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Personalizing for Relevance: How AI is Transforming Customer Experiences

Woman with gray hair having a personalized customer experience on her computer thanks to help from AI

We’re continuing to see the many powerful applications for AI. Along with potentially useful creative tools, AI excels at data collection and parsing. Now, we’re seeing that algorithmic power combine with marketing expertise to create a personalized and relevant customer experiences for small businesses. Rosewood will explain what personalization and relevance in marketing are, and how AI is a powerful tool for a marketing team to create personally relevant marketing for any customer or client experiences.

Personalization, Relevancy, and AI in Marketing

Personalization has been a major tool in marketing for over a decade. It emphasizes marketing that communicates personally to the individual members of your audience over broader, more general marketing campaigns that lack a specific target. While this might include one-off custom communications or exchanges, it can also be automated. For example, emails or messages can automatically address receivers by their first names. 

Overall, customers have come to expect personalized experiences that respect their individuality and interests. At least 71% of customers expect a personalized experience, and a greater 76% are frustrated when they don’t have one. Personalization has also demonstrated an average 10-15% revenue lift, which increases to 25% for direct to consumer businesses. These individualized experiences create stronger personal connections, which lead to more customers and clients returning for more purchases and services. This is where small businesses can excel over larger companies that typically provide more generalized customer experiences.

Thanks to AI, more complex and valuable data can be gathered from users to create even more personalized marketing that is relevant to customers’ interests and experiences. This is why relevancy has become an essential marketing criterion alongside personalization. These algorithms and AI automations can consider browsing history, page time, social media data, and more. Marketers can then use this information and tell these programs how to generate product recommendations, personalized notifications, curated packages, communications, and more. These AI help your business understand the true, individual interests of each of your customers so that any marketing that reaches them is relevant.  

Where AI Can Help with Personalization and Relevancy

As we’ve covered before, AI is a general term. It’s recently become the common title for various programs which can learn from data to accomplish more complex tasks. For personalized and relevant marketing, these AI can sift through an overwhelming amount of user information that would take far more time for a human. That’s why AI is a powerful tool for small businesses who usually won’t be able to dedicate a person to poring through this information. Instead, AI is a valuable tool for your marketing team to build effective strategies for relevant marketing campaigns. We’ll go over some of the most effective uses of AI in personalized marketing.

E-Commerce Tracking

When customers are on your website or digital store, AI software can track what they browse and for how long. It will also track any purchases, wishlisting, shares, etc. This tracking isn’t especially new, but more developments in machine learning allow AI to start grouping and interpreting the data. All that behavioral information from many customers, allows an AI to develop customer groups and profiles according to their interests and various other demographics like age and area. These can then be used for a plethora of personalized and relevant marketing strategies.

Relevant Email Marketing

With this detailed profile generation, AI can then begin to automatically message subscribed customers about product recommendations or send communications that are more relevant to their interests. This will still require a human to create and design the message and templates. However, the AI can take over the busy work of adding appropriate products and sending the emails off. 

Your marketing team can also use these AI-generated profiles to analyze your audience and segment your email recipients to start creating emails more relevant to each group’s interests. This will lead to more opens and clicks, since they will better grab your audience’s attention. Again, AI can’t quite handle the creation process itself. Human expertise is still necessary for effective personalized marketing.

Personalized Website Customer Experiences

By tracking their ecommerce behavior, AI incorporated into your site can start to tailor customers’ website experience to be more relevant. Products listed on the front page or recommended to them at other browsing stages can be specified to their personal interests. This keeps them in your store and more likely to purchase, since they will continue to see what is relevant to their interests in your business.

Personalized Chatbots

Customer service is an important part of your daily, individualized marketing, and instant messaging through your website, social media, and SMS has become a fundamental customer service tool. Those messages can also be overwhelming and chatbots can help manage the flood. However, they are also often robotic and simple. Current advances in AI famously happening with Chat-GPT and Google Bard are allowing chat bots to accomplish more complex tasks and communications. They can address the customer by name, and even potentially pull up their profile’s information. They aren’t quite at the level of replacing a human’s social finesse or able to handle more complex inquiries. However, they have made great strides where simple interactions can be accomplished entirely automatically for a pleasant and personalized customer experience.

Don’t Forget About Human Expertise

AI technology is currently surging in its development and it’s still hard to see where it will end up in the coming months and years. It’s already showing it’s a powerful tool for personalized marketing, but don’t let it completely override the human touch of your business either. Ultimately, personalized connections are human ones, and customers want that human connection with your business. Similarly, AI is still limited in its abilities. Analyzing information, writing messages, creating visual content, and more still require human ingenuity and expertise. If you want to talk more about how you can strategize and incorporate AI into your digital marketing, ecommerce, or web design, be sure to contact Rosewood Marketing.

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Successfully Working with Your Marketing Team

Some of the Rosewood Team standing side by side smiling.

We’ve previously explained how to maintain and manage your business’ relationship with influencers. This time we’re going to look at how you can work successfully with your marketing team, like the one at Rosewood Marketing. They work closely alongside your business to create meaningful and impactful marketing campaigns. It is an active and long-term relationship, and a marketing team will require consistent collaboration from other parts of your business. You will want to follow certain practices that ensure their optimal performance. After all, their success is also yours. Here’s how to successfully work with your marketing team.

Regular and Clear Communication

Every relationship relies on clear and consistent communication, and it’s no less true for successfully working with your marketing team. Maintain a steady dialogue so that you keep each other updated. Inform your marketing team as early as possible with all the pertinent details about new products or new services, collaborations with other companies, attendances at public events, etc. This is invaluable information about your business’ work, and your marketing team can only plan around them if they receive this information early. At the same time, marketing can move fast, so it’s also beneficial if they can ask pertinent questions and have them answered promptly to jump on a sudden trend. In turn, they can update your business in a timely manner and can provide updates with regular performance reports and analytics. 

Have and Update Your Goals

Your marketing team will create, handle, and communicate any plans they make to accomplish your business’ marketing goals. However, you and your business need to first set those goals. Ask yourself some questions. What do you hope marketing will accomplish for your business? Do you want to increase discoverability or advertise certain products? Are there aspects of your business you want to highlight or receive more attention? The answers to those questions will help provide the basis for a marketing team to start planning. Remember to continue asking these questions, so that you can regularly communicate new or revised goals to your marketing team. 

Listen to Your Marketing Team

With clear communication and these goals set, your marketing team can help identify the best and optimal channels to accomplish them and start formulating plans and timelines. To work successfully with your marketing team, listen to their input and feedback. They will develop clear objectives from your goals and define key performance indexes (KPIs) for tracking progress. They will be able to tell you whether online advertising, social media, or search engine optimization will be most effective, along with the best practices. Your marketing team may refine or revise your goals based on their own professional experience or identify certain communication and information as necessary. Similarly, their reports will include insightful analysis that explains and interprets the various statistics. 

All of this is valuable information, so listen. Just as your marketing team will rely on your knowledge about your business and industry, you rely on their expertise and knowledge about marketing. They are experts in communication channels, tools, and methods. They understand what the general public and more specifically your community wants, expects, and needs to see. Your marketing team will use that expertise to produce effective marketing, introduce you to unfamiliar concepts, and guide you through any new processes. Your marketing team is just as invested in its success, so heeding their insight is essential to successfully working with them.

Provide Them with Materials

The best marketing content has real depictions of your business. People love to see authenticity at work. Stock photography is convenient and has its uses, but the strongest and most successful marketing has images and videos of your business, its products, and team. Unfortunately, your marketing team cannot always be present to capture such content. Thankfully, most people today have phones with great cameras sitting in their pockets. Take pictures and record videos of your business operating when the opportunity arises. We recommend creating a cloud drive such as Google Drive or Dropbox where you can regularly upload the materials for your marketing team to access. Not everything might be a perfect asset for your marketing team, but regularly providing them with those materials will give them a treasury for creating some truly outstanding and special marketing. If you want some more professional materials, consider getting professional photography and videography of your business and brand.

There are myriad other materials that can help your marketing team be successful. Branding materials from companies whose products you carry are high quality and valuable. Has your business received thank you messages? Those are fantastic testimonials for your marketing team to advertise. If you’re not sure what materials might be useful and your marketing team has, it is best to ask. Your marketing team will happily inform you of the kinds of materials that can help them be more successful. 

A Critical Part of Your Business

Following these best practices is critical to successfully working with your marketing team. Steady communication, clear and definitive goals, space for input, and a regular supply of materials will provide them the basis to help your business grow. Your marketing team is a critical component of your business, and like any organ, it needs to work together with the others to ensure the body’s, in this case your business’, health and success. If you are ready to start meeting your marketing goals, contact Rosewood today.

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Rosewood’s 2022 Year in Review

The Rosewood team reviews all they accomplished in 2022

After a relaxing and celebratory holiday break, the Rosewood team are back and busy at our desks in our various offices today, and 2023 is proving to be as exciting as its predecessor. We’re excited for all the amazing projects this new year is bringing and anxious to get started, but first, we’re taking an opportunity to review and reflect on the incredible year and successes the Rosewood team and our clients have shared in 2022. 

Rosewood Grew in Team Members and in Service Offerings

Overall, 2022 proved a productive and fruitful year for us and our clients. Rosewood saw growth in all divisions of our company and reached some fantastic milestones. We grew to over 120 active clients and white-labeled for 5 other agencies. We also started a new nonprofit fundraising platform in collaboration with Graf-Martin Communications. Our Canada-wide team even met up this Fall and spent some quality time together for a photoshoot and day of fun.

Rosewood Rebranded to Serve Our Clients Better

Rosewood saw some exciting changes and developments alongside our growth in 2022. In November we celebrated our seventh anniversary. It’s astonishing how much Rosewood has grown and changed over the years. To match our development, in August of this past year we launched our rebrand with Rosewood 2.0. Our loyal peacock departed for a new logo look and feel. To match the growth of our services over those years, we also took the opportunity to clarify our company core values, mission and vision. Along with that new look, we implemented a new target audience and social media strategy. We’re still growing and changing and will soon be launching a whole new website that better reflects Rosewood’s path forward. 

Rosewood Welcomed a New Account Coordinator

2022 was certainly a year of news for Rosewood. To better organize our wide swath of projects, we implemented a new project management system through Monday.com. That was spearheaded by another new at Rosewood. We brought on our newest team member Paige as an Account Coordinator to our clients and to support Rosewood internally. Paige has been an incredible addition to our team. Her passion and enthusiasm are contagious, and her penchant for planning has been vital for customizing Monday.com’s setup for each division and their specific needs to ensure the utmost streamlining for everyone.

Speaking of our divisions, they also have plenty to boast about for their 2022s. 

Here are just a select few of their wins from 2022:

Websites:

  • Designed and launched more than 25 new websites
  • Completed over 640 updates and requests
  • 18 new clients signed on for maintenance for regular updates, optimal functionality, and high-quality content from our expert web team
  • Developed a new fundraising platform for nonprofits in collaboration with Graf-Martin Communications

Ads:

  • Our advertising team produced a nearly 20x return on advertising spend (ROAS) which also produced a customer acquisition of up to 6x for some of our clients
  • Ads team was able to generate over 7,300 visits to just one of our client’s websites
  • One client’s ads reached nearly 71,000 people, and another was seen a staggering 312,646 times

Digital Media:

  • Created and published well over 1100 posts 
  • Numerous new clients signed up for our social media services to improve their business’ discoverability, reach, and authenticity
  • Successfully increased clients’ reach through social media to develop high-profile partnerships, including two from the ground up

Catch the Ace:

  • Helped nonprofits raise over $500,000 to support community programs

Misc.:

  • We successfully put our heads together to solve an escape room during our team building day
  • Our Director of Digital Media, Georgie, became a proud mother to the first Rosewood Baby (and she’s adorable)

It proved to be an eventful and accomplished year, but we’re even more eager to continue our work and growth into 2023. We have some new services that we’re excited to announce soon. Keep an eye on our social channels for updates. For now, we hope you all are also having a good start to the new year. Thank you all for being a part of this past year, and we’re looking forward to sharing in success this year.

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