Crafting the right marketing campaign has long required a complex matrix of decision making based on some data, intuition, and an educated guess by marketers. It must be relevant to the customer but can’t risk cannibalizing sales; it should be sent through the appropriate medium; and the timing has to be right.
Today, technological advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are changing the way brands approach their marketing and customer engagement efforts. Specifically, artificial intelligence is providing new strategic insights as to what motivates specific guests.
Artificial intelligence has the power to expand brands’ understanding of its customers’ patterns, behaviors, wants, and needs. By using AI, marketers can harness the power of their data, uncovering trends that would otherwise remain hidden because of the limits of the human mind.
The beauty of this technology is that its decision-making power is at the user’s discretion. The individuals or teams using the tech can choose what to have the AI optimize for, like maximum ROI or email open rate, and when to default to a human touch.
As an example, consider convenience stores’ bread and butter: fuel sales. C-stores account for approximately 80% of fuel sales nationwide, but many brands lack the margins to discount gas effectively. If you can’t have the advantage of offering gas at a discount, then the question is: How do you entice customers to fill up at your brand’s pump and not at your competitor’s?
You might try offering discounts on other in-store items, but it would be a shot in the dark as to whether those customers who visited based on a center-store incentive would fill up on gas while they’re there. Artificial intelligence makes a critical difference here by identifying exactly what other items those fuel purchasers are seeking.
Through an algorithm commonly called clustering, AI can identify and sort customers based on the items they buy together, like coffee and gas, or tobacco and soft drinks. Instead of the marketer hypothesizing a logical pairing and looking for proof in the data, the AI can assess millions of data points at once to find what items are most commonly purchased together.
Once you understand what else your valuable fuel customers are buying, you can target those specific clusters of purchasers with offers that speak directly to them. For example, you can incentivize coffee drinkers who often fuel up at the pump to make an extra visit with a targeted free hot beverage promotion, while sending an offer for 50% off a freshly prepared sandwich to the customers who fill their tank on their way home from work and grab dinner to go.
Artificial intelligence can even find patterns in the day of the week customers visit, how likely they are to come back in the next seven days, and how likely they are to read your brand’s emails. It takes customer engagement to the next level by unlocking the secrets hidden within the data you’re already collecting through your loyalty program.
Visit us at www.paytronix.com to learn more about AI to IASM and the science of turning artificial intelligence into individual actions.
This post is sponsored by Paytronix