Let’s face it. Running an ecommerce business is difficult at the best of times. With consistent changes in engagement tactics, to the ever-changing digital landscape, there is little time for proper optimization. For both established and new brands, there are so many aspects to juggle. Remaining competitive, driving site traffic, search engine optimization (SEO), and engagement, it often feels like there isn't enough time in the day to accomplish it all.
However, it's not all doom and gloom, there is some light at the end of the tunnel. With the rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) and its implementation within Shopify applications, AI has helped brands regain some ground. There are a multitude of different tools to help you speed up your site and provide better experiences for your customers.
In this blog, we will dive into several strategies for leveraging AI to optimize your site that are easy and efficient, we’ll throw in some app recommendations for good measure.
Strategies:
Content
Starting off with something we all should be doing, optimizing content. Writing content is often a time commitment and there are no guarantees that it will click with your audience and produce the traffic you want or need. So, why not leverage AI to do it for you? AI can make writing content a key component of your marketing strategy without having to devote too many resources to it. With AI you can produce more consistent and engaging content that hits the mark more often than not.
Apps like Blog Pilot have the ability to do just that. Set your parameters and forget about it, letting the AI handle the rest. Gone, also are the days of manually combing topics for the proper keywords. Blog Pilot has you covered, making sure all of your content has been properly optimized for SEO.
Copywriting
A lot of effort and time goes into generating ideas, outlining, writing, revising, editing, and finalizing the piece. Time is a precious commodity, so why not save it and use AI to handle your copywriting needs? AI has gotten to the point where it can almost entirely replicate human writing. This has advantages when it comes to projects requiring a lot of copy. It also means that time that previously was allocated to writing can be reclaimed and focused on solving other problems.
Language models have come a long way in the past few years and have finally reached a place where they can be used very effectively. So, it may be time to retire the typewriter and leverage apps like Otto. Otto can handle whatever copywriting tasks you throw at it. In seconds you can have a fully optimized and high-quality piece of copy, ready to be implemented where you see fit.
Images
If you’re an image-forward brand, like a clothing or watch brand, it’s important that your images are properly optimized. This means making sure that your alt text is appropriately optimized for search rankings, as well as visually appealing to your customers.
This is where apps like Pebblely AI and Squirai AI come in to help. Together they make sure your products are seen and beautifully displayed. Pebblely lets you remove backgrounds from your products and replaces them with high-quality AI-generated images that are designed to make your product pop.
Squirai AI specializes in SEO, providing all of your images with alt text to improve search rankings. With Squirai you can automatically scan for any images that don’t have alt text and have it generate text in seconds.
Customer support
Your customers are always the main focus when optimizing your site. So, it makes sense to employ tools that your customers as they journey through your store. AI makes it thousands of times easier to do so. With the ability to answer and address concerns in real time, customers would prefer AI over waiting for the support team. Employing AI in this way saves a lot of resources in the long run and allows support teams to address more serious issues.
Tools like Gobot make it easy to provide support in real-time. Gobot is an AI-powered chatbot and product quiz app that helps your customers at every stage of their journey. Its quizzes ask customers questions to understand what they are looking for and recommend products that align with their answers.
Personalization
Customers want some form of personalization from the brands they are shopping with. This can be as simple as recommended products, to as complex as unique items. This used to be a big ask from many businesses. However, AI has made it almost simpler than saying the alphabet backward. Using AI you can provide tailored landing pages, personalized recommendations, and even location-based pricing. This makes the whole purchasing process much more enjoyable for the customer. Making them more likely to continue shopping with you.
AI Search, Filter & Recommend is a tool designed just for that reason. The app, as it suggests, leverages AI to deliver experiences tailored to each customer. By analyzing shopping behavior and buying habits, AI Search is able to recommend products that the customer would enjoy. This extends to the search bar, product pages, and home page as well.
Accessibility
If you are planning to sell products internationally or are already in the process of doing so, you may already understand the difficulties of making your site accessible to everyone. This used to be a much larger issue. Involving a lot of development and alterations to your site. Maybe even setting up alternative sites for different regions. But, with AI that can all be done automatically in real time.
Transcy does just that and handles all the heavy lifting for you. Limiting access to your store is the last thing you want to do. So, having an AI tool that can automatically translate your site and offer currency converters is a must-have. This is an easy and efficient way for you to begin your transition into international markets.
Product collections
How you organize your products can make a huge difference in what people see and how they perceive your brand. For in-person stores, there are often merchandisers that work each day to make sure that the right products are being seen. However, online this can be handled by AI making it more efficient and unlike people, it never has to stop working. This means your products will always be updated and properly organized for your customers, and you have a real-time indicator of your sales.
Apps like Entaice use data collected from your customer’s buying and viewing habits to consistently rank products to ensure that products are displayed in a visually appealing and effective way. Even leaving wiggle room for you to do some of your own promotions.
Profit & Upselling
Optimizing for profits is important, regardless of the size of your business. There are many ways to do this, but today we are going to focus on the upselling side. What makes upselling such a simple yet effective tactic is that it focuses on providing value to customers. Here you can use AI to better target those upsell opportunities. Using it to analyze shopping behaviors and recognize what customers put in their cart to recommend products they may also need.
Vanga AI is an app that does this well. Using data captured from customers’ carts and transactions Vanga AI provides additional product recommendations before the customer is out of the buying process. Additionally to ensure that each upsell has the right impact on order sizes, Vanga AI automatically A/B tests to make sure that every upsell is profitable.
Wrap up
AI offers tremendous advantages in nearly every aspect of the ecommerce business. From creating optimized and engaging content automatically to providing customers with real-time customer service. By leveraging AI merchants can optimize their sites like never before and provide experiences for customers that surpass their expectations.
As ecommerce begins to enter this new phase AI will surely be the driving force behind it. AI has become an integral part of what will make online shopping an engaging and valuable experience. Finally bringing merchants back up to speed with the customers they serve.
