AI powered personalization for websites: The key to scaling your business

Authored by Apoorv Sood, Vice President Of Global Business Development and Partnerships, WebEngage

Businesses today are aware of how valuable a good customer experience is for their success, and therefore are on the constant lookout for trends and tools that can be incorporated into their wider marketing strategy so as to be able to deliver an elevated and hyper-personalized customer experience. Artificial Intelligence (AI), a leading technology,  continues to gain momentum and popularity for marketers and sales professionals to enhance customer retention through enhanced engagement across various touch points in the customer journey. As per a report by ResearchandMarkets,The AI solution market is expected to achieve a total global value of $301.2 billion by 2028.

AI-powered personalization for websites is one such strategy that uses machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence to customize the online experience for each visitor based on their overall behavior, preferences, and interests. The technology works by collecting and analyzing data at various touch points, including browsing history, search terms, click behavior, and purchase history, and then using this data to make real-time decisions about which content to show to each visitor.

By leveraging AI-powered personalization, businesses can increase engagement and conversions on their website by showing visitors content and offers that are relevant to their interests and needs. This uniquely tailored and personalized experience that each customer enjoys, over a period of time, will result in improved customer satisfaction and also earn loyalty for the brand.

There are a set of questions that enterprises should consider while beginning the website personalisation process and vetting platforms to implement this. 'Death by Tools’, a report by WebEngage suggests the following for consideration:

• Does the platform provide a no/low-code interface for website personalization?
• Does the platform connect with your existing CMS to provide content personalization?
• Does the platform connect via APIs and provide real-time data fetch from your CDP/CRM?
• Does the platform support segment-level personalization?
• Does the platform support behavior-driven personalization for your customers?
• Does the platform connect with your catalog/recommendation engine to provide personalization?

Importance of AI in website personalization

• Leveraging data intelligence to understand customer behavior: AI and ML enable businesses to continuously learn and improve from the data it analyzes, thereby, making them capable of anticipating customer behavior. This in turn provides actionable insights to brands on how they can provide highly relevant and personalized content to customers, improving their journey at every step.

1. Real-time analysis with decision-led AI: AI allows for real-time decisioning - which is the ability to make a decision based on the most recent data that is available, even as recent as the data from the current interaction that a customer is having.  An effective tool for personalization, it helps enterprises understand a customer’s requirements through data in real-time.

1. Conversational AI: Businesses should view chatbots as an aid to employees and not as a replacement for humans. Chatbots have the potential to address transactional problems, often related to information discovery. Developments in conversational AI like Natural Language Processing (NLP) have made it possible for easy, reliant customer engagement on one hand, and has made it possible to enter into newer markets and target wider segments of customers without letting language and dialectic nuances become a barrier. Conversational AI adoption in India has seen a significant spike in recent years. In fact, according to a report by ResearchAndMarkets.com, the conversational commerce transaction value in the country will increase from US$21,902.0 million in 2023 to reach US$51,970.9 million by 2028^[1].

• Hyper-personalized recommendations: Brands should look at incorporating AI-generated content into communication with customers. To establish experiential engagement, AI can use customers’ features, likeness or preferences, creating a differentiating strategy for businesses competing in a creative niche.
• Enhanced customer engagement with content generation: Dynamic content generation refers to the technique of employing AI algorithms to automatically generate content material for a website that is based on a user's choices. This can extend to product descriptions and blogs as well.

Future developments in website personalization powered by AI are likely to offer users increasingly more sophisticated and individualised experiences. As AI continues to advance, businesses will have access to increasingly more potent algorithms and tools that can be used to gather, analyze, and react to consumer data in real-time.

The rising usage of natural language processing (NLP) and chatbots is anticipated to be one of the primary areas of focus for future developments in AI-powered website personalisation. NLP is an area of AI that deals with the use of natural language in communication between machines and people. NLP will enable chatbots to comprehend customer requests and respond to them in a more human-like manner, resulting in a more conversational and natural user experience.