7 MINUTE READ

AI in eCommerce personalization: 6 Profitable Insights for you!

Deepak Gawas
Deepak Gawas May 10, 2021

2021 is definitely the year of digital transformation, giving the eCommerce industry a major impetus to stay competitive with new digital tools. According to a survey by Dell Technologies, 80% of businesses have fast-tracked at least some digital transformation programs in 2020 that have strengthened cybersecurity, empowered remote work capabilities, and reinvented digital experiences for their people and customers.

As an eCommerce business owner, there’s a lot on your plate to deal with. While the winds of change are in your favor, you need to level up big time to leverage opportunities perfectly. Your customers are literally all over the world spoiled for choice and are ready to switch loyalties at the drop of a hat. Does this mean loyal patronage is a thing of the past? 

Definitely not, but customers are feeling indulgent and want a lot of attention. A whopping 59% of customers have placed a lot of importance on customer experience owing to the pandemic. They want to know you know them and understand them well. They want you to respect their time and privacy, giving them what they want exactly the way they want it. 

This is very easy despite the challenges thanks to customer analytics. All you need is an eCommerce personalization platform and a solid eCommerce strategy that’s guided by the right insights. Artificial intelligence or AI comes in handy here, and a lot of platforms are leveraging it well to give you an edge in this highly competitive eCommerce market. 

These eCommerce personalization platforms are helping eCommerce businesses get some incredible insights about their visitors without moving a finger. Let’s find out more.

Customer analytics and data analysis

eCommerce personalization platforms play a big role in customer analytics that gives you a 360-degree view of your campaign and how well it performs. It collects information across multiple channels like store, email, chat, etc. to give you a why, how, and when of customer behavior.

It considers diverse customer segments while analyzing different campaigns and marketing initiatives to give you important information such as daily page views, the number of users, how many viewed the offers, bounce rate, the average time spent on a webpage, to give you a better understanding of your audience. 

Customer analytics takes the guesswork out of your marketing initiatives, giving you clear perspectives and metrics to work upon. High-quality data always helps prioritize activities and facilitates the activation of marketing campaigns. It will tell you the rate of mobile adoption, how many people are engaging with your app versus those visiting your website. You will get device-wise updates to decide what improvements consider for further elevating the customer experience. 

Typically, it helps answer 6 important questions that open a whole another world of insights to plan and execute new campaigns.

1. Who’s viewing?

A big part of the customer acquisition puzzle is knowing who’s viewing. Analytics tells you a lot about campaign viewership. It tells you where your customers are, how they engage with your campaign, whether they view your catalogs through email or check them out on your website, or click on one of the recommended products.

For instance, ewiz commerce as part of its customer acquisition report tells you the exact open rate, click-to-open, click-through rate, number of unsubscribed users, which channel they are engaging through, etc. It gives you a thorough campaign review based on analytics and algorithms telling you how it compares against industry standards.

2. Which industry do they belong to?

Again, it’s analytics that has answers to all these questions. It gives you insights into customer journeys based on the choices they make and their purchase history.

Some of these platforms give you an integrated Google analytics report that tracks all activities to give you the exact conversion rate, acquisition behavior, the profession they are into or the industry they belong to, engaged time, page views, etc. You can apply this information to build customer personas and reach them more effectively.

3. When do they view it?

As part of the detailed analysis, you also get to know when prospects usually visit your store or open your emails. You can even combine analytics with predictive modeling to identify trends and cyclical patterns to expect, predict, and plan for the future.

Millennials are usually quick to view and act while there would be others who may prefer to engage with your app or site only during their free time in the afternoon or evening. Knowing when to communicate can increase your conversion rate significantly. One such insight is Send Time Optimization (STO) that tells you when you should send your email campaigns to get maximum opens.

4. For how long?

Just knowing whether they visit your store or open your emails is not enough. You need to know for how long they viewed it. Was the communication engaging enough?

It has to be captivating enough to hold their interest for long and entice them to add the products to their wishlist and make that purchase. If they can recommend those products to their friends, then even better. Once you know what catches their fancy, you can create a personalized experience as product recommendations or custom catalogs for them.

Accenture recently confirmed that 41% of customers have switched companies because of poor customization, and 73% of CEOs acknowledged the need for creating products, services, and experiences that were more meaningful to their customers. Clearly, there is an immense demand for personalization, and customer behavior analytics provides the key.

5. What did they view?

Your customers are going to engage with you in multiple ways, as omnichannel becomes the norm. eCommerce Personalization platforms also tell you the channel and the campaign that brought them in, along with the products that kept them hooked. Some of these reports show you the top 5 performing campaigns and highlight the ‘most performing’ and ‘least performing’ products to allow you to create instant campaigns to leverage the popularity of high-performing products.

As analytics gets more intuitive, it shows you novel ways to segment your customer bases and reach them wherever they are, irrespective of channels or geographies in a customer journey. It’s important to identify the many touchpoints to facilitate a smooth journey, and analytics helps you do just that.

6. What would they like to see or buy?

No matter how good your eCommerce store is and how useful the products are, they are going to render little value unless you know your customers, what their gender and ages are, what they do, where they live, their lifestyle status, how often they abandon carts, how excited they are with discounts and offers, etc.

The key to understand your customers is to keep collecting all the interaction data and analyzing it the right way. This data comes from multiple sources - be it rewards programs, email communication, or retail point of sale. Unfortunately, it is impossible to do this manually.

Luckily, you can rely on AI-driven eCommerce personalization platforms like ewiz commerce to do the heavy lifting for you. These platforms keep consuming all this data, analyze it and use it to personalize your customers’ experience by providing product recommendations that are displayed in the store, in personalized catalogs, and even offers. So, all your campaigns are personalized and recommend products or offer that your prospect is more likely to buy.

That all the successful eCommerce businesses have reported 20X ROI because of personalization tells us it definitely works!

Remember, no matter how small or big your eCommerce business is, you can achieve a lot more with AI-powered eCommerce personalization.

Leverage AI for your B2B business with ewiz commerce

ewiz commerce is the world’s only B2B eCommerce platform with built-in AI-powered marketing tools to help you create personalized shopping experiences for your customers.

Our key offerings:

  • AI-powered eCommerce Store
  • AI-powered eCommerce personalization
  • AI-powered email marketing platform

Deepak heads marketing at ewiz commerce, an AI-powered eCommerce platform and is passionate about sharing his knowledge around B2B marketing, demand generation and copywriting. He loves exploring latest trends in the digital world and frequently writes about it.