73% of shoppers use multiple channels throughout their shopping journeys. It’s common for people to end up on a website from a link they saw in an email or on Facebook. Or they may even see an online ad and end up visiting your brick-and-mortar store.
During their journeys, consumers may have many different interactions with your business. Your marketing strategy needs to be designed to bring all of those experiences together. Regardless of the channel they use, you need to ensure that you’re providing them with consistent information. You need to ensure that you’re giving them a seamless omnichannel experience.
What’s more, you need to reach out to your customers at the right times with the right messages on the right channels. For this, AI can be a complete game-changer.
How AI Can Improve Your Omnichannel Strategy
Creating an effective and positive omnichannel experience requires a lot of planning. To get it right, you also need the right technology at your fingertips. In this article, we will discuss different ways in which you can leverage AI like Conversion.ai to optimize your omnichannel strategy.
1. Understand Consumer Behavior and Preferences
For any marketing strategy to succeed, you need to first understand your consumer’s choices. You can cater to their needs only if you know what they are looking for.
You need to know what their budget is, which device they are using, what they are most likely to buy, and other such information.
With AI, you can easily find out this information about consumers. What’s more, you can get insights into their past purchase history. It can be instrumental in understanding their preferences.
You can use Cortex to make sense of your data and find new ways to engage your target audience and stay ahead of the trends. You can use it to conduct a market analysis to determine how you can stand out from your competitors.
Using this data and information can help you build even more nuanced customer personas with insight into what visuals and messaging cause them to buy. That’s the first step to building a solid omnichannel marketing strategy.
2. Provide Targeted Messages
By leveraging AI, you can use Big Data to drive sales for your business. With AI, you can learn about consumer behavior and make recommendations based on it.
For instance, say a customer searches for or reads an article on trekking shoes on your website. That indicates that they are interested in them. To guide them towards the next stage of the sales funnel, you need to market what they are looking for to them. You could showcase Facebook or Instagram ads to them related to trekking shoes.
In such a case, you are actually sending them targeted ads or messages based on their actions on another channel.
3. Drive Sales
Chatbots are a great way to provide instant customer service. They are like diligent employees who work 24×7 to ensure your customers are always happy. Even when you aren’t online, a chatbot can tackle all of your customers’ questions with ease.
That’s just one of the benefits of using chatbots. Intelligent AI-powered chatbots can also be used to boost your sales and revenue.
For example, a social media chatbot can display relevant products as well. It can help customers find what they are looking for and answer questions about the particular product.
It can showcase details like features and price to help customers make an informed choice. Along with it, chatbots can also send customers a link to the product page.
Essentially, the social media chatbot will redirect customers to the website where they can purchase the product.
General Motors uses Aivo’s AgentBot on their websites in Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, and Chile. The key function of Chevy, their chatbot, is to generate new leads through a quote form.
Whenever a customer shows interest in a particular product, Chevy can recognize their purchase intent. So, it sends them the quote form.
When the prospects complete their information, the bot directly sends it to the CRM. It is designed to handle all interested users with a proactive approach so that they can get responses in real-time.
4. Simplify Retail Shopping Experience
When it comes to AI, it’s applications on the web are what most marketers look at. But there’s more to it than that. You can even use AI to simplify your retail shopping experience.
Imagine you walk into a store, grab some groceries, and head out without having to wait in a queue to pay your bill. With AI, it’s possible to provide such convenience.
That’s exactly how Amazon Go stores are enabling self-service with the help of AI. With their “Just Walk Out” technology, customers don’t need to spend time at checkout or waiting in lines.
As customers enter the store, they need to open the app for Amazon Go. While they are shopping in the store, they track the offline activity of customers using computer vision and deep learning algorithms.
Any item that they grab while shopping is added to their Amazon virtual card automatically. Using RGB cameras, infrared sensors, and other advanced technology, they are able to trace a customer’s digital footprint.
If a person puts back any product on the shelf, it’s directly removed from the shopping list on the virtual card. When the system isn’t able to identify any product, they check the customer’s previous purchase history.
It’s a highly advanced technology that shows us the true potential of using AI to optimize omnichannel strategies. In the coming years, Amazon aims to open up 20,000 such stores to transform the retail shopping experience.
Image via Amazon
Conclusion
Reaching out to customers on multiple platforms is no longer an option, it’s a necessity. After all, customers move from one platform to another while shopping. On all channels, your customers deserve a seamless and convenient shopping experience.
AI can open up a host of new opportunities for omnichannel marketing. If you want to stay at the top of your game, you should consider leveraging AI to optimize your omnichannel strategy. So, what are you waiting for? It’s time to hop on this hot trend.
7 Types of Virtual Events: What They Are Used For