Practical Steps for Implementing AI in E-Commerce
Everyone’s talking about AI. You can’t even open a search engine without the page advertising all-new AI-powered features. AI is being leveraged by everyone from enterprise-level businesses, to comedians on Tiktok making Plankton from Spongebob sing popular songs.
There’s so much being said about AI that AI-powered functionality can seem a far-off dream for small businesses. And so much of that information paints very different pictures of AI’s utility. For some, AI is just a tool that they can use to auto-generate art, or record themselves sounding like cartoon characters. For others, AI is going to fundamentally change the future of commerce. And still, others have doubts about the security and ethics of AI tools.
AI is a revolutionary technology, there’s no question — and it has a variety of potential use cases for e-commerce businesses of all sizes. While we leave the earth-shattering predictions to the dreamers and entrepreneurs, we do not doubt that AI will change how e-commerce businesses function and that it may become a competitive factor as it gets more generally adopted.
Knowing that AI can be useful for your business is, as they say, half the battle — knowing how and where AI should be applied is a different matter. This article will aim to provide you with insights into how you can integrate AI into your e-commerce storefront to personalize customer experiences and target advertising.
Chapters
Integrating AI: Outlining a Business Case
Once you’ve decided to integrate AI into your storefront, you need to quickly chart out a strategy setting in stone where and how AI will facilitate operations. Deploying AI itself is often uncomplicated, as it involves copying and pasting a couple of lines of code in predetermined places — there are a wide variety of guides available on how to integrate your chosen tools. But before you can choose the specific tools you need, you need to know what you need, why, and how the tools are going to facilitate your goals.
Before settling on options, follow this checklist to develop a project strategy:
- Make sure stakeholders are aligned on a vision. You and your stakeholders all have ideas about where you want your business to go — but you need everyone aligned on a common goal before investing in any kind of change. Take a beat, have a meeting, explain what you want to do and how you plan to do it.
- Research tools that address targeted pain points. There are a wide variety of AI-powered tools out there, and some of them will perform certain functions better than others. Conduct research on pricing, scope, and difficulty of integration, then settle on a short list of possible options.
- Prioritize, measure, and adjust. Choose one pain point and one tool to integrate; then, after the integration is done, measure the results. Adjust your strategy based on how well the tool performs and how aligned the results seem to be with your goals.
It’s important to take it piecemeal. While progress might seem slower than some stakeholders will expect as a result, this approach allows you to closely measure the tool’s impact on your site, customer satisfaction, and overall user experience.
Personalize Customer Experiences
Now that we’ve outlined what your project strategy should look like, let’s turn to one of the primary use cases for AI in e-commerce — personalization. Whether you decide to use AI to provide personalized search results, virtual voice chat support, or 24/7 consultation via chatbot, there are a wide variety of ways to deploy AI to create white-glove service experiences for potential customers.
Let’s break some of them down:
- Generative AI copywriting: provide accurate, detailed descriptions of your products and services to your customers, all with minimal effort.
- Virtual voice chat support: always have someone knowledgeable and able to answer when your customers call. This has the added benefit of filtering out easy-to-answer questions, leaving you to only deal with complex issues.
- Interact on social media: From writing Instagram captions to responding directly to customer complaints, AI can take the burden of managing your social media off of you.
- Proactive product recommendations: From reminding customers that they’ve left something in their cart to actively recommending products via email marketing, AI can provide direct support to marketing, keeping customers engaged.
Running an e-commerce business is difficult, and you can’t always afford to give your customers the personalized experiences that your brand is built on. Let AI support you in that, providing white-glove service to each and every visitor to your site.
Target Your Advertising
From proactively recommending products to auto-generating SEO-friendly content, AI is also excellent at getting your products in front of people who might benefit from them. As AI takes in your customer data, it can auto-segment your customers into categories for outreach, and then actively deploy those insights by creating content tailored to them.
Understanding the customer journey is a key part of improving customer experiences, and the only way to do that is to analyze customer data. But it takes us humans lots of time and effort to collect, analyze, and draw insight from raw data — and we’re likely to miss potentially profitable segments of our audience. AI has no such limits.
You can leverage AI-powered tools to, at a glance, see and understand every segment of your audience, and then create content tailored to draw those consumers in. Invest in tools that are proficient at generating content and managing marketing, and you’ll be able to craft a streamlined, effective marketing strategy.
We hope this article provided the practical steps you need to deploy AI for your storefront. With a clear strategy, an understanding of AI’s potential use cases, and the ability to knowledgeably select the tools you need, you’ll be well on your way to remaining competitive in 2024 and beyond.
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