As we take a temperature check on the current state of promotions and targeted marketing, one fact becomes abundantly clear: without personalization, marketing efforts are simply not as successful. In fact, more than half of all customers expect some form of personalization in the offers they receive.
In an era where consumer data protection is driving the conversation about how brands can gather and deploy their personalization efforts, it’s imperative that the methods used to identify high-intent audiences also take into account consumer privacy. The capabilities of artificial intelligence have evolved exponentially in the past ten years, providing an avenue for brands to compile, and make actionable, consumer data in ways that were previously unimaginable, while also factoring in the importance of audience privacy.
This new era of AI is manifesting itself twofold: first off, the technology surrounding AI in the promotions space is making those personalized offers more nuanced in a way that maximizes margins and focuses on audience intent. Second, the ways those personalization efforts can be deployed is reinventing aspects of the promotions strategy that haven’t evolved much over time.
Using AI to Personalize Promotions
While AI is integrating the promotional experience into these emerging platforms, it’s also influencing the foundation of promotions and targeting themselves. Artificial intelligence can be used to model consumer behavior in a way that identifies intent signals from consumers and delivers the most compelling offer, at the most compelling time, to drive sales.
RevTrax AI, for example, has been built up over the past ten years, refining millions of consumer interactions to create an infrastructure of data that can be harnessed to deploy personalized offers. By understanding consumer behavior, RevTrax AI can target both known and unknown audiences to deliver personalized discounts in a privacy-by-design framework.
The key to personalization in pricing and promotion lies in discount dependency. Instead of offering a wide base of customers a blanket offer, RevTrax AI can identify customers that may only need a small discount to drive a sale. Or, a customer may not need a discount at all. By understanding which customers are motivated by which price points, brands are able to tailor their personalization and discounting efforts in a way that doesn’t sacrifice margins; and this is just one of the many factors that drive RevTrax AI.
Deploying This New Class of AI to Intelligently Distribute Offers
Email has been a cornerstone of marketing outreach efforts for decades, yet over time it has become a vehicle for blanket offers that lack the nuance needed to maximize ROI. Too often the level of “personalization” that exists within marketing emails redounds to little more than placing a customer’s name in a subject line.
When AI is integrated into the structure of email campaigns, they become significantly more agile, offering customers intelligent offers built off of the same framework that guides other RevTrax personalized promotion efforts. By implementing AI-Driven Email Offers, customers are given more dynamic discounting, populating unique offers specific to the customer when they open an email.
What this means for marketers is a better ROI. Instead of the rote method of blanketing one-size-fits-all offers to an entire email list, or even segment, personalization in offers is tailored to the unique discount dependency of the customer. Why give everyone a 50 percent off discount when certain customers can be motivated to click through, or buy, on a ten percent offer?
Adding AI to email provides the method of personalization that customers demand, without sacrificing margins. And, because these offers are personalized on a customer level, it removes the guesswork involved in A/B testing or the complicated task of detailed audience segmentation.
Artificial intelligence has come a long way, and will only serve to further personalization in pricing and promotion as time goes on. With new platforms, and new points of contact with consumers, brands are given access to wealths of data to influence offers, and new avenues to deliver those offers. With better AI, all sides of the promotional equation come out ahead.
For more information on how RevTrax AI can revolutionize personalization and pricing efforts, contact one of our experts today.