How Can Artificial Intelligence Help DTC Brands Acquire New Customers?
Jan 18, 2022
10 min read
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.
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Things You Must Remember Before Adopting Marketing Automation
The application of marketing automation in this digital world has entirely reflected on the small and local businesses and big-scale industry-specific firms. In 2019, The global market size of marketing automation solutions was at $15.6 Billion. It is expected to reach a whopping $25.1 Billion valuation by the end of 2023. It is accelerating growth aspects for these industries, but it functions as a helping hand in minimizing the burden off your marketing division. Another study suggests that the automation software industry would increase at a CAGR of 19.2% between 2020 and 2025. It means that the value of the global marketing automation software industry would triple by 2025. At this moment, most businesses have already invested in Marketing Automation to synchronize their time and resources with the help of technology, resulting in effective and optimized marketing. In simpler words, marketing automation allows your business to leverage technology to do marketing tasks by replacing human resources. Since these tasks are routine and mild, mostly email targeting or repetitive chores such as auto-responding to pre-sales leads, etc., technological aid is considered an ideal resource for them. Marketing automation somehow affects your marketer’s duties and responsibilities and transforms their complex functions into much simpler tasks. As a result, your marketing department gets time to be creative for designing marketing campaigns and ponder upon increasing brand awareness via product and service quality. In addition, the best thing about emphasizing technology is that you source out the best results at the right time with purposeful business insights and data analysis that elevate your firm’s productivity. The best action plan for businesses worldwide in this modern time is to put marketing automation into operation and consider lead generation and nurturing their primary tasks. By doing so, you’re not only allowing technology, or say, Artificial Intelligence, to automate your business’ marketing requirements but remove emotional presence in some of the tasks with practical machine learning elements. Source: Pexels What To Do Before Committing To Marketing Automation? After your business has given a thought to MA being a full-fledged tech aid, you must have a list of things ready to check before diving into the implementation of marketing automation. Luckily, below is the list of those factors that one should think about MA to supersede human efforts and time . 1. Creating A Strategic Plan With technology surpassing your business marketing routine tasks, you may have to draw and implement a new strategy altogether. For obtaining the best results, your business has to undertake its goals and objective statements related to marketing and how you used to establish marketing campaigns. To begin with, list down why marketing automation would be the right decision for your business- refer to the global statistics for efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and customer engagement projection. Diving into the marketing automation world without a firm strategy could be daunting, like shooting an arrow in the dark- inefficient and less promising. Moreover, you’ll not only be deploying unnecessary monetary funds and efforts but lose crucial time. You could have used the time to explore or work on new opportunities. 2. Having Quality Content By implementing a strategy to obtain marketing automation services, your next step would be to plan out content delivery to your prospects. Having good quality content on your plate is crucial to engaging your customers with the correct information. With marketing automation and content working together, your business will experience a positive shift in sales, thus increasing your revenue growth. Therefore, having a firm grip on high-quality content creation is significant to trigger the buying process. Another benefit of producing good content for your business would be greater customer engagement on your website. If a customer stays on your website by engaging with the last level of content that takes them to the purchasing page, it can increase the conversion rate. 3. Align Your Departments Bringing technological aid to your marketing department does not mean the other departments of your business firm would not be affected or could relate to it. You must bring harmony to your marketing, sales, and other divisions, right from the beginning. When you plan to give your marketing strategy a new shape, it is crucial to comprehend its effects on the business sales and anticipate the customer behavior/actions after introducing marketing automation. Synchronize the objectives of your marketing and sales departments to make the most of marketing automation tools and enhance your marketing campaigns then and there. Incorporating your sales experts into the marketing automation systems facilitates their understanding of the importance of sales-ready leads and how to nurture those leads to obtain positive results. 4. Training Your Division Heads For The Change It might sound efficient and convenient in upgrading your marketing campaigns, departments, and experts towards automated aid, but, in reality, it requires constant training and development to understand the complexities of marketing automation. Your business marketers must show interest in learning about MA; they must continue the practice to specialize in the industry-specific roles for your business. Consider working on the product and marketing automation tools to explore the loose ends and define a sharp plan that would help take advantage of MA tools. In addition, your marketing team can create data statistics after working with the marketing automation software to link with the initial objective strategy that can be studied by your sales team as well. 5. Setting A Benchmark In the end, before implementing marketing automation, set your business benchmarks in terms of revenue, lead generation, customer base, etc. These benchmarks must be objective-driven, so your business can achieve them with marketing automation’s aid. Once you’re clear with the benchmarks, develop ways to measure your results after successfully implementing MA tools. Having that said, you may want to explore expert guidance from a leading brand. Saffron Tech is your one-stop shop to narrow down your marketing automation system requirements. With our team of experts empowering your marketing approach, we aim at providing an efficient and cost-effective service to help you assess which marketing automation tool would do wonders for your business type. Visit our website and sign up to dive into our services! ...
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11 Key growth metrics for SaaS businesses
Sustainable growth for SaaS companies depends on mastering the art of understanding the SaaS key metrics. Identifying and utilizing these indicators are most important for success. This blog will look at the most important SaaS performance metrics, including Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Activation Rate, Retention Rate, and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). These metrics are interconnected with each other and are very useful when evaluating the health and progress of a SaaS business. How can you calculate each metric? What are their significance, and how do they influence one another? Recognizing the impact of these metrics is a basic but crucial step. In this discussion, we'll navigate the key metrics for SaaS companies that shape their growth trajectory. What are Saas metrics? SaaS or Software as a Service metrics refers to key performance indicators (KPIs) and measurements used to evaluate the performance, efficiency, and success of a SaaS (Software as a Service) business performance model. These key SaaS metrics help measure various aspects of a saas marketing in a startup, providing valuable insights into its growth, user satisfaction, and overall health. 11 SaaS Growth Metrics to Measure Your Success In the current state of the market, there are several metrics that analyze your SaaS business. Still, it’s essential to understand that not every metric is a good indicator of the growth of the SaaS. While it’s important to understand and utilize some of the best metrics to help you analyze and track your growth. Here are some of the most important key metrics you need for your SaaS growth: 1. Activation Rate The activation rate is a super significant number for businesses in a b2b saas marketing strategy– it helps us determine how many people use our product. It shows the percentage of users who start using the product as intended, not just signing up and forgetting about it. To calculate the activation rate, we look at how many people signed up and how many of them started using the product. The formula is: So, it's not just about getting people to sign up; it's about getting them to use and engage with the product. One way to increase the activation rate is by giving new users a personalized introduction to the product. This helps turn signups into active users who stick around. 2. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) When a business has to acquire Customer, the cost is Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the expense of acquiring a single customer. It serves as a valuable metric for measuring the success of marketing strategies and determining the return on investment (ROI). To calculate CAC, you need to keep tabs on the number of new customers acquired over a specific period and ensure accurate sales and marketing expenditures tracking. Else we will lose the customers which we have gained. The formula is straightforward: For emerging businesses, CAC is an important factor in assessing the acquisition's value and making informed adjustments for the future. When considering the total amount spent on sales and marketing, various components need to be considered, including: PPC or Social Media Ads Salaries of team members Subscription costs for marketing tools Costs associated with content creation, such as blogs, design, and video Expenses related to agencies 3. Customer lifecycle value Customer Lifecycle Value (CLV) is like figuring out how much each customer is worth to your business over time. It lets you calculate the average amount a customer spends on your product during your relationship. To find CLV, you take how much money a customer gives you in a year, on average, and divide it by how long they usually stick around. The formula is: If you are just starting your business, CLV helps you with calculations and see if your plan will make money. It's a tool for established businesses to tweak their strategies, finding ways to get more from each customer while spending less to bring them in. 4. Average revenue per user The average revenue per user (ARPU) signifies the average revenue generated from each customer. This metric indicates a product's profitability and is calculated as: Calculating and understanding ARPU is fundamental for gaining insights into how well a product is performing in generating revenue from its user base. 5. Monthly recurring revenue Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) is like the money a SaaS business can rely on getting every month because they usually get paid through subscriptions. To find MRR, you just multiply the total number of paying customers by how much each customer brings in on average (ARPU). For businesses with subscriptions, keeping a close eye on the money coming in each month is super important. MRR helps them see how much income they can expect regularly. It is an easy way to track and compare revenues month after month and encourage subscription upgrades by highlighting advanced features, identify cross-selling opportunities for additional value, introduce customizable add-ons to meet specific user needs, implement referral programs for client advocacy and revenue growth, and prioritize customer success to enhance satisfaction, reduce churn, and expansion revenue 6. Annual recurring revenue Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) builds upon the Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) concept and assesses year-over-year growth. While MRR is great for understanding monthly fluctuations, ARR provides a broader view, allowing you to evaluate your entire year. It can be calculated as: Comparing ARR from one year to the next gives you insights into your business's stability and overall performance. Since MRR can vary month by month, relying solely on it might not capture the whole picture. ARR offers a more comprehensive understanding of how your business is doing over the long term. It is a valuable tool for measuring performance. 7. Customer churn Churned customers can be calculated by the percentage of customers who discontinue their association with your company within a specified timeframe. While it's not the most enjoyable metric, businesses must address it especially using the saas marketing playbook. The churn rate can be calculated using the formula: The goal is to keep this rate as low as possible by consistently engaging users and delivering ongoing value. For instance, companies like Loom proactively manage churn by sending email tutorials showcasing new features to keep existing users involved and satisfied. 8. Revenue churn Revenue churn measures the reduction in revenue stemming from the loss of existing customers. It's calculated as: Many experts consider revenue churn a more updated metric than customer churn as it directly reflects the financial impact. To gain a comprehensive understanding of business churn, evaluating revenue churn and customer churn together is recommended. This dual analysis provides a broader view of how customer departures impact the customer base and the overall revenue. 9. Active trials Active trials are a valuable metric, especially for businesses employing a freemium business model. This metric is a solid indicator of the effectiveness of your marketing spend strategies, mainly when experimenting with different messages. The calculation for active trials is as follows: Active Trials = Sum of all active subscriptions during a period This increase in this number from one period to another suggests that your efforts yield positive results. Identifying what precisely contributes to this growth is crucial for ongoing business development. Not monitoring your active trials leaves you wondering about the success of your client acquisition venture. However, it's important to interpret active trials with caution. It's not just about creating accounts; you want to ensure that users actively engage with your product. Simply having an account doesn't necessarily equate to genuine product usage. 10. Customer Engagement Score A customer engagement score is a measure that shows how much a customer interacts with a business's product or events. The score depends on what actions count as engagement, which can vary. To figure out the score, you assign weights (how important an action is) to different engagement actions and multiply them by how often those actions happen: Customer Engagement Score = (w1*n1) + (w2 * n2) + … + (w# + n#) Here, 'w' is how much an action matters, and 'n' is how often it happens. For example, some businesses try to bring back users who could be more active by reaching out through emails. Pitch does this well with its email marketing strategy. A higher engagement score usually means customers are more involved and interested in what the business offers. 11. Trial conversion rate Converting free trials into paying subscriptions is a challenging task for SaaS marketing. To understand what is saas marketing, you need to monitor the conversion rate is a valuable strategy to stay proactive and work towards improvement. A target conversion rate of 25% is advisable for long-term success, and exceeding 30% is commendable; consider it a perfect job. Keeping a close eye on how many users transition from free trials to paid subscriptions provides insights that can guide efforts to enhance this crucial aspect of the business. Conclusion The list of SaaS growth metrics is vast and they align to the saas marketing funnel, but it’s wise to look for the best key metrics to lead your SaaS business to the top. The metrics we've discussed are like your guide, helping you track and take your business in the right direction. If you want more help figuring out which growth metrics are perfect for your business, connect with Saffron Edge. At Saffron Edge, a Saas website design agency, we can guide you in customizing a strategy that perfectly fits your needs and also on the development end, we can help you in providing the best website designs for your Saas business. Connect with us today; let us do the work! ...
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How To Optimize Your WordPress Site For Voice Search?
Back in 2011, when Google introduced Voice Search, nobody would have imagined that it would grow in such magnitude that it would become one of the key aspects of search marketing campaigns. Nowadays, voice search has become a staple feature, thanks to the ever-increasing number of smart devices and digital assistants. As per the current statistics, voice search is used by 41% of adults at least once a day. This number is going to boom as it has been predicted that by 2020, 50% of online searches will be voice searches. Why is voice search so important? In recent years, Google has improved the accuracy of voice recognition from below 80% to over 90%. This improvement has been made to pave the way for the future of online searches. As you already know the smartphones have witnessed a boom in their usage, so more and more people now tend to use voice search. The smart devices also leverage the feature of voice search. The current statistics show that there are already 45 million voice-assisted devices being used in the United States alone. So, you can see how voice search is dominating a huge chunk of online searches. If you want to outsmart your competitors and stay on the top rankings in the search results, then you must learn to optimize your site for voice search. How to optimize for voice search To optimize your website according to voice search is not rocket science. You just need to take care of a few pointers and you can rank your WordPress site in the top positions. Here are the pointers you must keep in mind to optimize your WordPress site for voice search. Pay Attention To The Themes And Plugins Themes are the backbone of your WordPress site. The whole outlook of your website and how visitors respond to your site relies heavily on the themes you use. The plugins are the added functionalities and define the responsiveness of your website. So you must customize the themes and plugins to optimize your site for voice search. A recent survey analyzed 10,000 searches on Google home devices and found out that average voice search results page loads 52% faster than the overall average page. So page speed is a major aspect of voice search results. Accordingly, you must choose the themes and plugins that make your site loads fast. You must go for a theme that uses javascript and loads in seconds. This way, you can ensure that your WordPress site appears at top rankings in voice search results. Long Tail Keywords When you use normal search, the search queries contain keywords that have short tail length. The voice searches, on the other hand, have long-tail keywords. Voice searches are also more likely to contain question phrases. Long tail keywords also ensure a high conversion rate as the competition is low in the long tail keywords. Make sure that the content of your website has a conversational tone as most of these long tail keywords come across as conversational questions rather than search queries. Position Zero Optimization Gone are the days when website owners used to battle for the number 1 position on the search engine result page. The quest is now for the zero position on the search engine result page, also known as the snippet. You must also customize your content according to this. To gain the position zero, you must fill in all the details and website profile correctly. Also, you must give the complete details about your business and add relevant contact information to be featured on the Google snippet. Local SEO Implementation Most of the voice searches end up with results that display the business address. Also, “near me” searches on Google have grown by 900% over the last two years. So to use this fact for the best of your business, you need to master the local SEO strategies and implement it on your website. Local SEO refers to the localization of keywords through geographic indicators. For this, you can try adding keywords that specify the location of your business operations. You can add content to your website that is location-specific and is relevant to your business. Google My Business Listing To optimize your website according to voice search, you must also create a Google My Business listing of your business. As you already know how crucial local SEO is for your business. And local SEO works best when your business is listed on Google My Business. Also, with the recent boom in smart speakers, it is advisable to create a listing of your website on different other businesses citing online directories. Your Content Should Be Readable Also, you must make your content readable. Most of the website visitors bulleted information crisply and briefly. So you must pay attention to that and rather than using long mundane posts, try to make your content interactive, engaging and readable. Optimize For Mobile With Google’s new mobile-first policy, the rules of the game have changed. You need to create optimized content for mobile devices as Google now prioritizes the mobile-based content for mobile devices. So if your website is not mobile-friendly then your website might lose voice search results ranking as well as the normal search result rankings. So check out the guidelines to optimize your website for mobile. Use Of Schema Mark-Up Schema mark-up is used to control the way you share information about your website with machines and how machines interpret it. Using schema mark-up to implement structured data lands your website in rich snippets. These rich snippets differ from normal ones and increase your click-through rate and also drive traffic to your websites. They help you to gain an edge over your competition. The wrap-up With the introduction of voice search, the digital marketing scenario has changed. To get accustomed to this change, you need to make changes to your website and its content. You need to come up with unique and interactive content and also change the structure of the website if needed. Whether you are developing content specific to voice searches or normal searches, you need to find your niche. You need to identify your brand yourself first and then come up with ways to advertise it. So recognize your brand and establish its dominance. Click here to know more about website optimization. ...
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