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How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Mobile App Marketing?

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Artificial Intelligence may have been around for quite some time, but it has been evolving at varying paces. However, the current pace of evolution and innovation in AI is probably at the highest since it emerged first. The ways in which AI has managed to invade into our lives and disrupt our everyday lives is astounding to say the least, and it is only in the past few years that we have witnessed some groundbreaking breakthroughs in the field.

When it comes to marketing in any field or promotion of any product, it is imperative that the strategies adopted be in sync with the latest technology and leverage it to the utmost. Mobile app marketing is no different and the potential of one of the latest technologies – Artificial Intelligence is spectacularly promising in this regard. In eCommerce industry the big players like Amazon are already putting AI to great use and predicting buying behavior and making recommendations to their customers on the basis of their prior purchases.

The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Mobile App Marketing

Artificial Intelligence in its various forms has made it possible to automate the tasks that were repetitive, and have made them predictive, instead of mechanical. In context of mobile app marketing especially, Artificial Intelligence and machine learning have made it possible to perform actions based on the preferences & needs of the users, without receiving explicit instructions in any manner.

1) Automated Reasoning

This is a field that has emerged from coming together of computer science and mathematical logic and is dedicated to better understand the various aspects of reasoning. This, arguably is one of the most powerful elements of AI and plays a critical part in helping the customer achieve their goal more promptly and in a more convenient manner.

It is by putting AI to use that we have the capability to program apps to perform certain ‘human-like’ abilities by affording them the capacity to reason for themselves without the need for any real human intervention at any point. Once the apps have been aptly programmed, they have the ability to observe and analyze the in-app behavior of different users and make quick decisions based on the behavior patterns and other numerous parameters. This essentially means that you are enabling the app to move away from the ‘one size fits all’ concept and offer, to the users a more customized experience and options.

One of the most successful examples of this is Uber. The app makes use of AI to take into account the time of the day, traffic conditions, location etc. to suggest to their drivers the best possible route to take. This is how the drivers reach their customers in the shortest possible time, thus fulfilling their objective of using the app feature. How does that happen? The app makes use of an algorithm that takes millions of pieces of information that are collected from other drivers in the community, the routes taken by them, and the learning or insights it has gathered by observing them and accomplishes this seemingly magical task.

2) Enhanced User Experience

If you are an app developer, you have the privilege of being on both ends of the spectrum and have been through the pain of a user bombarded with irrelevant push notifications, spammy emailers or simply an overload of information. With artificial intelligence in play, the marketing strategies are more personalized, hence the promotion material becomes actually enjoyable. AI has the ability to figure out the patterns by sorting through massive amount of data and make sense of it in record time while maintaining impressive accuracy levels and thus offer to the consumers tailored and personalized user experience. Ironically enough, we are using artificial intelligence in mobile app marketing to lend it a more human touch. A good marketer has the potential to make use of AI in order to understand the customers and users better, and then use their own creativity and imagination to come up with the most compelling marketing campaigns.

3) Performance Based Marketing

There was a time when studies were conducted on the target user groups using marketing research tools like focus groups, lead scoring, and marketing platforms, but today, it is all about artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence combined with machine learning has the potential to assess not just the target customers, but also the entire industry that your app is a part of. It has the capability to scan huge demographic groups and browse through entire generations of texts, phrases, questions, and shoppers in order to unveil hidden patterns, solutions, and opportunities in the data.

A mobile app marketer must create a culture that relentlessly focuses on performance and on measurement, and then make use of AI in order to take it further and draw in maximum benefits. The future belongs to those who can inculcate a performance-based culture in their organizations and focus almost obsessively on relevant metrics & measurements before using AI to heighten the essence of that culture and reap in huge benefits.

4) Content is King

Content indeed is the king today and no matter what material you are sending to your client including push notifications, emailers, or an in-app message, the content needs to be drafted only after due research, must be worded carefully before being sent to the users who have agreed to receive them. Writing great and meaningful content is not as easy as it sounds and involves quite a few considerations including – getting the wording just right, or personalizing the message just a tad, and many such more factors. This is one of those heavy responsibilities that have made their way stealthily on to a marketer’s plate. As per recent studies however, it is predicted that by the end of this year, almost 20% of the content would be created by machines. One of the most crucial elements of this is making viable topic suggestions to the marketer helping them decide what they must write about keeping the target audience in consideration. It is the first few interactions of the user with the app that have crucial importance and are instrumental in their decision of keeping the app or moving on. Now that artificial intelligence is a part of the app program, and is running in the background, it collects information about their in-app behavior and makes each interactive session more valuable that the one preceding it. This will eventually bring about an overall increase in the overall user retention and engagement. What Artificial Intelligence does for the marketers is take away any guesswork that was in play, instilling an inherent confidence in them about delivering the right message, to the right group of users, at the right time, through the right channel.

5) The Right Recommendations

Did you know that about 80% of the app users stop using the app and abandon it within 90 days of first downloading the app?

This is an alarming piece of data, especially if you are planning to develop an app for your business. The users mostly uninstall those apps that fail to engage them. Even though you have been sending out push notifications with fresh content to all your users, if it is not relevant to the recipient, it will do you more harm than good! In this era of technological advancements and intuitive machines, the customers expect a lot more from the apps that they download on their mobile devices. The average app user today expects an intuitive and customized experience, and anything less than that is entirely unacceptable, which would often lead them go looking for a competitor who offers them what they are looking for.

Artificial Intelligence allows you to apply a learning algorithm that can easily monitor the choices or decisions made by the users while using their app, understand their preferences. It is this information that can help your app make relevant recommendations to your users so that they remain engaged and interested.

Some of the most successful examples of this are YouTube and Netflix who have implemented such learning algorithms and have been able to put artificial intelligence to good use. This is the magic behind them coming up with recommendations that suit you to the tee!

6) Focus on Whole Customer Journey

Of the total number of people who download an app, around 80% stop using it within 3 days of installing it. It is a sign that the quest to understand the customers or users can not end at the stage where you get them to download the app. You must ensure that they stay your customers by engaging them constructively and in an enjoyable manner.

AI goes beyond just the download or install stage and renders a more holistic picture of the customer behavior and the evolution it goes through after the install, and after each interaction. It can even identify relevant patterns among customers, thus offering insight into the best way to approach the customers at opportune moments.

7) Understanding Buying Behavior

The ultimate goal of building an app, for most people is to make money from it. Once you have gained a decent number of downloads (a number you should decide in your initial business plan regarding the app), it is them imperative that you think about ways to make money from it and earn revenue from your customers. It is common knowledge that gaining new customers for your app is not just time consuming, but also tough, and quite a costly affair. However, up-selling to your existing pool of loyal customers can prove to be the main growth driver for a business app like yours. There are the age-old methods of shooting out emailers, bombarding your customers with push notifications, or in-app messages to hard sell each and everything incessantly is a sure-shot way to getting your app uninstalled from most of the customers’ devices.

There is no dearth of user data available for any app owner which can be a great advantage, but a big hassle as well! It is important for any mobile app marketer to know how and who to target and make informed & cautious decision about what to sell, who to sell to, and when to make the sale. This is where Artificial Intelligence comes in handy. This massive data set in front of you might be humanly impossible to sift through but can be accomplished in a fraction of that time using AI. It can actually help you analyze user behavior of the customers on your app and help you distinguish between those who may be recognized as the ‘hot leads’ from those who are not. A system that is designed and powered by AI has the ability to learn the ideal time to shoot targeted, relevant suggestions about the products and services that are offered by your app and send them to only those users who care the most about your app and its offerings.

8) Customer Decisions Powered by AI

The future belongs to AI in more ways than one. It is because of the accuracy afforded by AI that customers or app users would eventually disregard the recommendations and simply trust AI for making their buying decisions. As an example, a customer could wade through thousands of clothing recommendations by setting in filters and spend precious time looking for things that they may or may not like, or they could simply rely on the recommendations made to them by an AI program that would leverage their past preferences and data about how they have interacted with similar apps or services in the past.

As a mobile app marketer, you must pay attention to make better recommendations for your targeted app users, upon every interaction they have with your app. AI gives you all the data and insights, but it is up to you, as a marketer to make use of the data at your disposal and offer the best recommendations and experience to your users.

9) Importance of Localization

A great section of the AI integrated apps would be centered around voice control, which means that it would do well to channelize efforts towards app localization. If you were to only offer your app in a single language, you would probably be restricting your audience greatly and missing out on a huge pool of users. When you localize your app, you offer to your users the same seamless experience irrespective of their chosen or preferred language.

10) Unlock Customer Data with Privacy in Mind

AI and machine learning models can learn patterns really well, sometimes too well. We all know the eerie feeling of a product recommendation that hits too close to home as if algorithms were reading our minds. More and more customers demand privacy, locking away their data and valuable, population-level intelligence. One way to overcome this is to use next-gen privacy-enhancing technologies, like synthetic data to unlock customer data in a way that respects their privacy.