Why Generative AI is a Must-Have for Every Marketer’s Toolbox to Understand Customer Emotions

Generative AI took the business world by storm in 2023, helping organizations reimagine everyday processes and interactions. Many are experimenting with it to boost productivity – such as increased content production – and reduce time spent on menial tasks.

For marketers, GenAI’s potential can be even greater than just efficiency gains. In addition to the above use cases, marketers can use GenAI to increase conversions, recover abandoned online shopping carts, and drive e-commerce revenue through better personalization. In fact, 85% of marketers believe the technology can be effective at driving personalization in their marketing communications.

All signs point to AI’s increased use in the years to come as it becomes further woven into the fabric of business and marketing operations. I believe the most potent applications for marketers are to use GenAI not only to understand how emotional drivers impact customer actions, but also to use that insight to increase conversions and drive revenue.

Using GenAI  to understand customer emotions

Fundamentally, GenAI uses machine learning to pinpoint trends and patterns in pre-existing data to create new content. Such content includes text, images, video, and even audio. The technology has widespread use cases across industries. Marketers can use GenAI for a variety of functions including automating repetitive tasks and creating content based on consumer sentiment and behavior, and brand engagement.

So, how and where do emotions fit into this? The answer can be found in a specialized enterprise type of GenAI: Emotion-informed GenAI. It generates content from a sophisticated and proven knowledge base of the words, phrases, and sentences that perform best and resonate most with customers so they take action and increase your conversions. This specialized technology identifies the common, trending patterns within the data and maps them to the types of motivators that resonate with customers. And it works! For example, applying this specialized AI to the online cart – where abandonment occurs at a rate of over 70% losing ecommerce brands $18 billion in sales per year – not only strengthens customer relationships but also reduces cart abandonment, ultimately increasing revenue.

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Keeping pace with ever-evolving customer behaviors and market conditions

It can be challenging to keep up with the ever-changing demands of customers, given our digital world is powered by instant access to information and gratification with just a few, quick clicks. It is also increasingly difficult to stand out in the crowded digital content market. This is where personalized language comes into play.

As market conditions ebb and flow, the needs, wants and motivators behind customer behaviors will inevitably change too, and so must the personalized language used in your communications and campaigns — whether to acquire new customers or continue to engage the ones you already have. Emotion-informed GenAI is a proven way to understand how people react to specific words and phrases, as well as what language is most likely to inspire them. What’s more, it can better guide and create fresh content that is most likely to motivate customers to take action.

For context, Persado’s 2023 Customer Motivation Report, which analyzed consumer responses to 20.9 billion messages across 3,200+ campaigns, found that narratives with “stability,” “consistency,” and “reliability” not only grasped the attention of customers but also inspired action. The report also found that “timelessness” was a top-performing narrative in fashion and retail. For example, in one apparel brand’s campaign, its message around “timelessness” outperformed messages around “hype” and “versatility,” resulting in a 27% click increase.

Tuning in to customer emotions to personalize and drive revenue

True personalization is a key driver in today’s technology-driven ecosystem, and emotion-informed, motivation-aware GenAI is the vehicle that brands of all sizes are using to achieve personalization at scale. Ask yourself: With the number of ads and emails from brands that you receive each day, which ones break through the noise? What messaging resonates with and motivates you? And most importantly, which ones actually inspire you to take action?  It all boils down to emotions and language tailored to you — a.k.a the individual — versus the masses. Language personalization lifts the curtain between businesses and their customers, unveiling what sings to and inspires each individual to act across every touchpoint in a customer journey.

The payoff for marketers using emotion-informed GenAI is threefold. First, efficiency gains from scalable content generation. Second, a dramatic increase in the performance of communications that use motivating language and phrases. And third, revenue gains from increased conversions.

As you prepare your marketing plans and strategies for 2024 and beyond, consider which GenAI solutions are going to deliver on your business objectives. Moving beyond pure efficiency gains, emotion-informed AI solutions can transform your customer interactions by leveraging motivating language to propel personalization and increase conversions and revenue.

 

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