Personalise or Perish: How AI-led personalisation can be a powerful marketer’s tool for unmatched customer experience

This article first appeared in MARKETING Weekender Issue 357

By Pavan Sondur, Co-founder and CEO and Prashant Kumar, CTO, Unbxd

Nobody wants to be just another face in the crowd. Brands want to stand out, individualise themselves and be one in a million. The ones that successfully crack this code can effectively amplify their sales manifold and, in fact eventually become an extension of their customer’s personalities.

Personalisation empowers your brand to treat every customer as a unique individual unto himself and not as a cog in the larger machine of users, accounts, or prospects.

Therefore, personalisation marketing strategies junk the old batch-and-blast methods and replace them with marketing communications that immediately strike a note and establish the brand’s relevance in the customer’s life.

Of course, such marketing leapfrogs can only be driven by technological advancements like AI, ML and data analytics that permit B2B and B2C businesses to create customised experiences via smart targeting solutions. Thanks to this data-driven approach, firms can now extract key insights that can be utilised to strengthen personalised experience and boost conversion rates.

In fact, personalisation is now a standard gadget in the marketing toolbox of any modern-age marketing firm and any company that is not leveraging it only stands to lose market share in the coming years. No surprise then that, as per Netcore Cloud’s Ecommerce Personalization Benchmark Report 2021, personalisation increases the conversion by 45% for retailers and has reduced the abandonment rate to 46% from 60%.

What does the future hold?

The writing on the wall is clear: A new brand without the guiding light of personalisation will find itself lost in the thicket of modern consumer behaviour, bogged down by the complexity of the marketplace and in fear of competitors eroding its market share. Au contraire, companies that adopt a hyper-personalisation approach can leverage their customer data to ensure higher conversions, better brand recollection and inflated customer satisfaction levels.

A result case which validates this study is how Indian multinational educational technology company, BYJU’S achieved a whopping 1/3rd increase in feature discovery and adoption using SaaS Company, Netcore Cloud’s no-code Product Experience platform.

By its very nature, traditional marketing lacks the ability to compute different data points that present a better understanding of customer behaviour at scale. Our study indicates, AI-driven personalisation has been so impactful that 71% retailers have seen at least 4x ROI on personalisation and that 91% shoppers would abandon their journey with little to no AI-driven personalisation.

The final word: There is no marketing without the effort to understand the person behind the purchase.

Brands that get this right continue to pivot while the others eventually perish. While its important to personalize, it is also important to get it right without seeming intrusive. Success in this area assured unbeatable brand loyalty as a result reduction of customer acquisition costs and a clear increase in retention rates, revenues, and the efficiency of marketing spends.

Today, entrepreneurial initiatives are divided into two camps: In the first camp are those who put all their faith in the jaded application of traditional marketing tools, which have diminishing returns and marginal utility. The second camp is populated by those who are waking up to the transformative powers of AI-powered personalisation and scaling it across their channels and customer touchpoints in tandem with traditional marketing.

Going forward, it is the firms in the second camp, those that are actively deploying personalisation capabilities that will be witnessing first-hand the wonders it can work for their business.