Whether or not we realize it, artificial intelligence (AI) is at the core of many of our online experiences. From Netflix and Amazon to curated content in an email newsletter, AI can be a highly effective way to establish meaningful connections with your audiences and provide personalized experiences catered to their unique needs.

Many small businesses and marketing professionals still believe that advanced AI systems are outside their expertise (or budget). However, modern tools make integrating AI-powered features into your website easier and more affordable than ever. Read on to learn more about three ways you can use AI to engage your site’s visitors below.

1. Personalization

No matter the industry, consumers and buyers expect highly personalized web experiences. AI can automate a huge part of your website’s personalization, saving both time and money in creating personalized marketing.

Personalization involves analyzing and leveraging data from your digital marketing mix to deliver unique experiences (including messages and offers) to your customers. For websites, most approaches fall into manual (rule-based) or machine-driven approaches. For the latter, affordable tools like Segment, Dynamic Yield, and Optimizely use AI and machine learning to give your customers highly personalized experiences on your site.

Marketers and businesses can use AI-driven personalization on their site to recommend products or content based on popularity, similarity to what a visitor has already viewed, what content has been recently added to the site, and more. These can be supplemented by advanced algorithms like collaborative filtering (grouping visitors together based on common likes and dislikes and interaction with content), decision trees (to find the most common paths taken to reach a conversion point), and other filters and boosts. Especially when compared to manual personalization, AI can give your customers a highly tailored site experience with relatively little upfront cost.

2. Chatbots

Chatbots have become commonplace on company websites across all industries and sectors. While early technology gave them a reputation as being stiff, awkward, and difficult to use, modern AI has transformed them into invaluable customer service and personalization tools for your website.

Research shows that messaging apps and chatbots are becoming more popular for many types of customer interactions. Their ease of use and convenience can often exceed the capabilites of a human, especially on larger scales. Chatbots can help customers find specific products, information, contact info, and even forward conversion-ready customers to a member of your sales team to complete the buyer’s journey.

With ChatBot, Freshchat, Drift, and others offering affordable and accessible tools for building chatbots, it’s easier than ever to for businesses to leverage AI to provide customer service from within their site. Best of all, many chatbots integrate easily with your CRM, making them invaluable resources for building your client base.

3. Customer Insights and Segmentation

While AI has countless audience-facing applications to engage your customers, it’s equally valuable on the backend as a tool to help you get the most out of your data. Marketing professionals know that pouring over web analytics can be a challenging and time-consuming process; especially for those of us who aren’t “numbers” people, we’ll take all the help we can get!

From automatically generated reports from Google Analytics and UX mapping from HotJar to Dynamic Yield’s advanced customer segmentation algorithms, there are nearly countless tools to help businesses and marketers use data to truly understand their customers. Tasks like geo-targeting, recording and measuring on-site interactions, and analyzing purchasing behaviours allow you to measure and optimize every interaction your customer has with your business.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, AI is just another tool to help businesses and marketers engage effectively with their customers. It’s not a miracle solution on its own; AI can only be as effective as the application in which it’s used, as well as the data it’s given to work with. Even with the most sophisticated tools, marketers and businesses still need to ensure they’re using AI in a way that adds value for their customers and their business as part an overall strategy designed for consistent results.

With over two decades of experience in digital marketing, Atrium Digital continually helps our clients achieve digital marketing success across a wide variety of fields and industries. Our unique approach allows us to engineer systems, build platforms, and optimize routines to deliver consistent results over time, allowing organizations to experience sustained growth through digital marketing.