AI Age Digital Marketing: How Chatbots like ChatGPT are Affecting Customer-business Relationships

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is quickly changing the way businesses operate, and the digital marketing scene is no exception to this impactful digital phenomenon. The emergence of chatbots has revolutionized the way businesses interact with their customers, with complex jobs like customer segmentation and data analysis with immense precision and in very less time. With the tech giants totally invested in releasing their own chatbots one after the other, from Open AI’s ChatGPT to Microsoft’s Bing Chatbot and even Google announcing its entry into the race to the AI age, a chatbot boom is probably just around the corner. With this emergence of chatbots and the subsequent democratization of AI, there are to be major changes in the scope and technical prospects of the digital marketing world and the way business-to-customer interactions would occur hereafter.

From one-message-fits-all to highly personalized customer engagement

Personalization of business messaging for select customers has traditionally been a desirable but highly vexing job. However, its results have always been startling, with research suggesting that even putting the name of customers alone in email marketing messages leads to a surge in impression rates by 5.2%. Chatbots like ChatGPT have brought a revolution in content generation through deep learning, which allows them to produce intelligent, conversational, and human-like responses to queries. Combined with its ability to provide insights into customer behaviour and preferences on the basis of its analysis of customer interactions, it proves to be a highly effective tool in helping create tailor-made content for each customer segment. 

In the coming times, from leveraging the complex language processing models to automation of repetitive tasks, chatbots would lead to hikes in Click-through rates (CTRs) of business-to-customer interactions. 

For instance, AI-powered chatbots would have a direct introductory conversation with them and immediately divert them to a human. On the other hand, their conversational data and analysis of the customer’s preferences and behavior would help the human behind the business have a greater chance at successful consumer engagement. 

Hyper-personalization: The Next Level of Digital Marketing

While personalization of business messaging does contribute its part in developing closer customer relationships and fruitful engagement, it’s not going to be enough in the coming days. 

Business messages would have to grow more relevant and timely to ensure the greatest chances of lead generation from engagement, especially with rising competition from the democratization of AI technologies. With the ease of availability of real-time behavioral data of customers, businesses would have to indulge in hyper-personalized digital marketing campaigns to tap their potential audiences. From e-commerce giant Amazon to global music service Spotify, every industry-leading business is taking advantage of hyper-personalized digital campaigns and registering growth in its consumer base. Amazon has a ‘recommendation engine’ they use to curate hyper-personalized engagements with their consumers, right from their amazon home pages to the emails they receive and much more. 

The following two things are to be kept in mind while venturing into a hyper-personalized digital marketing campaign: – 

1. Collecting Behavioral data: Compared to traditional personalization, hyper-personalization would have greater relevance of real-time behavioral data. The more comprehensive your data, the more personalized your message would be with higher chances of lead generation.

2. Timeliness: Timing is of the essence when it comes to hyper-personalized messaging. Based on their trends and real-time online behaviour data, messages can be targeted to customers at optimal times for the greatest likelihood of effective consumer engagement. 

For example – dropping an advertisement for an upcoming sale of electronics to a user who came to your website looking for a headphone or mobile device, even if he didn’t buy anything, is a perfect example of a hyper-personalized digital marketing message placed for the right person at the right time. 

Conclusion

As the market braces for a potential chatbot boom, there are numerous aspects of digital marketing that would undergo a major metamorphosis in the coming years. Personalization of digital marketing strategies is inevitable with the rise of nuanced chatbot models based on complex language learning processes. However, another phenomenon, which has already shown some of its effects on the market but is yet to fully democratize and manifest in the market at large is hyper-personalization. E-commerce and the digital marketing world have to brace themselves for large chunks of real-time data analysis and pushing out timely messages to each and every customer in accordance with their preferences and online behaviour to truly lead to a successful digital marketing campaign and subsequent lead generation.