With India undergoing a digital evolution, a majority of the most successful companies are adopting marketing automation solutions to increase the overall success rate of their marketing campaigns across channels, states a recent trend report released by Netcore Solutions, India’s leading full-stack marketing technology company.

The marketing automation industry is worth about $5.5 billion and drives lead generation and prospect nurturing globally. Given the potential of marketing automation and brands spending increasingly more time and money on marketing in a digital world, here are seven key trends on how marketing automation is set to evolve in 2017:

1. Chatbots: Chatbots have been hailed as the biggest technology wave in 20 years. Chatbots are poised to be the paradigm shift of the decade and will have a huge impact on customer experience. Chatbots are already engaging consumers on the brand’s owned properties such as website, mobile app, etc. Using real-time analytics brands will look to create hyper-personalised conversations with the consumer across different owned mediums.

Several industry surveys have highlighted that approximately 49.4 per cent of consumers have shown interest in connecting with a brand through chatbots over SMSes.

However, the report by Netcore suggests that the biggest revolution in chatbots will be driven by messaging apps. Smartphone users today use personal messaging apps several times a day. For brands, it is imperative to be present where their customers are. Hence, in the next five years brands would need to leverage chatbots to create meaningful conversations with their consumers. In a country like India, WhatsApp is ubiquitous. Hence, if chatbots start invading messaging apps such as WhatsApp, the dynamics of marketing will go through a paradigm shift. Marketers in future would combine machine learning, deep learning, AI, natural language processing, and recommendation engines to fine tune their chatbots.

2. Rise of In-the-moment campaigns: Modern marketing has now evolved towards using real-time data for marketing. With real-time data, marketers can create in-the-moment campaigns. Although research has shown that superlative customer experience is critical to a brand’s success, less than a third of marketers currently use real-time marketing.

Like a sales person in a brick-and-mortar store, real-time marketing allows to monitor a customer’s web activity in real time and immediately send them a message based on it (via a chat window asking if they need help or a sticky bar with a code for additional discounts to nudge them towards a purchase, etc.) Marketers can use real-time social listening platforms so that a customer’s activity on social media triggers marketing messages.

3. Audience targeting eyeing OTS: Audience targeting is the marketer’s ability to reach out to their own prospects through other paid channels. Audience targeting is going to gain a lot of traction in India through options like Facebook Custom Audience and Google Customer Match. Both the services (Google Customer Match and Facebook Custom Audience) are expected to gain traction in the next few years. Marketers would upload their own customer lists on the platforms and then show customized brand messages to those consumers utilizing the power of customer segmentation principle. More and more audience targeting will be driven by cross-channel marketing strategy with a view to increase a customer’s “opportunity to see” (OTS).

4. Unified view of the customer: With the smartphone revolution, consumers leave behind implicit and explicit data across an array of touchpoints, spread across multiple vendors. Marketers are already collecting customer data across several channels and touchpoints to understand customer behaviour. However, this reliance on customer’s ‘digital pheromones ‘is going to increase in the next few years. From data silos, marketers will shift towards unified view of the customer data to leverage customer data optimally, from a customer’s offline and online activities.

5. Analytics: While ‘predictive analytic’ has been long-used buzzwords, marketers are slowly waking up to the potential of such easier-to-implement analytics to drive marketing change and create real impact in the year to come. The adoption of predictive analytics is expected to witness a surge bolstered by the need to attain higher RoI and also to re-activate dormant customers.

Predictive analytics will be more effectively utilized to forecast the next steps of a customer and push relevant, personalised campaigns to them. Based on the analysis, marketers can decide whether to cross-sell or up sell to customers, which customers show signs of becoming a premium, high-segment customers etc., and then target them accordingly.

6. Mass hyper-personalisation: Today, the competitive landscape is defined by customer experience. The future is going to be dominated by brands that have individualised their marketing activities to consumers. With multiplicity of devices or mediums consumers today are inundated with marketing messages. So relevant and hyper personalised messaging is the critical differentiator that will save messages from being ignored or spammed. With this message deluge, which are largely non-personal in nature, brands risk pushing customers from ‘customer delight’ to ‘customer annoyance’. Mass 1:1 personalisation will be the norm for the smart marketer of the future.

7. Rise of the CDOs: India is increasingly becoming a cashless economy, particularly in light of recent government policies. So now, more than ever before, brands need to go digital or risk failure. Chief Digital Officers (CDOs) are the leaders driving this organisational change. A key pillar of a digital organisation is digital marketing and CDOs will rise to work closely and in synergy with Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs), to become the chief influencers and decision-makers.