AI – just a buzzword or a technology to fuel your business? ECommerce businesses, from small to giant, are talking day and night about the new possibilities artificial intelligence can bring.
Let’s figure out if you can really benefit from AI.
Better product recommendations and messages due to AI
Analysis of the way customer interacts with your website, what products he views and what he likes the most is a powerful way to optimize customer’s journey. Using this data, you may craft personalized recommendations and increase conversion rates.
You may have noticed that Netflix proposes you movies you were interested in before, Amazon uses data about your previous purchases for product recommendations.
Imagine your visitor views a dress from your last collection for 5 minutes and returns to this page for 3 times more in the next week. After that, he doesn’t visit your store.
If you have an application, you may send him a notification with the words “Hey! Looks like you have forgotten something” with the photo of the dress.
You may also retarget these visitors with Facebook ads. Give your potential customers a possibility to get a promo code in a chat with your Facebook page. This way you get their Facebook profile and subscribers for your chatbot.
Moreover, now you may now compare which ads and blog posts perform the best and invest money more efficiently.
We are smoothly getting to the next point – personalized messages.
Email marketing is changing a lot lately.
Apart from classic ways to make your subscribers open an email, new and revolutional ones are coming to the stage.
Thanks to AI you may personalize the email or an ad to the particular interests of every customer.
Imagine a client A clicks the ad “new dress for a night out” for dress A and a client B wants to buy the same dress but clicked on “dinner outfit” ad. You also know about preferences of both from their social media profiles.
Then you may send a blog post “how to stay safe on a night out” for the customer A and “how to dress for formal events” for a customer B.
Chat Bots
Thanks to the chatbots now marketers are able to support customers 24/7 and answer most of their questions in minutes.
Moreover, chatbots are making the choice of a product or a store much easier.
For example, if you have a few stores in the town you may suggest potential customers try your clothes in the nearest shop. Just with a few questions, you will give them a review of the stores where the dress may be found, where the nearest one is and how to get there.
Moreover, you may recommend other clothes that will match the chosen one and bundle offers if there are any.
Go beyond texting
With the growth of mobile purchasing marketers need to think about engaging the clients in the ways that make ordering on mobile simple.
Latest technologies such as voice commerce enable us to recognize the speech of a person, convert it to the text and respond to the query in a matter of minutes.
Starbucks used AI to enable taking orders made with voice commands and messages in an app. Their new application “My Starbucks Barista” functions as Siri and chatbot for a store at the same time and allows to customize the order.
Moreover, you are able to order your favourite breakfast at Starbucks just by indicating that you want it as usual. Amazon’s Echo gives heaps of opportunities to customers to order from the comfort of the home by voice in a minute.
New “Conversational eCommerce” approach is about the necessity to facilitate ordering in real time. Customer communication that used to be one of the hardest parts for eCommerce marketers is becoming much easier to handle with chatbots.
How about creating a virtual assistant that will work 24/7 and always will follow the sales instructions? How about giving a customer the possibility to choose from all options possible? With chatbots you are more than welcome to interact with customers during the whole purchasing cycle. From sending them updates to taking orders with one tap on the screen of a mobile phone.
You will not forget to ask the feedback from a client if your chatbot is programmed to do that automatically after some time after the purchase.
However, if you don’t invest in the AI for chatbots and choose more rude communication patterns, you may face their incorrect operation. Chatbot can “forget” the previous purchases of the customer, interpret the questions in the wrong way and break the chain of messages.
To wrap up
Well-made chatbots are enabling 24/7 support with instant replies possible, voice ordering simplifies e-shopping and reduces stress from clients. AI is empowering eCommerce and making the approach to the customer as personalized as possible.
For marketers, it means that costs may be reduced and spent much more efficient.
Small steps and using AI tools even for small and medium firms are one of the ways to drive more leads and improve conversions. Don’t jump into AI too quickly, try to embrace each step and perfect the systems before moving to the next innovation.