The impact of AI on mobile marketing

Why use AI?

Mobile is without doubt the marketing channel of the future. Τoday’s consumers are mobile-first, with over 6.3bn smartphone users around the globe, according to Statista. And brands are fast adopting mobile marketing strategies to reach them, using a variety of delivery channels. However, in order for success to come their way, quality consumer data is of great importance.

The introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) as a mobile marketing tool is enabling businesses to collect rich consumer data with much greater accuracy and use it to influence spending. While machine learning, a subset of AI, allows computerized applications to perform without much help or instructions from humans. Both AI and machine learning are making the mobile marketing arena more effective than ever.

Despite the effectiveness of mobile marketing with AI integration, it is important to point out that many businesses today don’t limit themselves to mobile-only strategies. They usually adopt an omnichannel strategy to meet their needs. Hence, mobile is used as part of a multichannel marketing strategy where each channel reinforces the other, helping businesses connect seamlessly with customers on a much deeper level.

No doubt, AI is changing the face of marketing across all industries, as we are quickly moving away from relying on human interaction alone to understand customers' needs.

Summing up the qualities of AI, these can be categorized as follows:

• Measurable – AI assists in automating the tedious work required for consumer data analysis. It also simplifies the task of finding and extracting data.
• Speedy – AI mines through large amounts of consumer data at high speed and identifies key customer characteristics, providing a much more personalized shopping experience.
• Effective – AI learns more about customer preferences over time, increasingly personalizing the user experience.

Benefits of AI to mobile marketers

As the above suggests, by applying AI to mobile marketing strategies, brands can benefit in several ways. So, let’s examine how in more depth.

1. Improved relevance & personalization

It is time for mobile marketers to take the guesswork out of their strategies. It is time to stop investing tons of time in pulling data, segmenting customers and trying to understand what messages are better for each segment. With the help of AI, they are able to deliver more targeted and personalized marketing messages and make effective predictions with extreme accuracy.

By spotting consumers' behavioural trends and patterns, AI tools make it easy for a mobile marketer to create highly targeted and personalized content, with a high probability to convert. As they learn over time about each app user, they can send the right content, to the right user at the right time, with a click of a button.

Mobile marketers can also leave timing in the hands of an AI-enabled machine. By doing so, the content will reach the user at a time that is personalized to them.

2. Minimize Churn

All businesses are challenged with customer churn. Mobile apps are no different. A large percentage of app users churn within 90 days. This is no good news as acquiring a new customer costs between 5-25 times as much as it does to retain a customer. Keeping churn to a minimum is essential for most companies.

Users increasingly want and expect a personalized brand experience, in order to be retained and to become loyal. This is where AI comes in. With AI tools, marketers can take personalization to a whole new level and get the most relevant content to each individual user.

In addition, AI’s predictive techniques allow marketers to accurately compare the characteristics and actions of past users with their existing user base. This helps in better understanding why users are churning, so marketers can make the necessary adjustments to prevent it from happening again.

3. Real-Time Personas

Users continuously change, as do situations and needs, posing a challenge to businesses. Keeping up with these changes in real-time and managing them manually is simply impossible.  In the past personas were typically pre-defined using basic demographical data such as age, gender, sex and location. Yet, their online or in-app behaviours were not taken into account. Behaviours that are more indicative of what they like, dislike, need or want.

AI tools, on the other hand, can collect and analyze consumer data from a wide range of sources at an insane scale. They can easily monitor and identify behavioural changes in real-time, and continually shift users into the persona or segment that they best see fit at that time.

4. Continuous learning and improvement

AI never stops learning. Based on all its learning it makes the right decisions using the data it has, without the need of any instructions. Marketers just need to set it up. From then on, they can let it do its job.

Unlike humans who often make mistakes, with AI there is no need to worry. The system will do exactly what it was instructed to do with no errors. And what’s more, it continues to learn about a user's individual preferences over time as it continuously collects more and more data.

5. Empowering the lead generation process

AI tools can help free up a marketer's time when it comes to identifying which users they should focus on the most (i.e. users who are most likely to make in-app purchases). AI can process data for you in a fraction of the time, separate good leads from bad, and recommend the perfect touchpoints and content for each target. This way marketers can focus on creating the most effective campaigns for the leads that truly matter.

6. Creating conversational experiences

With the development of natural language processing through AI, chatbots are now widely being used. These artificially intelligent messaging bots provide a huge opportunity for mobile marketers to position themselves as pioneers in the industry.

Firstly, businesses can reach a wider audience. Approximately 1.4 billion people are willing to talk to chatbots and use messaging apps.

Secondly, using chatbots helps reduce customer support costs while it boosts operational efficiency. ΑI chatbots are able to use past questions and historical data to deliver personalized results to users’ queries. This way businesses can win customer service agents’ time back, focusing their efforts on more complicated requests that require human assistance.

Most importantly, AI is an enabler of seamless interactions between brands and consumers. With consumers willing to purchase goods via a chatbot, they see bot interaction as easy and reliable for their needs. The online conversation closely resembles the experience of shopping in a traditional retail store and it can be enhanced by creating customized recommendations to users based on their interactions.

Ready to join the AI revolution?

Customers' expectations are constantly rising, with marketers always trying to catch up. Artificial Intelligence is a critical tool in predicting the needs and wants of users before they even know themselves with the use of rich data.

Simply integrating AI into your mobile marketing efforts can make you stand out from the competition. No need to wait any longer. The time is right for you to take advantage of its potential and all its benefits before it goes fully mainstream. By generating insights from huge piles of data, AI can remove all the boring guesswork, and let the marketer focus their efforts on the more creative and strategic sides.

WayMore helps companies optimize their marketing campaigns through intelligent products, like chatbots that elevate your customers’ experience, increase customer engagement, embrace scalability, and empower your brand.

Surely by teaming up with an established provider, businesses can elevate their customers’ experience and empower their brand.