You Leverage AI Personalization?

To market effectively, most of today’s marketers rely on audience segmentation to create highly relevant messages for specific groups of people. However, the problem with people is that they’re hard to group. Once you go beyond demographics into things like customer needs, wants, values, and interests, you’ll find that each individual is unique. Unfortunately for marketers, it would take far too much time and effort to create millions of “segments of one.” 

With AI, however, it’s a whole different story. ChatGPT, for example, gets more than 10 million queries per day — and produces an individualized response for each. With that kind of ability, you can leverage any of the AI personalization techniques below to produce truly unique results for individual consumers.

Deliver Real-Time Tailored Experiences

Today’s AI tools are often touted as personal assistants designed to help people get things done more efficiently. When you look at this from the perspective of a marketer, it’s easy to see how one could use this technology to create an AI-powered personal shopping assistant capable of delivering real-time tailored experiences to thousands of individual customers.

Take AI chatbots as an example. Non-AI chatbots have been around for a while — and in many cases, they’re just not that helpful since they only give canned responses based on predefined rulesets. AI flips the script — literally. With the current advancements in AI technology, today’s chatbots can understand what the customer is saying and deliver a human-like response that meets each customer’s needs. 

In other words, you can train AI-powered chatbots with information about your products, store policies, or other details that customers might need to know — and then the chatbot can actually hold a conversation with each customer, learning more about that customer’s individual preferences and needs so it can provide the exact product or information they’re seeking. The end result is a digital experience that can drastically increase customer satisfaction by making shopping, customer support, or even tech support simple.

Predict Customer Needs

With predictive AI, it’s possible to create product recommendation engines (also sometimes called recommendation systems) capable of improving the user experience by helping shoppers find products or services they might not have discovered on their own. This type of system relies on machine learning algorithms plus vast datasets. 

What kind of data? Purchase histories, browsing information, customer feedback, customer preferences, user behavior, demographic characteristics, and more can all be used to help predictive AI create real-time personalized product recommendations.

In fact, you can take things a step further and use data collected from surveys and quizzes to supercharge your data. That’s what ASICS did with their OneASICS survey that they created with Jebbit. This is a simple survey that asks a few questions about customer preferences — and the results have proved to be fantastic. Since partnering with Jebbit to create interactive experiences, ASICS has seen a 90% completion rate and a 70% website redirect rate.

In terms of enriching data? This campaign has collected an average 21.5 data points per profile. If you’re interested in developing your own AI-powered recommendation engine, that’s a huge amount of information that you could add to your data pool.

Create Highly Targeted Marketing Campaigns

The customer journey is full of so many different touchpoints. To make matters more complicated, each of your audience segments will have a slightly different journey. Complexities like these make content personalization difficult in the best of times. If you’re trying to create relevant content for super narrow segments, the task may seem insurmountable — and if you wanted to tailor messaging to the individual user, you’d need an army of marketers.

AI has the potential to become that army of marketers, at least in part. With it, you can leverage vast amounts of data to automate the segmentation process, allowing you to create ultra-narrow audience segments much quicker and easier than you would via traditional methods. From there, marketers can turn toward natural language processing models and other types of generative AI to craft text, images, video, and more — all to suit fine-tuned segments.

4 Best Practices for AI Personalization

Brands are rushing to adopt AI for personalization as well as for a variety of other tasks. However, despite all the excitement, it’s crucial to not lose sight of important considerations like data privacy, ethics, or the practical realities of using AI in a business setting. As you explore AI personalization, keep the four best practices below in mind. 

1. Maintain Data Privacy and Integrity

You’ve been using data to drive your marketing all along (or at least, you should be), and with that, you’re probably also aware that it’s crucial to maintain compliance with data privacy regulations. Not only is this an important way to maintain customer trust, but — well, in many areas, it’s also the law! For example, the European Union has the General Data Protection Regulation law, and in the United States, the California Consumer Privacy Act is similar. These laws give consumers various rights, like the right to know what information you’re collecting, the ability to request deletion of that information, or the ability to opt out of the sale of their information.

If you’re leveraging AI to process data, the same rules and ethics will apply. You’ll need to keep abreast of the latest data privacy regulations both to maintain compliance with the laws and to boost trust in your company among consumers.

Beyond that, it’s also important to maintain data integrity. This means you should do the following:

• Create a single source of truth to break down silos between departments and datasets.
• Maintain regular backups to preserve data in the event of IT issues or cyberattacks.
• Validate data regularly to correct errors and remove outdated information.
• Remember that old data can be just as bad as no data — and be sure to optimize, fill in gaps, and update with fresh data.
• Maintain tight access control to ensure that only approved users and systems can access sensitive data.

2. Be on the Lookout for Bias

Today’s AI is lauded for possessing the capability to provide human-like interactions — and just like humans, AIs are susceptible to bias. Preventing biases requires a twofold approach.

First, take care with the AI’s training data. The data itself may contain biases — and if you aren’t careful, you can inadvertently train the AI to perpetuate those biases.

Second, since biases can be hard to spot in the training data, make it a practice to continually monitor and adjust AI algorithms and their outputs. This will help you spot biases — then take steps to eradicate them. 

3. Set Realistic Expectations

There’s no denying that there is a lot of hype surrounding AI right now, plus a ton of excitement for what the future will bring. It’s easy to fall into the trap of setting your expectations too high. Do AI tools stand ready to make much of the work of marketing easier? Yes! But will you be able to automate the entirety of your marketing activities? Probably not — at least, not anytime soon.

That’s the big thing to remember: AI can help you create more personalized experiences, and it can also help you automate bulky, repetitive tasks. However, at the end of the day, marketing will still need to have a human touch. 

For starters, AI is known to make mistakes — and that’s why its outputs should be monitored, particularly if you’re using AI for personalization across multiple channels. Getting human eyes on the outputs is the only reliable way to ensure that your messaging is factual, relevant, and on-brand.

Speaking of on-brand: You can train AI to use your brand’s voice and style for text, images, and more. But here again it’s crucial to remember that AI isn’t infallible. No matter how you handle content production, you’ll still need people to look over the final product before publishing. It’s the only way to ensure consistency across multiple campaigns and multiple channels.

AI also lacks that fundamental spark of human creativity. Use it to automate — and therefore to give your creative team more time for creativity. AI won’t be thinking up the next brilliant viral marketing campaign for your brand, but it can give your marketers more time to get inspired.

4. Keep Your Team Trained

Technology moves fast — and AI is one of the fastest-growing tech sectors out there right now. Not only does that mean that you’ll have to put in some work to stay on top of the latest trends and advancements, but also that you should invest in training and continuous learning opportunities to keep your team up to date. 

• Educate your team on proper data collection and handling — and be sure to include education on ethical practices and privacy.
• Show team members how to spot and mitigate biases in AI.
• When implementing new AI tools (or when hiring new team members), avoid the sink-or-swim approach and instead invest in training to show your team how they can get the most from these tools.

Gather the Data You Need for AI Personalization With Jebbit

The transformative power of AI means big things for marketers who are working hard to create better and better customer experiences. Your AI personalization strategy could include real-time tailored content and recommendations, a predictive recommendation engine, or a system that allows you to develop messaging for highly targeted audience segments. 

No matter how you choose to implement AI, each of these use cases share one thing in common: You’ll need data.

That’s where Jebbit can help. Add Jebbit’s quizzes, surveys, and other interactive experiences to your marketing strategy to not only engage your customers but to gather the kind of data you need most for your AI personalization tools.

Ready to get started? Schedule a strategy call with a Jebbit Experience expert today.