Search for the “AI marketing” keyword and Google will deliver over a billion search results. Most of them will emphasize different use cases from content optimization to customer modeling. All of these are excellent examples of AI’s functionality, but how do you pick the right one?

To put AI into a business-oriented perspective, marketers should focus on the goals they want to achieve. Today, there are three key opportunities marketers should consider using AI for: customer acquisition, user engagement and their retention.

AI for Growth

Customer acquisition is never easy. Direct to consumer and e-commerce brands are pouring millions of dollars into their digital acquisition campaigns every day. But how do they ensure that the right customers are being acquired? What is it exactly that determines whether a prospect will convert?

AI helps marketers tackle such challenges by providing deep customer understanding

far beyond the level of demographics. An AI- powered Customer Modeling Platform examines historic customer behaviors and combines them with thousands of data points about each customer to provide marketers with the universal understanding of the drivers behind that customer behavior.

Run your customer data through AI and you may learn that one of your product categories interests only consumers with higher income, living in suburban areas. Or you may learn that your highest Life-Time-Value (LTV) customers can be defined by a set of unique personality traits and, therefore, they have responded well to your specific messaging that resonates with that trait.

Having such insights into their existing customers, marketers are able not only to adjust their campaign targeting but most importantly their content as well. Matching content to audiences that are generated from such deep AI-driven insights allows them to grow with lower costs per acquisition (CPA), higher return on ad spend (ROAS) and more desirable end customer traits.

AI for Engagement

Now, when you have your consumer base growing steadily, how do you keep them engaged? With consumers tending to ignore marketing emails and inundated with social media ads served by ever evolving algorithms how do you make sure you are able to maintain high levels of engagement and repeat purchase?

Personalization has been the answer to the above questions for the past ten years. As a result, all your brand’s competitors are personalizing their campaigns the same way you do. However, rarely anything beyond hyper-targeting is considered when thinking about personalization.

AI helps marketers stand out by individualizing their campaign content. By using a Customer Modeling Platform to learn who your customers are, you will be able to leverage the so-called Communication Archetypes to individualize your content.

With the help of AI, you may learn that the dominant group of your customers are analytical, balanced and independent, and can be defined by the Reliable Plan Maker Archetype.

However, you may also notice that your customers with the highest average order value fall outside the dominant group and are defined as Experimental Fun Seekers, people who tend to be high in energy and positivity and eager to explore new things.

Provided with such AI-generated insights, marketers are able to review their customer segmentation, campaign messaging and creatives, and adjust them to their customers’ needs. Such insights enable marketers to bring their campaign personalization to the individual level by matching words, images and videos to resonate with each of your customers best.

AI for Retention

An AI-powered Customer Modeling Platform helps marketers model their customer data in many different ways, including for the purpose of managing customer retention.

Quite often it is difficult for direct to consumer marketers to manage retention due to a few different reasons. Sometimes there is simply not enough data to understand the drivers behind customer behavior. In other examples, the way CRM teams approach their data might be preventing them from individual level scoring and subsequent downstream marketing automation.

In such scenarios, AI can be used to build emotionally intelligent churn models identifying customers with a higher risk of stopping to use the service in a set period of time as well as recommend the best curative action.

For some businesses, such as subscription services, AI modeling might even be vital when the customer acquisition cost is more expensive than what they pay when they order for the first time.

How to Start Using AI for Growth, Engagement or Retention?

To start with, you may explore a more detailed checklist that provides some step-by-step guidance on how to use AI for different business goals in the Marketer’s Artificial Intelligence Playbook.

However, the quickest and easiest way to accelerate your company’s AI adoption is to start a free trial of the Genus AI Growth Platform, which is capable of modeling your customers, scoring your campaign content and providing guidance on how to engage your customers in an emotionally intelligent way.