How Can Artificial Intelligence Help DTC Brands Acquire New Customers?

Gone are the days when the success of a brand used to depend on its products or services. Today, a satisfying personalized user experience is the first thing a customer looks for. The market has become a fierce battlefield where every business strives to acquire maximum customers. And when the battle is about customer experience, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the weapon that can offer you a competitive edge over others. Today, AI development is on an entirely next level. Almost all the companies are exploring and leveraging the benefits of this technology in their DTC businesses to enhance the customer experience. According to a Semrush report, 86% of the CEOs believe artificial intelligence was the mainstream technology in their offices in 2021. Moreover, according to Gartner, the global AI software market can reach $62 billion by 2022. So, if you also want to know how to use AI for improving customer experience and acquiring new customers, this blog is for you.

How Does AI Help in Improving Customer Experience?

Source: Freepik Some people believe that AI is the replacement for human beings. However, it isn't true. In fact, it acts as a driving force that increases efficiency and expedites customer service processes. Moreover, AI can integrate with other technologies, such as machine learning and deep learning, that help automate basic customer interactions. A healthy customer interaction leads to a satisfying customer experience, which, in turn, increases customer acquisition. For example, today, most websites and mobile applications are powered by conversational chatbots that resolve your basic queries using AI commands. Moreover, you might have also observed product recommendations on eCommerce sites based on your past shopping behavior data. All these AI features help in enhancing customer engagement and customer retention rates. Below are a few ways through which you can improve the customer service experience with AI:

Chatbot-based Customer Service Support

As your business grows, the load on the customer service team also increases. They receive a plethora of queries from a massive amount of customers regularly. On top of that, your customers also expect to have the resolution time as low as possible. It makes customer service very hectic and challenging for the support team. However, with the introduction of AI chatbots, customers can get prompt solutions to their issues with high-speed responses in real-time. In fact, as per the statistics, nearly one in four organizations that deal with customer service are presently using AI-powered virtual assistants and chatbots.

24/7 Customer Support to the Consumers

Issues can pop up anytime, especially with the consumers. They expect that the brands must be available at all times for their rescue. However, being open day and night is challenging, specifically when you have a small customer support team. In such situations, automated customer service can prove to be your helping hand. It makes sure to offer on-demand support to the customers and answers their queries as soon as they pop up. Even if the automated systems could not resolve their issues, the auto-generated responses would assure them that their voices would be heard.

Customized and Proactive Customer Service

The best thing about AI for eCommerce and other DTC businesses is that it can efficiently gather a massive amount of appropriate customers' data. Analyzing this data, you can recommend products and services to the customers based on their browsing history and preferences. In addition, AI can also help create specific customer personas to focus on individual shoppers' buying patterns and deliver them the most personalized experience. As per Semrush research, 71% of marketers consider AI a suitable tool for a customized experience, making customers feel that every product and service suggested to them is custom-made for them only.

A Perfect Decision-Making Tool for Customers

You might be surprised to know that around 27% of the customers believe that AI can offer equal or better customer support services than human beings. Since most customers use their devices to interact with the brands, it becomes crucial to employ AI-powered virtual assistants to act as personalized touchpoints throughout their purchasing journey. These automated assistants can gather valuable details regarding the customers' queries and suggest the best option to ease their decision-making process. In this way, the customer satisfaction level increases, and the support team becomes free to perform other priority tasks.

How Can AI Help DTC Brands in Retaining Existing Customers and Acquiring New Ones?

Today, it does not matter what industry you operate in; one of the most crucial things that can make or break your brand is customer retention and acquisition. As already mentioned, customer experience is the key to getting a hold of your employees, and AI is certainly an apt way to achieve that. In fact, 40% of business owners believe that their biggest motivation to equip AI into their systems is customer experience. Here are some ways through which AI can help you with customer retention and acquisition:

Finding and Filling the Gaps in the Content Marketing Strategy

"Content is King!" You might have read or heard this somewhere, and to state the fact, it is true. In business operations, you must always focus on what content you are delivering to your customers. It would be best if you asked yourself the following questions:

• Is the content relevant to your target audience?
• How does the content help your customers?
• Does the content delivered by you help in lead generation, growth or productivity?

Addressing these questions is essential for any business. You must know what content you should develop for your targeted customers. By using AI algorithms, you can figure out the gaps in your content and fix the issues to improve the performance of your marketing campaigns. Moreover, if you are into eCommerce or retail, AI can help you determine the demands and expectations of your customers, based on which you can create the relevant content to attract them.

Pre-qualifying the Leads

Since you have fixed your content strategies, you might receive heavy traffic over your website. However, not every visitor that comes to your web portal will turn into potential customers, and if this happens frequently, it might be possible that you are getting low-quality leads. It could happen due to:

• Targeting the wrong consumers
• Using inappropriate content strategies
• Inclusion of ineffective CTA
• Marketing on the incorrect social media platforms

That's why 80% of new leads never transform into product sales. However, with the right AI tools, you can get the relevant data to know more about the interests and expectations of your target audience. It will help your sales department pick a specific lead generation strategy that includes pursuing, finding, and qualifying the leads that need to be followed up.

Providing Customized Recommendations

It might surprise you that many customers prioritize a personalized experience over privacy, as stated in a report by Harvard Business Review. In fact, the businesses that deliver customized recommendations based on customer data experience a 10% boost in their sales over the ones that don't. AI-based systems are so advanced that they analyze individual consumer data and filter the best-suited products and services for each of them as per their interests and preferences. In this way, businesses can easily target potential audiences and effectively acquire new customers on a large scale.

Surging Repurchases with Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics is one of the state-of-the-art approaches that several businesses use for customer engagement and retention. In this process, the system analyzes the historical data with the help of AI, machine learning, data mining, and many other techniques. With predictive analytics, you can forecast trends, develop insights, and predict the customers' behavior based on historical data. One of the most significant benefits of predictive analytics is that it gives all the customers' information (from the data they had provided) related to their purchase history. Using AI, businesses can identify the products purchased frequently in the past and make the customer repurchase them. More purchases will deliver a positive experience and feedback for your business, which can ultimately lead to more new shoppers on your portal.

Wrapping Up

AI and machine learning no longer belong to the 'newest' technologies as many companies have already understood their benefits and are leveraging their features to gain success. Not only do AI tools help in customer engagement and acquisition, but they are also helpful in brand awareness and improving the customers' overall experience with one's brand. From lead generation to content personalization, AI has proved to be a perfect fit. Therefore, don't let yourself be pushed behind in the competition. Consult a skillful and experienced digital marketing agency with high proficiency in AI to retain the existing customers and acquire new ones.