Artificial Intelligence (AI) innovation is revolutionising sales and marketing by delivering in-depth market insight and deepening understanding of consumer behaviours. These advances are giving retail companies new opportunities to improve sales, brand-value and customer loyalty. In this blog post, we will explore how retail companies are using AI to boost sales and marketing through more targeted and poignant campaigns.
Cross-Selling to the Right Customers
AI innovation has delivered greater customer insight into shopping habits. Using machine learning algorithms, retailers can analyse large volumes of data to develop in-depth profiles on their customers. Thanks to these algorithms, it is possible to identify a customer’s demographic information, how much they spend and what they spend it on. With this information, retailers identify the best customers who would respond positively to a targeted campaign. Galeries Lafayette, a prominent retailer in France, uses AI to optimise their cross-selling campaign. They analyse data collected from 60 stores and 100s of items to identify the customers at the store who would most likely benefit from complementary items.
Using AI allows Galeries Lafayette to accomplish two goals: Personalise each email for customers, which incites a positive response. Select the most desirable customers only, allowing them to limit their spending on marketing.
Dynamic Pricing
Dynamic pricing allows companies to set different prices based on demand and supply to entice customers to encourage demand. Before AI, companies had to hire a dedicated team and large servers to store data. Moreover, it was impossible to account for unexpected factors. The real-time capabilities of machine learning allows businesses to take advantage of the most recent events to price up or price down.
Improve Sales Without Increasing Sales Personnel
Salespeople spend a good deal of their time performing adminstrative tasks instead of closing high-end tasks. AI technology in analytics software can process vast amounts of data and generate valuable information for salespeople, thus a sales team no longer has to waste time trying to process data that is vague and indistinguishable, allowing them to do more valuable work like farming and hunting for more relevant leads. AI capabilities from software like Salesforce, for example, improve buyer and seller interaction to improve a sales person's chance of winning a deal by providing lead scores, deal scores, opportunity insights, and step on the next method of outreach.
Demand Forecast Optimisation
Forecasting sales is challenging to accomplish but it is now more efficient and accurate. Thanks to machine learning and predictive analytics, retail companies can collect information from sales data and use the data to predict when a stocked item will run out. Using this information, retailers can resupply before the stock runs out. They can also see which good or service is meeting expectations and what is falling behind.
However, retailers can do a lot more than just restock on time, they can devise marketing campaigns to spice up demand. An excellent example is Walmart - the retail giant uses predictive analytics and machine learning to collect data from point of sale terminals to assess demand levels, so they know which items are selling well and which ones are struggling. Once they find items with low demand levels, Walmart will find solutions to boost demand.
Improving Competitive Advantage
Market insights improve a company’s understanding of consumers, which allows them to develop their competitive advantage. Consumer insight reveals that customers are looking for a personalised shopping experience, something that companies can use to their advantage. This is where AI is useful as it can be used in different applications to improve the customer experience. The best example is using glasses that stream information to sales associates, so they know everything about the product and their customers. Digital signage can be integrated into shelves to inform customers and encourage them to try new products.
Amazon uses AI to further their competitive advantage, by using algorithms to recommend products to customers based on their previous purchases. The e-commerce giant revealed that 35% of their revenue comes from their recommendation engine.
AI Makes Sophisticated Marketing More Accessible
AI innovations make in-depth market insight more accessible than before. The processing power of machine learning and predictive analytics gives companies detailed, granular insight into their customers. AI gives companies better marketing techniques to entice customers to spend more like dynamic pricing and recommended engine technology. AI also allows companies to market smarter by identifying and targeting customers more efficiently. Overall, AI is a real game-changer for sales and marketing.
