Everyone in the world of business has heard of the impact AI has had on eCommerce. Today, we’ll be looking at the 10 most powerful ways you can use it to get an edge on your competition.
AI has been seeping into every faculty of our lives. For all of our shopping needs, we have Amazon. We rely on AI to help us fly airplanes. Household names like Google, Apple, and Microsoft have all been heavily investing in AI.
A number of eCommerce sites are already using AI for a variety of different reasons. AI not only helps you get more traffic, but it’ll also help you further your understanding of your customers.
This has led to a variety of companies investing large sums of money into machine learning services.
In this article, we’ll be going over the top 10 ways AI has influenced the world of eCommerce.
1. Predictive Marketing
If you’ve ever had the experience of talking about something, only to see it in your Amazon recommendations the next day, then you’ve experienced predictive marketing. The AI uses your customer data in order to find out what you’ll want to purchase next.
Once it has this data, it’ll run ads based on it. These personalized ads then perform better with customers and wind up making a larger profit. Knowing what your customers need and when they need it is a massive advantage.
AI can also take note of how every customer interacts with your marketing, in addition to recording the times when they’re online the most. This can make you publish ads at the times that their activity is at its peak. When you’ve got this analysis, you can adjust your marketing strategies according to it.
2. ChatBots
Chatbots are an excellent addition to any eCommerce business. In fact, over 85% of all customer interactions are made via chatbot these days.
Chatbots are AI that will talk to your customers 24/7, offering unparalleled support. They help your customer support employees deal with only the problems that can’t easily be solved.
In queries that aren’t difficult to solve, chatbots can drive people to the solution even faster than humans can. This is why most eCommerce sites have an integrated chatbot popping up as soon as someone enters the site.
3. Cybersecurity
With eCommerce becoming more and more popular, a growing number of malicious agents are looking at it as an opportunity.
AI can help you secure your business against cyberattacks from hackers and the like. Machine learning algorithms are an excellent layer of protection to have in any business, as they can stop attacks while they happen, in addition to helping prevent them.
4. Retargeting
Over 33% of all leads will end up unfollowed by the company sales team. This is 33% of your customers seeping through the cracks due to human error.
AI does not make errors like this. It can even analyze your customer’s behavior to help you retain them. Some physical stores are even using AI to detect where their customers are looking the most.
In eCommerce, this is even easier. The AI might see someone spending a lot of time in your “technology” section and recommend them the newest GPU next time they come in.
5. Voice Search Optimization
Almost 50% of all searches are made via voice. This means that Siri, Alexa, and similar software will be handling 50% of your customers. If your website isn’t popping up on voice searches, you’re losing money.
AI can help track how searches are made via voice and help you optimize your pages in order to rank higher. Voice optimization can also be easier than text optimization sometimes, and you get 50% of the audience either way!
6. Personalizing Marketing
AI can process a massive amount of data about your customers to help you personalize your content and interfaces to them. This doesn’t just mean it’ll be adding their 1st name on top of every email.
Personalization has been known to increase engagement rates. Because of this, using AI to personalize your approach for your customers can be crucial in today’s eCommerce field. You can personalize according to where your customer is when they’re online the most, as well as a variety of underlying factors a human marketer would overlook.
7. Eliminate Fake Reviews
Data shows over 76% of people put as much faith into online reviews as a personal recommendation. While this means that a good product will quickly gain results because of good reviews, it also gives a lot of power to people making fake ones. Competitor brands will often leave fake reviews on your products to sell their own.
AI can analyze your reviews and prune the real ones from the fakes. This’ll help customers make a more informed decision on your products and services.
8. Managing Inventory
Managing inventory can be one of the rougher tasks to handle in an eCommerce space. You need to carefully track how much inventory you have on hand, how much will arrive, and how much of it you need. This can result in significant delays if humans are handling it.
With hundreds of categories rippling across the world of eCommerce, it’s difficult to keep track of all your inventory through employees. This becomes even more difficult if the business is operating across multiple channels. AI, however, can analyze all of this data in minutes, and even predict changes in your inventory.
9. Intelligent Searches
Customers don’t always know precisely what they’re looking for. Their searches can be quite uncertain and ambiguous at times.
Thankfully, AI can help you optimize for these changes. It’ll analyze your users’ searching patterns in tandem with past searches to understand what they want to find. Chatbots further help with this, as the AI can use conversation data to predict searches.
10. Writing Ads
Did you know AI could actually write compelling advertisements? JPMorgan Chase did an experiment where they put out 2 headlines, one written by a human, one by AI.
- Access cash from the equity in your home. Take a look.
- It’s true–You can unlock cash from the equity in your home. Click to apply.
The 2nd, AI-written ad got double the amount of clicks compared to the human copy. You can use AI to write your marketing copy and not only will it lower your expenses, but it will also result in superior marketing.
The AI handles this by analyzing customer responses to a variety of different headlines. Instead of doing this with a fixed set of guidelines, AI is capable of adapting to modern trends and finding patterns we aren’t aware of.
Summary
Every day there seem to be more use cases for AI popping up in our lives. Its ability to process enormous amounts of data and find patterns that would remain hidden to the human eye has made it particularly valuable in marketing and eCommerce. These are just 10 of the most powerful ways AI is being used in eCommerce, and the technology is still young!