The Role of AI in Personalising eCommerce Experiences

Personalised Email Marketing Campaigns.

Email can be one of the most effective channels when it comes to converting customers and increasing their LTV. But it can also often be the first channel to "set and forget" meaning that ongoing testing and optimisation can be overlooked. Allowing AI to do some of the heavy lifting within your email strategy, could make your campaign more effective with less effort needed from you that you might think.

Segmentation:

AI-driven segmentation is becoming more sophisticated than ever. Tools, such as Emarsys can use machine learning algorithms to identify and group subscribers with similar characteristics or behaviours, enabling more targeted email campaigns. The traditional method would be using the RFM framework but AI would be able to expand on this in a far more granular way.

Content:

Most email marketing platforms such as Hubspot and Mailchimp have generative AI or AI assist when it comes to content and content optimisation.

So when it comes to creating effective subject lines, email copy or even A/B testing images and layouts, the native AI functions within these platforms can be increasingly useful. Within Mailchimp you can even use their AI powered content optimiser to personalise the content per contact.

Automation and Behavioural Triggers:

Automated email scheduling can be incredibly useful when sending our email campaigns. Mailchimp offer a optimised send using previous open rate data, industry and geographical benchmarking to optimise the send times of your emails in order to improve open rate. List management, and even responses to common customer question are also among the most commonly used strategies utilising AI.

You are also probably already using AI to trigger emails based on specific user behaviours, such as abandoned cart reminders or re-engagement emails for inactive subscribers.

AI-Powered Chatbots and Personal Shoppers.

AI powered chatbots can help answer standard customer queries including questions about delivery, calculating shipping fees, processing returns or even checking whether items are in stock. Having a 1-1 interaction with your customers is a way of building relationship and trust and an AI chatbot is a time efficient way of meeting that need.

For fashion retail in particular, thinking about a virtual personal shopper could provide your users with the personalised experience they want without the need for a bricks and mortar store. Using that same product recommendations technique, an AI virtual assistant can pull whole outfits or products suitable based on past purchases. If your products are tagged correcting and effectively within your merchant centre, users could also ask to see a range a products based on certain parameters suited to their needs.

AI should make a marketers job easier; not by taking over completely but by being able to automate more tedious tasks or sifting through large amounts of data to find patterns a human would never spot. These insights should then be used to improve personalisation and provide a more cohesive and relatable marketing strategy to both new and returning customers.