Adobe Experience Cloud Helps Personalize the Customer Experience with AI & Machine Learning

There are a few strategies that outrank personalization when it comes to building effective customer relationships for your business. In fact, a survey we conducted unveiled that 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from companies that offer personalized experiences. This underscores how it’s more important than ever for brands to not only understand their consumers on a granular level but to know exactly where and how to reach them — and this must be done in real time.

However, making personalization possible is no easy feat. Doing so requires sifting through massive volumes of data. Uber alone has collected over 100 petabytes of customer data — which is far too much for human analysts to handle in an efficient manner. It’s for this reason that many businesses have turned to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies to help ease their data processing woes.

Adobe Target is our personalization engine and when combined with Adobe Sensei, our AI and ML technology, brands can deliver intelligence-driven, real-time decisions that take the most relevant action for a specific customer. It can also be used to anticipate what a customer is likely to want next and deliver it proactively. By using Adobe Target to analyze how, when, and what customers shop for, businesses can better predict what the consumer wants on a person-by-person basis. Here we’ll explore the many reasons why AI and ML are invaluable tools to create an effective and engaging customer experience across any audience, big or small.

Vying for consumer attention is harder than it’s ever been

Today, businesses are competing for consumer attention like never before. Virgin Holidays realized that to continue satisfying customers and thereby grow its revenue, it needed to provide a seamless, end-to-end customer journey with personalized targeting and customization for its customers. The company decided to centralize communications for all departments and channels through a single scalable solution: Adobe Campaign, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud within Adobe Experience Cloud.

“Adobe aligns with our marketing goals to put the customer experience at the center of everything that we do,” says Morgan Bell, CRM trading executive at Virgin Holidays. “Through campaign orchestration we can now have conversations with our customers across channels, which increases engagement, experiences, and revenue for Virgin Holidays.”

AI and ML deliver insights to businesses — immediately

Before the exponential growth of interest in ML, organizations relied on A/B testing, a manual process that can typically take hours, or even days, to deliver insights about consumer behavior. By the time marketers had access to the insights they needed to take manual action to improve the shopping experience, it was too late, and the customer had moved on.

In contrast, Adobe Target’s built-in AI models can use online behavioral signals to determine the best experience to serve up in real time. Because these systems become smarter as more data is fed to them, they get better at predicting outcomes over time — making the turnaround time between consumer action, data insight, and marketer intervention almost immediate. This opens up a world of opportunity for businesses to iterate on the customer experience when it counts most — in real time.

For example, HSBC, a financial services company, recently piloted AI-driven dynamic content against static content on its mobile app home page via Adobe Target. The personalized results drastically outperformed the company’s static peers in terms of click-through rates to product pages.

With AI, advertising is a science with many possibilities

Historically, advertising was a guessing game. Ads used to take a one-size-fits-all approach, regardless of what channel they were on, forcing marketers to predict what would resonate with the widest slice of their audience. Today, we’re far from that. The combination of digital media and AI has transformed advertising into a science.

AI not only helps businesses better connect with their existing customer base, it can also help them identify new ones. Take look-alike modeling, a process which involves comparing demographic and psychographic traits of existing customers to predict which type of consumers are more likely to convert. Princess Cruises, using Adobe Experience Cloud, recently employed look-alike modeling to identify high-value customer segments. By considering the interests and experiences of prior cruisers, the business helped its marketers identify ideal consumer targets.

Alternatively, our AI models can also make recommendations around audience suppression, encouraging businesses to skip over certain consumers they’re unlikely to win over.

Everything is customizable, even the shopping experience

Consumers have come to expect customized online shopping experiences regardless of where or how they’re buying. As a result, Gartner predicts that by 2020, digital companies will boost their profits by as much as 15% by using AI to predict customer intent.

Whether you’re a midsize organization or a household brand, AI will be the key to help your business achieve more human customer experience, and Adobe Target will be the vehicle to get you there. Forget about having analysts crunch the data by hand, that’s a thing of the past. It’s time to be forward-thinking and put your trust in the power of AI and machine learning. Your customers and your business won’t be disappointed.

For more information on how your organization can create a competitive edge with AI and ML powered personalization via Adobe Target, click here.

This article was previously published on CIO.com.