How To Use AI To Boost Sales for Your Online Store

What makes a customer decide to purchase? Finding the right product at the right time. That’s why personalization is a key part of product marketing – if you know your target customers inside out, you’re golden.

Predictive AI can take your customer research to the next level by analyzing individuals’ consumer behavior and customer data, from which it can present hyper-personalized ads and product recommendations.

Recommended Tools

There are plenty of platforms that use AI to track your target audience and create personalized experiences. Here are my favorites for small ecommerce stores:

• LimeSpot: Add dynamic product collections and recommendations to key webpages, and send personalized texts and emails to customer segments. You can get started for free if your traffic is low, so it’s a great choice for experimenting.
• Adoric: Send personalized product recommendations, A/B test forms, and create tailored pop-up, sidebar, and banner promotions. Adoric has a free-forever plan for low traffic stores, and a low monthly cost of $4.99 per 100 orders when you integrate into a Shopify store.

Writing product descriptions that contain all the benefits and specifications can be difficult, especially when they also need to be enticing and persuasive.

Luckily, most AI website builders provide added AI support for this. My favorite options are Shopify Magic and Wix’s AI text generator, since they give you a high level of control over the draft’s length, complexity, and tone of voice. However, if you don’t have a built-in text generator for your website, I recommend using a free tool like Copy.AI, which provides five variations of your product description.

Tips for Strong AI Product Descriptions

Here are some pointers to get the best results when using AI to write product descriptions:

• Rather than expecting AI to come up with ideas from scratch, use it to connect your ideas in a smooth and coherent manner. To do this, be sure to provide all the necessary information and key selling points – the more context you provide, the more relevant and accurate your result.
• Play around with tone of voice: If the product descriptions in your brand’s tone of voice aren’t quite right, don’t be afraid to experiment with adjacent options. For instance, if you’ve tried “Bold,” then “Confident” may be a better fit. Combining them can also provide good results, if your AI text generator allows you to.
• Manually check and edit: You know your brand better than AI, so self editing is a key step before you finalize your product description. Swap out any uncharacteristic wording and punctuation, and add any missing keywords or product benefits.

Achieving consistently high email open rates with traditional email marketing tactics is difficult – even when you pick the most relevant topics and engaging subject lines, it’s hard to hit the mark for everyone.

When used in email marketing, AI identifies the nuances between your audience – whether that involves their interests, online behaviours, or daily routines – and leverages them to personalize every stage of your email strategy:

• Generate content ideas
• Optimize subject lines
• Choose the right times to send

But the proof speaks for itself – studies show that AI subject lines can have a 10% boost in open rates.

When considering how to use AI to increase sales, chatbots may have been your first thought. Online stores everywhere are using them at the moment, and for good reason – research indicates they’re responsible for a 23% uplift in ecommerce conversion rate.

The virtual agents work on behalf of a business to answer customer queries in real time, even outside of your working hours. In fact, it’s not uncommon to see them used around the clock, providing a base level of support to lighten the demand on customer service teams.

There are three main types of AI chatbots commonly used by ecommerce businesses:

1. Fully AI chatbots – AI algorithms process and respond to messages with flexible and human-like answers.
2. Rule-based chatbots – Follow a set of conditions, meaning that certain queries trigger correlating actions or responses.
3. Hybrid chatbots – Combine the above models to provide controlled responses to common queries and AI to tackle complex queries.

How To Choose an AI Chatbot

AI chatbots are a great tool to have on your ecommerce site, and many offer omnichannel support on platforms such as Facebook messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. It’s worth choosing an option that supports this so you can meet your customers where they are – especially if your business sells on social media or through a WhatsApp business profile.

Here are my top AI chatbot recommendations for small businesses:

Traditional customer segmentation typically separates your customers into groups based on commonalities – be that their age, gender, location, or interests – so that you can tailor marketing and communications to them. The drawback is that these groups are still broad and encompass a range of users.

AI customer segmentation digs deeper into these binaries, identifies the precise factors that make up each user, and finds parallels undetectable to the human eye.

These groups will help you to deliver hyper-personalized marketing, product recommendations, and targeted promotions to increase your sales.

Collect Quality Data

To segment customers with AI, you need to provide its systems with customer data from various sources, such as your website, social media, social commerce pages. The more data you provide, the more accurate and refined your customer segments will be.

The key data that AI algorithms can analyze is:

• Demographics
• Purchase behavior
• Past purchase history

Once you provide data in these areas, segmentation algorithms will create customer groups geared towards selling strategies.

Use to Predict Customer Behavior

Artificial intelligence can then use predictive algorithms to make highly accurate estimates on each customer segment’s behavior and the products they’re likely to buy. This predictive analysis is a gamechanger for ecommerce businesses, since it can be used to:

• Preempt trends that will impact your customers
• Personalize ad campaigns
• Target promotions and deals to select customers

The best part is that, since AI systems continually track and adapt segments in real time, you can be confident that your groups maintain accuracy.

You may not feel ready to hand over customer-facing tasks to AI models, but they can provide a helping hand behind the scenes. By offloading your repetitive daily tasks, you can free up time to focus on the areas that make the most direct impact on your sales.

In fact, AI automations can be the better option for these types of tasks, as they provide regulation which reduces the risk of human error. Tasks ecommerce businesses delegate to AI include:

• Generate and send customer service emails
• Send reminders for deadlines
• Maintain appropriate levels of stock

AI systems can also scour the online landscape to gauge the overall perception of your brand and products.

You might be wondering, isn’t that what social listening tools already do?

Yes, to an extent. However, social listening tools are limited to tracking key words on social media platforms, which barely scratches the surface of your online brand mentions. AI-driven language processing tools are much more expansive, and have the power to scan through survey answers, customer service chats, and third-party websites such as review platforms.

To get started, I recommend using ChatGPT, which is commonly used to track customer sentiment over time and spot patterns and shifts. It also has the power to provide recommendations for product and brand improvements based on these findings.

While AI has a lot to offer for ecommerce businesses, it’s important to understand that it doesn’t come without risk and can cause problems when used incorrectly. To maximize your sales with the help of AI, here are my top tips:

• Choose the right tools: AI should streamline your processes, not complicate them. Use tools that integrate into your existing ecosystem and align with your overall business goals.
• Maintain regular human oversight: AI tools aren’t perfect, and you should expect mistakes from time to time, especially in the initial learning period. Keeping tabs on areas of your business that are directed by AI tools, such as product pricing and stock ordering, will help you spot, correct, and report any issues with minimal impact.
• Inform customers of your AI usage: Whether they’re speaking directly to a chatbot, or their data is being used for predictive analysis, transparency will manage their expectations and maintain trust.

AI is changing the game for ecommerce businesses. Not only can it be used to crunch large amounts of data on your customers, but it can do so with an understanding of contextual factors and behavioral differences. In this article, I’ve demonstrated how to use AI to increase sales for your ecommerce business, with seven practical methods.

Once you start becoming more comfortable with AI, and experience its benefits, it can be tempting to increase its workload. However, you should maintain a human perspective over the majority of your business, especially in areas that require an empathetic or sensitive mindset.