Have you ever thought of a world where you can simply input numerous data into your computer, and it automatically spits out the information you need within minutes? Well, welcome to the world of Artificial Intelligence  — Where there’s reduced human effort, decreased human error, elimination of repetitive tasks and most importantly, where decisions are made based on data. Thinking of scaling your business and making your life easier? Then it’s time to implement AI into your business! 

The Importance of Artificial Intelligence

There’s no doubt that AI has the ability to make human life easier. With AI, you can bid farewell to hard labour, and say hello to digital assistance, faster decisions, and efficient communication. AI provides us with an abundance of advantages, but let’s explore the main ones: 

• Unbiased Decisions – AI systems don’t have emotions like humans do. They rely on facts and data rather than opinions, making their decisions more accurate and reliable. 
• 24/7 Availability – Unlike humans who need breaks often, AI-operated systems can work endlessly for 24 hours a day without experiencing fatigue, which increases productivity. With a helping hand, humans can focus on more important tasks, leaving repetitive jobs for AI systems to handle. 
• Better Analysis – AI can interpret data at a much faster rate compared to humans, study larger datasets quickly, and uncover deeper insights that the human mind can simply miss. 
• Product Enhancement – The product development process has changed with AI in the picture. Software developers have been able to take on an effective approach for each of the product development cycles from planning, designing, developing, testing and marketing. This in return helps improve the functionality of products and services as well as improving experiences for end-users.

How Can YOU Integrate AI Into Your eCommerce Business?

1. Personalization

AI applications in eCommerce businesses have taken customer experience to a new level. By adopting AI for your business, you can understand precise consumer preferences. When artificial intelligence works alongside a search engine, it provides insights such as users’ purchasing patterns and browsing history to offer relevant recommendations that go hand in hand with customers’ preferences. Here are 4 key areas where you can use AI for advanced personalization: 

• Ad targeting – Use AI to create targeted ads based on a customer’s demographics, purchase history, and online shopping behaviour. With the help of AI, Facebook ads launched Lookalike Audiences that helped the platform know more about its users. Incredibly, Facebook owns 60% of revenue in the ad market, while no other ad channels in the US exceed 5%. Using AI-driven targeting, DNA can also optimize targeting decisions based on thousands of data points to find your ideal audience. 

• Personalized messaging – You can leverage AI to present messages that resonate with a specific audience. To deliver the right messaging, AI examines various data points including: preferred content, pages viewed, past purchases, app downloads, pain points, and more. Two excellent examples of AI-based personalized messaging are: personalized content and product recommendation. With Growvare, you can create one ad and implement it into multiple channels and tweak the messaging to fit that specific channel. 

• Personalized content – Thanks to AI, personalizing content at scale is easily doable. AI processes all of your content and its metadata, then proceeds to learn what your content covers, its length and format. It also classifies and labels your content, determining which content should be sent to what type of customer. This can be done through cross-referencing user data with each content you have. For instance, Sephora tracks their customers’ purchase history, to then send emails with  relevant product offers and complementary offers.

• Product recommendation – AI recommendation engines can help you forecast what customers are likely to purchase next. By reviewing your customer’s purchase history, AI will compare that to the existing group data set and provide recommendations to the shopper. A great real-life example of this is the “My Starbucks Barista” feature. Starbucks implemented this AI solution to make the process of mobile orders much faster. The feature operates on inputs such as account information, purchase history and preferences, to provide more personalized recommendations for the customer to order next. It also leverages voice technology and allows customers to place orders by speaking to the app – talk about advanced drink ordering!

2. Advanced Semantic-Based Search 

Almost 43% of customers use the search bar on an eCommerce website. Have you ever felt frustrated when you typed a product you’re looking for into the search engine and the results provided don’t match your search? 

In comes AI-based semantic search. Semantics is when someone draws out meanings from words, sentences and phrases. The challenge with technology is getting computers to understand human language. Take this sentence, for example – “Grapes are green ” As humans, we understand that grapes are a fruit and the colour is green. However, to a computer, this means nothing. AI-based semantic search helps search engines process these linguistic nuances and understand the context of the phrase.  Whatever way you type a search query, the end goal of advanced semantic search is to be able to understand it. 

Here’s an example: On Netflix, when you search for a movie, but it doesn’t show up, Netflix still manages to provide a number of results that are relevant to the movie because it understands your intent. 

3. Augmented Reality 

Augmented reality (AR) is one of the hottest trending AI applications for eCommerce businesses. Since the pandemic, shopping from the comfort of your own home has become the new normal. 

One of the most significant barriers in eCommerce is the difficulty of determining the quality of a physical product in a virtual environment. AR helps bridge the gap between shopping physically and shopping online. Here’s how – AR gives  customers the opportunity to see themselves in the product or use the product before they purchase, rather than just seeing a basic image of the product. This helps to reduce returns! You can integrate AI-based augmented reality into your eCommerce site by including: 

• Virtual try-ons – this is very effective for makeup/apparel stores where people want to see an outfit or a shade of lipstick on themselves before purchasing it.

• Preview placement – have you ever wondered how that couch you’re looking for would fit in your living room? Preview placement allows customers to see how a product would look in their real-life desired area. 

By integrating AR, you can increase customer engagement as this feature will interest them into staying on your website for longer. Besides, even if users don’t buy your product during their first visit, the AR features will likely make them remember your website, and come back to try again in the future! 

4. Customer Relationship Management 

Artificial intelligence plays a vital role in sales and customer service. Profoundly, in the context of CRMs. One of the most tedious parts of a sales based job is entering data manually. In fact, it’s discovered that sales professionals spend 17% of their work time entering data, which is the equivalent of one workday per week. 

AI also eliminates dirty data in CRMs by detecting anomalies, duplicates and any other unusual data. This keeps the data clean and up-to-date, so that sales professionals always have the latest data available to them.

5. Chatbots 

Imagine asking a question and receiving a response in seconds. That’s what chatbots are for! Chatbots use natural language processing to understand customers’ questions and respond in a human-like manner. So although you’re speaking to a robot, it would feel like you’re speaking to a friendly human! 

Nowadays, customers want answers at the tip of their fingers, and many businesses are failing to catch up. Lead response time is becoming a HUGE deal – and companies are losing leads due to slow communication. In fact, taking longer than 5 minutes to respond to a new lead results in an 80% decrease in lead qualification. Ouch, that’s 80% of leads lost for businesses. 

Growvare’s instant lead alerts feature gives you a notification the minute you get a new lead, so you’re able to achieve the 5 minute rule and convert qualified leads when they’re most interested!

6. Image Recognition 

Picture this: you’re at the beach and you spot a swimsuit that you really like. You go back home and try searching for the product online, but can’t seem to find it. It does suck, but not for long! 

AI is changing that game too! Image recognition software allows customers to upload an image of a product they can’t find, and get recommended product suggestions that are similar to the image.

Google lens, an AI-based image recognition app, uses visual search technology to find objects through an image provided on a user’s mobile camera. The user takes a photo of what they’re looking for, and Google in return scans the picture to find information about it. The app can identify and provide information on historical landmarks, books, art and logos – and can scan QR codes!

SOURCE 

7. Improve Your Cybersecurity 

With the amount of information we gain about customers through sign-ups, lead forms and purchases, customer data is vulnerable if proper measures aren’t taken to protect that data. Knowing this, eCommerce businesses are using artificial intelligence to keep their websites protected. Here’s how AI can be integrated into your website for security needs: 

• Detection of new threats – AI can help you monitor, identify and prevent new threats on your website. AI uses predictive intelligence and algorithms to detect malware, run pattern recognition and stop threats from emerging on your website. It’s been revealed that AI decreases overall detection time by 12% and about 75% of executives state that it detects threats more accurately.

• Eliminates fake reviews –  Reviews play a prime role in customers’ purchasing decisions. About 95% of customers read reviews before they purchase a product. With so many people relying on reviews, they should be thoroughly checked for false statements and misleading information. This can be done manually; however, it will take away precious time from doing other important things. Also, human evaluation can be imprecise and biased. Artificial intelligence can detect strange patterns of text, writing format and style. Amazon’s AI system detects false reviews by analyzing the reviews’ characteristics. The AI system prioritizes the visibility of positive customer reviews to increase a customers’ purchase intent. 

8. Better Ad Results

What can AI do for your digital advertising strategy? The opportunities are endless!

• Artificial intelligence can help advertisers create converting ad copy and content.
• AI provides next level audience segmentation. By analyzing customer information (such as demographics and online behaviour) it decides what type of content each audience segment wants to see. 
• Setting suitable bids is another essential element of a successful ad. Automated bidding allows AI to automatically calculate and select the right amount of bids for you, without the hassle of doing it manually. 
• Predicting conversions by forecasting historical data is crucial for retargeting. AI studies historical location data and user demographics, which allows for better retargeting and fine-tuning of your ad copy. 
• Spending money on ads that aren’t performing well can hugely affect your ad budget. AI automatically pauses ads that aren’t performing well to reduce wasted ad spend.  

Growvare monitors your campaigns 24/7 and optimizes your results in real-time. DNA uses AI to eliminate under-performing keywords, and direct more budget to the ones getting you results! What was that? That’s the sound of wasted ad spend leaving the chat. See all the decisions DNA made, and the results in an easy to read report.

9. Retargeting 

Have you ever seen something cool online, but as you’re about to purchase it, an important call comes up and you stop what you’re doing? You end up forgetting what you were about to buy and a couple of days later… BAM, you see an ad for that product pop up again… “forgetting something?”. Retargeting is effective because the customer is already aware of your brand, it’s just a matter of converting them. 

Growvare uses AI to retarget customers based on user lists and frequent buyers, from the data collected through previous campaigns. Instead of starting from scratch, our AI rebuilds an audience of users who have shown interest in your ads with the “Reuse DNA” feature. 

What Does the Future Have In Store for eCommerce Businesses? 

Well, after reading the various types of ways AI takes form in day-to-day business activities, you should know that there’s a lot in store for eCommerce businesses. By integrating AI into your business, the need for you to repeat tasks is eliminated. With the automation that AI provides, you’ll be able to connect with customers on a deeper level and maximize your profits to the fullest. So what are you waiting for? Hop on the AI bandwagon and see the results for yourself!