AI-Powered Optimization of Websites: Steps to Improve Customer Experience with AI
How AI assists in effective content creation and personalized targeting?
For a few years, mobile-first was an approach readily followed for a better customer experience. According to Google, with the “new shift in computing,” AI-first has become the driving force for both search engines and marketers alike. It marks a shift in approach where the focus is now on uplifting the user search experience with an ultimate intent to improve the customer experience.
The AI-powered Google Algorithms, such as Hummingbird, RankBrain, and BERT count completely on advanced machine learning and natural language processing models to achieve such milestones. While the search engines, through AI deep learning systems, are focusing incessantly on creating better and relevant user experiences, marketers, on the other hand, are increasingly conscious of the challenges these algorithms pose. However, such AI transformations simultaneously create new opportunities for marketers to rethink and re-strategize optimization techniques for the websites for better customer experience and retention.
Contextually, a question pops up!
Why Do We Need AI-Powered Optimization of Websites?
- AI can execute cognitive tasks better than humans
- Predictive Intelligence can help process and interpret patterns in data
- AI can assist in making informed decisions out of unstructured data
- AI can track consumer preferences across multiple touch points
- Machine learning can help automate various decision-making tasks
- AI can process human language and understand the context and intent
These AI capabilities are impressive enough to encourage us to identify possibilities and strategies of how AI can augment optimization efforts. As a matter of fact, a hybrid strategy where you can club conventional optimization efforts with the AI-powered optimization of websites will produce outstanding results for enriched customer experiences, better customer retention, and higher conversion rates. Let’s figure out how?
This article typically focuses on identifying various touch points where AI can utilize user behavior data and augment content building possibilities with personalization and other allied techniques.
User Behavior & AI
Having an in-depth understanding of user behavior paves way for better marketing strategies.
Research by McKinsey shows that “organizations that leverage customer behavioral insights outperform peers by 85 percent in sales growth and more than 25 percent in gross margin.”
A typically rich behavioral data-set, in this case, would mean customer profiles having detailed information about their buying histories, preferences, transaction-based insights, and sentiment scoring. While you can install heatmaps and gather screen click-recordings of your website customers, you can also use forms with some qualifying questions to understand the buyer intent and their journeys. Gathering this data about user behavior is in fact, one of the first and crucial steps towards a better customer experience.
Simulating personalities and building buyer personas: Creating buyer personas using such data sets and profiling can bring a big boost to your conversions. This activity of building the semi-fictional representations of your actual customers, based on real demographic and psychographic data, will allow a deeper understanding of their pain points and needs.
You will know how to target them effectively and even steer their journeys towards the conversion goals. The industry acknowledges personas as reliable marketing instruments that have the potential to increase conversion rates manifold.
AI-Powered Persona Creator & User Behavior: While there are tools that generate user-personas as per the data you feed, there are some AI-powered persona creator tools such as Delve AI that automatically updates the buyer persona and are mapped with your website’s Google Analytics data to automatically “generate segment-wise, data-driven buyer personas usually in minutes, using machine learning.”
With such AI persona creators, personas are “auto-generated and keep getting updated by itself,” saving time and effort required for segmentation of the audience. (Source: Delve AI) Such an activity helps the marketers in knowing their audience and in grouping them into cohorts — which are then targeted with highly relevant and personalized messages thereby increasing the chances of customer retention, engagement, and conversion.
Personalization: Machine-learning goes a step further to determine what messages should reach out to which segment of customers and when. One of the finest examples of personalization is Amazon’s AI-powered product recommendations that “fuels 35% of customer purchases.” (Source: mdm)
Amazon’s AI engine, through machine learning and predictive analysis, understands the buying patterns and customer preferences of individuals, thereby recommending individualized products — the products that a user is likely to buy. Remember the suggestions popping up amidst your online shopping spree — “Products you may like,” “Frequently bought together,” “Customer who bought this, also bought this,” “Save for later,” so on and so forth.
There can be innumerable ways of building such recommendation algorithms. Most of the eCommerce websites, however, rely on AI services and solutions offered by AWS. For instance, Amazon.com depends on Amazon Personalize for product recommendations and personalization.
BigBasket is another business house that digs deep into its data lake, figures out the customer preferences, and recommends products accordingly. It banks upon AI for product listing and recommendations and offers a “Smart basket” that is actually a list of usually-purchased items which the users are likely to buy repeatedly. This smart basket, in its entirety, is sophisticated machine-learning and analytics combined to produce tailored recommendations for the users based on their previous purchase histories and online clickstream behavior.
As such, personalization on eCommerce websites can be categorized as one of the major AI-powered content marketing techniques that ensures that the right content reaches the right audience at the right time. While AI, in its myriad manifestations — personas, personalization — works wonders for eCommerce websites, it does help the other kinds of websites whether business-based branding websites, non-profit websites, or blogs. Personas and relevant content are the key here too!
Content & AI
Targeting your potential customers with highly relevant content can be challenging at times. Accomplishing this marketing goal manually can be taxing. With AI coming into the picture, the process of content creation and content distribution has become all the more effective and aligned with the user search intent.
Contextually, AI-powered tools can guide the content teams with insights into what their customers are looking for on the search engines and how to optimize content to be effective. The key difference between the manual efforts and AI-based content assistance is the data-driven approach that AI follows which implies accurate user behavior analysis with reliable predictive intelligence and content recommendations.
AI & Topic Inspiration: Topic Clusters: Content and optimization tools by HubSpot, through artificial intelligence, can suggest relevant topics for the marketers to build their content around. These suggestions are not mere haunches but are based on predictive intelligence and the fact that the latest search engine algorithms uphold topic clusters.
“You’ll get topic suggestions based on relevance, competition, and popularity, as well as access to monthly search data so you can estimate how ranking for specific topics will translate to organic traffic gains. Then, use HubSpot’s integrated content tools to create clusters of web pages and blog content around each of your core topics.” (Source: HubSpot)
Creating content around topic clusters enhances the authority of the website and improves search engine visibility. In a way, this optimization can help the prospects find you organically, from where you can steer their journeys towards acquisition or conversions on your websites.
Functioning and delivering results on almost the same lines, AI tools such as MarketMuse, Answerthepublic… (and there are more) showcase all the relevant terms associated with a specific topic category. These search listening tools take into account the user search queries and the autocomplete data from search engines, and come up with hundreds of queries built around the primary keyword.
While some queries can bring forth some fresh ideas, some can simply guide the content teams to strategize their content or even structure the layout of the blogs by incorporating the recommended questions as possible headings.
Content Intelligence: Audits and Optimization: As against the manual auditing of the websites, AI can quickly and effectively audit the website, analyze which content pieces need optimization, how to improve those, and what content can contribute to better engagement and generate results.
Content intelligence platforms such as Episerver, Optimizely (and many more) can analyze the impact of a piece of content it has on its audience and can suggest actionable result-oriented insights. Such platforms can be integrated with the CMS allowing seamless processes of content creation, optimization, and distribution — all driven by AI, big data analysis, and natural language processing.
Content Accuracy & Proofreading: Another AI tool that depends on natural language processing models is Grammarly — quite a famous and reliable one. Content generation tools, such as Grammarly with AI assistants, can assist in faster and accurate content creation to help marketers keep pace with the huge demand for content.
From sentence structuring to sentiment analysis of your content, these NLP models do it all. Whether the tone is friendly, whether there is a need to improvise the tone to connect to the audience, whether it is the readability of the content that needs to be taken care of! AI does all of it!
Putting all these efforts for effective content has a direct impact on customer experience and engagement. As such, conversions are more likely when the audience receives tailored content at the right time — the content that resonates with them!
Focusing on such relevant digital touch points is worth the effort. From the most relevant, resonating, and engaging content to knowing the audience and targeting them effectively with the right amount of personalization — AI manages all! AI can certainly help in increasing conversions and customer retention rate by creating the most powerful digital customer experiences, and focusing on varied digital touch points and refurbishing the customer journeys is worth the effort — both for the users and for the marketers alike. Marketers can make effective use of AI for optimizing their websites and especially when AI offers endless possibilities to augment the existing marketing efforts by multiple times.
Read about how AI can assist in SEO of the websites and improve customer retention with optimized voice and visual search.
