Our review of Eagle Eye’s AI Anthology: The Definitive Resource on Leveraging AI for Personalization & Retail Marketing
If you’ve ever experienced living through a hurricane, you might relate to the disconnect between the estimation of the storm’s power by reading weather maps as opposed to living through the storm as it passes over your head. There’s a parallel with Artificial Intelligence (AI) as it applies to retail marketing, though we expect the outcome of AI to customer loyalty to be positive and accretive.
C-Suite executives are searching for answers. A study by Forrester finds that while 70% of the retail executives surveyed are excited about AI, only 20% are currently leveraging advanced AI to improve their businesses. As brand marketers ponder the possibilities, they are hungry for definitive evidence and market proof to clearly illustrate exactly what AI will do for their business.
Eagle Eye has been ahead of its time on the topic of AI, hiring the industry’s first Chief AI Officer in 2023 and launching Eagle AI as an AI-based solution built specifically for the grocery and retail sectors. It also acquired Untie Nots, a French high-growth SaaS company that leverages AI and data science to enable retailers to develop highly personalized, profitable, and gamified promotions at scale.
Eagle Eye CEO - Tim Mason readily shares that “loyalty has a lot to gain from machine learning and automated technology.” He knows that retailers and brands already use technology to create truly personalized and gamified rewards, content, offers and messages that make loyalty members feel special. Like many of you, Mason believes that the ‘holy grail’ of retail marketing is true one-to-one engagement. If we can fully understand the optimal application of AI, that goal is finally within our reach.
As a step on its mission to enable retailers to deliver on the promise of personalization at the highest level, Eagle Eye commissioned the creation of Eagle Eye’s AI Anthology: The Definitive Resource on Leveraging AI for Personalization & Retail Marketing. The AI Anthology is a compilation of five curated articles written by the most informed minds at Eagle Eye, including contributions from - Jean-Matthieu Schertzer, Chief AI Officer at EagleAI, and Zyed Jamoussi, Founder of Untie Nots and now Managing Director at EagleAI. Writing from different perspectives, they collectively answer these questions:
- When will this technology be ready for implementation?
- How will retailers make it fit alongside their current strategies and processes?
- Are any retailers already leveraging AI for personalization or promotions?
- Is it delivering results?
- What does a comprehensive AI solution designed for retail look like?
A Mandate for Omnichannel Personalization
The more accustomed consumers become to the data-driven marketing tactics of retailers, the higher their expectations for personalization seem to rise. Research shows that 60% of shoppers worldwide believe it is “extremely” or “very” important to receive offers from a store or brand which are personalized to their needs.
For brands to connect effectively with their customers, they must adopt an omnichannel approach. Shopify research found that 53% of shoppers said they are likely to look at a product in-store but then buy it online. Numbers like these emphasize the dominant trend of a seamless omnichannel shopping experience.
Retailers will attest to why an omnichannel approach is important. In a recent conference presentation Anna Esrov, VP Customer Experience & Loyalty, Boll & Branch shared the omni-channel customer is 3x more valuable than single channel customers and represents 3x higher Average Order Value, 5% higher referral rates, and a 30% higher frequency to purchase in 30-day cycles.
Because of this omnichannel impact on value, retailers must adapt their in-shopping experience to match customers’ digital expectations. This finding came from Deloitte research which also noted that consumers desire more tech experiences that lead to deeper omnichannel engagement with the brands they love and patronize.
Omnichannel personalization also delivers performance results to retailers. For example. Australian retail giant Woolworths found that through investment in a data analytics company equipped with a personalization engine, it was able to realize customers 5X more likely to buy than they would have been when treated with traditional marketing.
Using AI to Achieve Personalization at Scale
The Eagle Eye Anthology says that to make personalization a reality, retailers need to understand three key points if they are to effectively execute broad-based personalization tactics:
The need for data quantity and quality
- AI models trained on poor-quality data will generate subpar outputs. Therefore, pre-processing data is of paramount importance.
Optimal integration of AI Outputs
- Finding the right implementation balance often requires adapting existing tools (or using purpose-built monitoring dashboards), putting common-sense guardrails in place, and enforcing manual review when AI predictions are uncertain.
How to trigger an AI-driven virtuous cycle
- Creating the capacity to measure the efficacy of predictions emanating from an AI engine is critical to allow for continuous improvement. Retailers should understand that optimizations multiply quickly, and the initial performance improvements are only the beginning.
Bruce Smith, who founded the connected fitness company Hydrow says that the proprietary data held by a brand is its most powerful and unique competitive differentiator. The company’s “alpha” is constituted by the way it collects and manages asymmetric customer data – Zero-Party data (ZPD) in a more familiar language. With the cost of creating content "trending towards zero", the ability to trial an unlimited volume of messages to consumers based on their personal data is bringing "personalization at scale" into focus.
Marrying Customer Data to Gamification
Non-offer content is central to winning the engagement and experience battle, hence why gamification has become central to many retailer loyalty programs. One study found that over 60% of customers who interacted with gamified elements went on to make a purchase. With the cost of producing content trending towards zero, AI can be used to test more approaches to engage the customer than ever before.
According to Mordor Intelligence, 40% of American retailers have already adopted AI in some form, and this number is projected to leap to 80% over the next three years. The next frontier will be choosing the right AI solutions that support customer loyalty and retention.
Today, retailers generate more data than at any other point in history and often speak about making data-driven decisions. Now is the time for retailers to build platforms to support advanced personalization based not on customer segments but on individual customers and their behaviors. And this is where predictive AI’s capabilities come to the fore. The right AI tools can harness the data retailers already hold to deliver real-time individualized offers or individualized gamified loyalty experiences based on thousands of metrics.
While AI in retail is far from critical mass, many opportunities exist for retailers wanting to take advantage of this generational technological development. Retail chains worldwide have already made substantial investments in AI tools. And AI has already produced dividends for retailers that have taken the leap of faith, for example, Amazon’s investments in AI features for its cloud computing business have already led to a 7% increase in its share price in February 2024.
Brands investing in AI now are set to position themselves as leaders in their niches, representing billions in potential profits in the coming years. A 2024 study by NVIDIA, the State of AI, and Retail in CPG, found that 69% of retailers have attributed increases in annual revenue directly to embracing AI technologies. Eagle Eye’s AI Anthology cites similarly powerful results experienced by Tesco, Carrefour, and Starbucks.
Retailers are operating in an increasingly omnichannel world and are seeking answers on how to leverage personalization and gamification to enhance their loyalty strategies and overall engagement with their customers. The demand for a retail-specific solution that will transform how retailers utilize data and personalization to revolutionize loyalty is met by EagleAI, as it adapts AI to serve as a catalyst to advance these larger strategic aims.
These key themes are captured in Eagle Eye’s AI Anthology, and you can find the guide here to read the entire compilation of articles and gain the practical tools that you need to refine, accelerate, and scale offers to your most valuable asset – your customers.
